Greetje den Holder — April 27, 2017 By now, you know about growth hacking and you know what it is not. At least, you know what growth hacking is not if you have read my blog Here Is What Growth Hacking Is NOT. If you still have questions about growth hacking, you may find your answers here.
In this blog, I will offer you 35 resources that allow you to learn about growth hacking. If you put much effort into it, you may even master it! First, you will find 6 ways to learn about growth hacking. Then, you will find 23 online growth hacking courses and 12 growth hacking experts to follow. This way, you will get a solid foundation of growth hacking knowledge and you will be able to continue to learn about it.
6 ways to become a growth hacker
Growth hacking is quite a broad topic. That also means there are several ways to learn how you can become a growth hacker. Icma.org has listed 6 of them for you.
1. Start devouring as many books as you can about growth hacking
To truly gain an understanding of growth hacking and the process it requires, start obtaining as much information about it as possible. Once you have obtained all of the information you need, start putting it into practice. As a growth hacker, putting your knowledge into action will always be an important step.
2. Get a mentor who has done it before
The first step is reading as much as you can, but having a mentor to help guide you through the learning process is vital. A mentor can help you overcome some of the greatest obstacles that accompany growth hacking. In addition, you will learn valuable insider growth hacking secrets. Make sure to ask for help from someone who does it as a profession.
3. Start connecting all of your thoughts to growth hacking
Growth hacking has always been more about mindset than about tactics and techniques. To become a truly successful growth hacker, you have to have an unshakeable desire to produce growth constantly. Every task that you take on should be directly tied to an attempt to grow.
4. Master hacking one step at a time
Growth hacking is not unlike a person’s effort to obtain a college education without ever actually going to college. All on your own, you have to figure out where to start, what to put in your curriculum, and what to study. Break down your learning process into manageable segments and tackle one portion of growth hacking at a time.
5. Learn about marketing
Growth hacking is a single factor in the broader field of marketing. So, to be a truly successful growth hacker, you have to become a truly successful marketer. Learn the basics of marketing because everything you do as a growth hacker will come from the core concepts of marketing.
6. Become an analytics expert
As a growth hacker, you will take action according to what the data tells you, so you will also want to develop a dependency on it as well. Data will help you determine what parts of your marketing ventures are working and what parts are not. It will help you to decipher growth from decline and the raw information required to plan your decisions and behaviors.
23 online growth hacking courses
As you can tell from the information above, learning about growth hacking should be aimed at marketing and analytics, among other areas. Apostle Mengoulis adds coding to this mix. He lists 23 online courses that will help you become a growth hacker, which he categorizes into overall growth hacking, marketing, coding, and data analysis. I thought this list was helpful, so I wanted to share it with you. For links to the courses described, please visit the original article.
8 growth hacking courses
- The Ultimate Introduction to Growth Hacking | Growth University | $ 99
Learn how to acquire more customers and model your product’s growth from one of the world’s first international growth hacking agencies. This course will help you adopt a growth mindset and process, essential to executing your growth strategies.
- HypeBomb – Growth Hacking for startups | Udemy | $ 99
HypeBomb is a course on how to get more clients for your startup. It concentrates on marketing strategies that worked every time in the past. Learn how to get more clients and convert them into paying customers.
- Growth Courses | by GrowHack | 69$ /month
If you have the budget and the desire to spend it wisely, you should attend these classes. You get access to exclusive discounts, expert & personalized support for each class, and all course updates.
- Learn Growth in 30 Days | by Growthmint | In Beta
Want to learn about analytics, conversion rates or the growth funnel? Growthmint prepares the right course for you. It is currently in beta, so most probably will be available for free.
- Growth Hacking: Lean Marketing for Startups | Udemy | $ 49
This course offers a chance to learn the secrets of how the world’s fastest growing companies got their first million users, or what tools only growth hackers know for building hacks quickly with almost no time or experience necessary.
- Startup Growth Hacking: 19 Actionable and Advanced Tactics | Udemy | $ 49
The mind behind Moz will walk you through 19 proven and actionable growth hacks to grow. All video lectures, eBooks, and worksheets are download-enabled.
