Introducing the Developer's Guide to Growth
Growth is the lifeblood of any business. But as a developer starting out with your own startup or side-project, growth can seem more like a black box than a science. Where do you even start? Do you focus on marketing and advertising? Talking to customers? And how do you know if any of it is working? It’s enough to make even the most intrepid founder want to retreat back to the comfort of coding.
But growth doesn’t have to be such a mystery. With the right framework, growth can be framed, measured, and optimized just like any other process. That’s why I’m sharing the Developer’s Guide to Growth—a gentle introduction to help people from technical backgrounds jump into the world of growth.
With this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn:
- How to frame growth as an optimization problem using concepts like funnels and personas
- The roles played by marketing, sales, customer success and other growth functions
- A repeatable framework for developing and tuning your company’s growth funnel
- Actionable tips for improving awareness, acquisition, activation, retention and revenue
Whether you’re working on a bootstrapped side project or raising your first round of funding, the guide will help you wrap your head around growth and gain the knowledge to systematically improve it.
Defining Your Persona and Funnel
The guide begins with two fundamental concepts: the customer persona and the funnel. The persona is a profile of who your ideal customer is, including details like:
- Their role and industry
- The problems they face
- What motivates them to buy
The funnel then maps out the journey customers take from initial awareness of your product to becoming happy, paying users.
With the guide, you’ll take the first steps of developing an initial persona and funnel based on assumptions and available data.
Understanding the Roles that Drive Growth
Next, the guide explores the key functions that work together to grow your business:
- Marketing - Building awareness and driving acquisition
- Sales - Converting interested prospects into paying customers
- Customer Success - Retaining happy customers and reducing churn
- Data, Finance and more
In each area, you’ll gain perspective on how each function operates, plus tips to maximize the time you’re investing and anti-patterns to avoid.
Turning Your Funnel into an Optimization Engine
Armed with your funnel framework, you’re ready to start optimizing. The guide offers a simple, staged approach to narrowing the overwhelming number of possible growth experiments:
- Keep a running list of opportunities in each part of the funnel
- Regularly prioritize for the highest-impact ideas
- Experiment and validate hypotheses accordingly
To give you ideas to test, the guide includes examples of experiments that can improve awareness, acquisition, activation and more. These include tactics like:
- Creating content and running contests to build awareness
- A/B testing landing pages to optimize conversion
- Automating email drips to improve retention
- Asking for referrals to unlock organic word-of-mouth
By the end, you’ll have a strategic framework alongside practical advice to start driving growth for your product.
Take the First Step Toward Growth
If you’re ready to move beyond guesswork and build a scalable, optimized growth machine, here’s a link to download a free PDF of the full Developer’s Guide to Growth.
Now go forth and grow!