No more growth hacks please

Never put the word growth hacking in your pitch deck.

Never put the word growth hacking in your pitch deck.

It is not a dirty word, but it is very unlikely that investors will say shut up and take my money.

Last week I was working on a pitch with one of my teams that are seeking for an international investment ATM and their Go-To-Market slide looked promising: 

• Priority #1: Content marketing & SEO (50% of activities)

• Priority #2: LinkedIn and X thought leadership (20% of activities)

• Priority #3: Cold outbound (10% of activities)

Until I have seen … 

• Priority #4: Growth hacking (20% of activities)

Wait, what? 

You mean experimentation? Building growth loops or product-led growth?

What on earth is growth hacking doing in your pitch deck? 

There are no silver bullets

Don’t get me wrong. I like experimentation. I love moonshots. 

I am also a co-instructor of the best-selling Growth Hacking course on Udemy. 

But working with trusted investors to try to create a GTM Fund (one of the most important goals for 2024) made me realize that this will make them tick for the wrong reason. 

Why? 

On the GTM slide of your pitch deck investors seek for the following sanity checks: 

• Do you have a healthy understanding of a market and customers?

• Do you have a game plan on how to win a significant market share in 3-12 months?

• Do you have a fighting chance to use these “channels” better than competitors?

• Do you have skills and capacity to master those channels?

• Does the CAC/LTV math compute- when will they see their money back with interest?

Investors like predictable revenue generating systems - your ability to generate profit at predictable and growing rates. And so your job in GTM is to find 2-3 of those systems that will reliably drive growth.

Growth hacking, experimentation, call it whatever you want - the goal of these activities is just to find these predictable growth engines.

7 Proven GTM Growth Strategies 

For an e-commerce brand, it would be fairly easy to describe go-to-market strategy.

First, we will do some UGC (user generated content) and engage influencers, push these materials out with Meta and TikTok ads and then do some remarketing and email marketing. I said easy to describe, not do :)

In B2B, things get a bit more complicated.

The issue with many startups is they jump straight into tactics: let's launch on Product Hunt, collect some emails, do LinkedIn, use Ai... Before defining their strategy.

I'm not the one to propose endless strategy discussions you'll never execute on, but the reality is, you need both. As Sun Tzu famously said:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Tactics alone won't get you anywhere. Before you get to them, follow this process:

strategy > channel > tactic

Never think about growth as 'random acts of marketing', but motions. Each comes with specific unit economics, different sales cycles, some are better at generating demand and some at capturing demand.

So, start with choosing a GTM motion first. In my experience, there are seven different proven GTM Growth Strategies worth considering as a backbone to your GTM growth model:

1. Inbound: Content creation with the intent to generate leads. 

2. Paid digital: Media buying to attract the attention of your target audience. 

3. Outbound: Cold outreach to companies that match your target audience via email, social media, telephone, or direct mail.

4. Account-based marketing (ABM): A strategic approach where sales and marketing teams work together to target and engage specific high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. The focus is on individual accounts rather than a broad audience.

5. Community: Creating valuable content and engaging members of a community.

6. Partners: Agreement with a compatible company to join marketing and sales efforts for mutual benefit.

7. Product-led growth (PLG): Development of a solution (usually a SaaS product) in a way that a prospect can self-onboard and get value before monetization efforts begin.

Most companies will find 1-3 GTM growth motions that will bring them 80% of business.

You select them based on:

• customer insights

• competitive landscape & opportunities

• your internal expertise & capacities

• unit economics

Now back to growth hacking. Or let’s agree we’ll call it experimentation.

Sean Ellis suggests that we leave 10% - 20% of resources aside for these endeavors and I agree.

Invest the rest toward initiatives that will predictably and reliably drive growth.

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