- Learn How to Get Your First Million Users | Udemy | $ 59
The course focuses on viral loops and elements of virality.
- Learn to Explode Product Growth in Just One Month |OneMonth | $ 49
Overall, this could be the starting point for any entrepreneur, marketer, or engineer who wants to learn how to grow a product.
2 marketing courses
- An Introduction to Marketing | Coursera – University of Pennsylvania | Free
This course will teach the fundamentals of marketing by getting to the root of customer decision making. The course focuses on branding strategies, customer centricity, and new market entry.
- Digital Marketing Course | Google | Free
The Digital Marketing Course is an initiative designed to educate students in the area of Digital Marketing. Learn the basics of Search Engine Marketing, Search Advertising, Display Advertising, Mobile, Social, Analytics, and Video.
5 coding courses
- Intro to Computer Science| Udacity | $ 150/month
In this introduction to computer programming, you will learn and practice key computer science concepts by building your own versions of popular web applications.
- Web Development | Udacity | $ 150/month
Learn the basics of how the web works, and go through core web development concepts such as how internet and browsers fit together, form validations, databases, APIs, integrating with other websites, scaling issues, and more.
- Make A Website | Codeacademy | Free
Build a recent version of Airbnb’s homepage and learn the fundamentals of web development. Learn how to structure a web page using HTML, style it using CSS, and how to do all of this quickly using Bootstrap.
- Make an Interactive Website | Codeacademy | Free
Want to create drop-down menus, carousels and many other interactions for your website? Educate through building the Flipboard home page and learn how to add interactivity to your website.
- Learn How to Use Popular APIs | Codeacademy | Free
Learn how to use popular APIs and make your own applications. Each track teaches how APIs work in general, and then take a quick deep-dive in each API based on JavaScript, Python or Ruby.
8 data analysis courses
- Digital Analytics Fundamentals | by Google Analytics Academy | Free
Have an overview of today’s digital measurement landscape and be guided on how to build an effective measurement plan. It includes the best practices for collecting actionable data, descriptions of key digital measurement concepts, terminology, and analysis techniques, and it deep-dives into Google Analytics reports with specific examples for evaluating your digital marketing performance.
- Google Analytics Platform Principles | by Google Analytics Academy | Free
Learn about the four components of the Analytics platform: collection, processing, configuration, and reporting. Learn how Analytics collects the data you need across different devices, how your data is transformed before you see it in your reports, and key concepts for customizing your Analytics data in useful ways.
- Ecommerce Analytics: From Data to Decisions | by Google Analytics Academy | Free
Discover useful reporting and analysis techniques to help your e-commerce business make data-driven decisions using Google Analytics. Immerse yourself in the measurement planning process and practice navigating Google Analytics to improve the performance of an example e-commerce business.
- Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals | by Google Analytics Academy | Free
This is a course on mobile app measurement, so you can learn how using Google Analytics data can help you make your app more discoverable and more profitable.
- Lean Analytics Workshop | Udemy | Free
Here, you will learn how to use data to build a better startup faster. The Lean Startup movement advocated a new approach to finding the right product and market with a constant cycle of building, measuring, and learning. Now Lean Analytics dives deeper into the measurement component of that cycle.
- Intro to Data Science| Udacity | $ 150/month
Grab the opportunity to work through a data science project end to end, from analyzing a dataset to visualizing and communicating your data analysis. By working on the class project, you will be exposed to and understand the skills that are needed to become a data scientist yourself. Learn about data manipulation, data analysis, data communication and working with big data.
- Data Analysis with R | Udacity | $ 150/month
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is an approach to data analysis for summarizing and visualizing the important characteristics of a data set.
- Introduction to Databases | by Stanford University | Free
Although this course is not running at the moment, you can go through the whole course completely for free directly through Stanford Online. Moreover, this course is available through Coursera and you can add it to your watch list for the near future. This mini-course provides a general introduction to databases and introduces the popular relational data model.
