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1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

One of the most popular theories on the phases of behavior change is known as the Transtheoretical Model. It outlines five phases that lead to an alteration in one’s behavior: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Here is a quick overview of each phase: Precontemplation: Individual is unaware that their behavior is a problem. Contemplation: Individual is aware that their behavior is an issue and is ambivalent as to whether action should be taken. Preparation: Individual plans to take action in the near future – a “window of opportunity” has opened. Action: Individual has made specific overt modifications to their lifestyle. Maintenance & Relapse Prevention: Individual take steps to avoid factors that increase the risk of relapse.

The Behavior Potential illustrates the common cycle of awareness, motivation, action and frustration we often experience when trying to change our ways, with each spike representing a single attempt. The goal is to manipulate the phases of the Behavior Potential so that:

Phase 0: Precontemplation – Get Views During this phase, no one has seen your product, and so the goal is to get it in front of people, which is where Growth Hacking comes into play.

My Latest War: Angels charging startups to pitch ================= Recently, I was made aware of a group of angel investors that were charging startups to pitch them.

Yes, you heard that correctly: the rich people (angels) are charging the poor people (startup entrepreneurs desperate for cash to fuel their dreams) to hear their pitch. No, I’m not kidding. This is actually happening — and it’s widespread.

None of them have ever charged me a dime for doing so. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE RICH!

Khosla wasn’t trying to defame Y Combinator, noting “There’s plenty of smart teams out of YC that we fund.” But he stressed that heavily prepared presentations can backfire. “Too much of the polish of the five slide deck” distracts a team and can repel mentors like him. For a startup that believes it has a great idea, the next thing they need is great execution, and that requires an all-star team and savvy strategy — elements that the right angel or VC firm can offer. A pumped-up valuation might help the founders retain more equity, but that doesn’t matter without success.

If your idea is risky, but with a huge upside that isn’t valued too high, you can gain the support of people like Vinod and his Khosla Ventures. ”I spend most of my time recruiting for my companies. Once you hire the wrong people… it’s really hard to get a company back on track.”

Modern Techniques A decade later, things have changed since those early days of guerilla user testing. Now there are a few different ways to highlight usability issues and some of them are even easier, quicker, and cheaper to implement that the in-person tests that Nielsen popularized. Here are 4 test types that I’ve used: In person, moderated and lightly scripted: This is the traditional format of a usability test and of the in-person techniques, it’s the easiest one to get started with. A quick definition of terms: in person means that you’re sitting down with the user, moderated means that there’s someone talking to the user and acting as a sort of referee to keep things on track, and scripted means that there’s a fixed set of tasks written down in advance and that the moderator wants the user to accomplish. In person, moderated and unscripted: This is the Listening Lab technique popularized by Mark Hurst. It requires a bit more experience and finesse to pull off in order to gather valid usability insights without turning into a completely unstructured focus group. In it, the moderator asks the user what tasks he or she wants to accomplish before diving into the app, based on their demographic, a loose conversation about their interests, or their impressions of external marketing pages. Remote and moderated (scripted or unscripted): This can be roughly the same as the two techniques above, except the moderator and user aren’t physically present in the same room and use a video app like Skype to connect instead. This is especially a help to early stage projects, when initial early users can come from any part of the world. Remote, asynchronous and heavily scripted: This is the absolute easiest and most newbie-friendly way to try user testing. It’s enabled by relatively new tools like Usertesting.com, where the moderator and user don’t chat in real time and instead, the user is left on their own to follow step-by-step instructions on how to use the site or app in question, while their mouse movement and audio feedback is recorded.

The basic framework of an in-person tests is: Think about what goals you’d like the user to accomplish (yes, even for the unscripted tests because you still want to see if they can complete certain tasks, although in a looser, unguided format). Record everything – at least the audio and screen, if not also their face and body, so you can review later as well as share with the team. It’s a newbie mistake to try to moderate a test at the same time that you’re analyzing it for lessons, and even newbier to ask stakeholders to just listen to a summary when audio/visual feedback can have such a punch. Use about 5 or 6 people – any less has too much noise while any more has diminishing returns. Note that a qualitative research method like this is different from a quantitative one like A/B testing, where the cutoff is much higher and more users is always better. Let people explore and make mistakes on their own while also keeping them on task. Don’t talk so much that you’re explaining everything on the screen like a car salesman, but also don’t morosely sit back and let them feel judged. Try to strike a balance between friendly and observant.

Later opens and clicks are likely to be higher quality. There are fewer of them, but many retailers find they lead to higher conversion rates. In other words, the distribution of revenue through time won’t be as skewed to the first 24-48 hours as you’d expect from opens and clicks alone.

There’s also a need to keep campaigns “active” for longer. If people return to an email some time later, do the links, images and landing pages still work? If coupons or offers have expired, is that communicated and are alternatives presented?