12 growth hacking experts to follow
Reading books and taking courses allow you to acquire a solid foundation of growth hacking knowledge. Once you have established this knowledge foundation, a great way to keep up with the latest growth hacking news is following growth hacking experts on social media. Laxman Papineni has listed the top 12 growth experts that you should follow. Find their social media accounts, websites, and blogs, and start learning!
- Brian Balfour – Founder and CEO of Reforge
Not only was he the co-founder of startups like Viximo and Boundless Learning, both of which were acquired; he also worked in venture capital (VC) as an entrepreneur-in-residence. In other words, he has seen both sides of the coin: the startup, and the investor. He was also VP of growth at HubSpot.
- Andrew Chen – Head of Rider at Growth Uber
Much can be said about Uber, but we all know it has experienced unequivocal brand growth since its 2009 founding. Chen is responsible for that. He has also worked as both an entrepreneur-in-residence in the VC sector and as an “entrepreneur-out-of-residence.” In both capacities, he focused on growing early-stage businesses, like Barkbox and Tinder, wearing the hats of both a business owner and an investor.
- Sean Ellis – CEO of GrowthHackers
It could be said that Sean Ellis was a growth hacker before that term became a thing. In August 2008, he became the “interim growth executive” for Eventbrite. Since then, he has also served in interim growth roles with companies like Dropbox in their earliest stages. In other words, he helped some of the most recognizable names in tech grow.
- Nir Eyal – Best-Selling Author, Consultant, and Public Speaker
Nir Eyal has worked at companies like Sunshine Business Development and AdNectar, which lent to the expertise that went into his best-selling book ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,’ which answers the question of how successful companies create products people cannot put down.
- Noah Kagan – Chief Sumo at Sumo Group
From Facebook to Mint, Kagan has helped to launch and market several products and services. Kagan’s blog OkDork is what he calls a guide to “marketing, business musings, online communities and other things to kill time while you are at work.”
- Brianne Kimmel – Growth Marketing at Zendesk
Zendesk is one of those SaaS companies that just keeps growing, despite a constantly-evolving environment. It has the agility to adapt to a changing market. Brianne Kimmel oversees the marketing and growth strategies to embolden the company’s conversion. She also contributed to the growth of companies like Hotwire and HotelClub, which is now an Orbitz company.
- Fareed Mosavat – Senior PM of Growth at Slack
Fareed Mosavat has set foot in a number of big-name, early-stage tech companies and led the growth of major products. From RunKeeper to Instacart, Mosavat knows how to take data and use it to build something significant.
- Neil Patel – Co-founder of KISSmetrics and Hello Bar
Often quoted in my blogs, he is kind of a growth rockstar. He founded KISSmetrics, which has become one of the leading, most recognizable analytics platforms. Today, he continues to juggle various outlets as a growth expert. Think of Crazy Egg, Quick Sprout, his own website, and a podcast.
- Sujan Patel – Co-founder of Web Profits
Sujan Patel is the co-founder of growth marketing agency Web Profits, the co-founder of Mailshake, and one of the minds behind LinkTexting. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes and has a blog.
- Eric Peters – Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot Academy
Eric Peters is responsible for driving growth for HubSpot Academy’s free courses, which come with a suite of free marketing and sales tools to apply to what you are learning in the HubSpot growth stack. Before HubSpot, he was tasked with measuring and optimizing how users flowed through the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company he previously worked for. He often shares his insights with the public on the HubSpot Academy blog and in videos.
- Rebecca Rosenfelt – Product Manager at Airbnb
Rebecca Rosenfelt arrived at Airbnb when it acquired her company Inhabit Vacations. The acquisition was part of Airbnb’s global growth strategy and its efforts to cultivate a recognizable presence. Rosenfelt was hired to initiate and oversee that growth.
- Alex Schultz – VP of Growth at Facebook
In the span of 12 years, Facebook has gone from a small, academic-only online toy to a publicly-traded, consistently growing media distribution platform. Since 2007, Alex Schultz has been responsible for that growth. He previously managed affiliate marketing in the U.K. for eBay.
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