Ryan Holiday on Growth Hacking – From the MoC Archives

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In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Before he became the most popular author on stoicism, we talked with Ryan Holiday about his marketing books!

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We put this episode together as part of some exclusive content, the feedback was so positive we’ve decided to put it in the feed for everyone!

You can still check out Growth Hacking here and Trust Me, I’m Lying!

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

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John Wall – 00:00
Hey everybody. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some backend plumbing with the website and some other stuff and playing around with some exclusive content. And rather than just sending out a blank file, I dug into the archives and got an interview with Ryan Holiday, who you may know from his books on stoicism. But before that, he actually had done a couple of marketing books, one called Growth Hacker Marketing and before that, a big hit, *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, which I still recommend to anybody in marketing as something to dig into. Only went out to about 300 people of all the subscribers because it was just out there for kind of a split second and got grabbed.

Well, I got feedback, and everyone was like, “Yeah, this is great.” And so I thought, why don’t I just throw it in the regular feed for everybody now that it’s been out there. This was just before Ryan hit it huge on the bestseller list with his books on stoicism. So it’s fun to hear where he was at that time. And also, it is amazing to me. I was surprised how this interview is almost 10 years old. The tools are so much better. The show actually sounds different. But this is one of my favorites from over the years. And so here we go.

Speaker 2 – 01:10
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall – 01:17
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today, we have a special interview with Ryan Holiday, the author of *Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising*. He’s also the author of *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, a great book that we’ll probably talk about a little bit, too. But Ryan, thanks for joining us today.

Ryan Holiday – 01:35
Thanks for having me. This sounds fun.

John Wall – 01:37
As we get started, I mean, give us the elevator pitch on growth hacking. What’s the idea here?

Ryan Holiday – 01:41
Yeah, so the idea was, one morning I’m sort of going about my day as a traditional marketer and I sit down and I read this article. The headline is, “Growth Hackers Are the New VPs of Marketing.” Now, I’m a VP of Marketing, I’m Director of Marketing and American Apparel, and I’ve never heard of a growth hacker, and I have no idea what it is. But I look at the companies that growth hackers are responsible for: Groupon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, a handful of billion-dollar brands that were built right in front of us, within the last five years, and they didn’t do any traditional marketing. They used a strategy they call growth hacking.

And so I thought, what does it mean that these people built billion-dollar brands using none of the things that I provide, or I, the services that I provided, I pride myself at being good at? Maybe they’re better marketers than me. And so I sat down to study what growth hacking is and how it works. The book is a result of those interviews and that research and trying it myself.

John Wall – 02:49
Right. And I thought one interesting point was talking about more about what it isn’t than what it is. Like you said, you were kind of doing VP of Marketing, so you had the book of business that you provided. But really, it came down to stuff that was testable, trackable, scalable. That was big three that you threw out there. So basically, the case studies, everything that you’re talking about in the book are people that have taken kind of this minimalist approach. Is that right?

Ryan Holiday – 03:12
I think so. I think what growth hacking is at its essence is, let’s say you’re an engineer in the Silicon Valley, and so your whole life is designed around sort of rules and languages and sort of what you see is what you get. It’s sort of coding mentality, this right-brain mentality. Don Draper is not a hero to them. That’s the opposite of what they do. But they still have things they have to promote, and they still have to launch startups and get millions of users.

And so what I think they did, right in front of us, is basically reinvent marketing because they didn’t like the things that marketing sort of held to be dear. And it turns out that the way of doing it that they came up with may, in fact, be more effective, more trackable, more efficient, and better than what people like me were trained to do.

John Wall – 04:07
Yeah, that’s true. And I noticed at the front of the book, you quote David Ogilvy. For this audience, folks that are heavy into marketing, I’m sure we have some listeners that kind of get that whole idea of, even Ogilvy back in the day was kind of like, it’s all about sales and it’s about driving the numbers, and he was so huge on direct marketing as being where the future was. And I think that’s because he, just like everyone else, had no idea what was going to happen with the web and the fact that we would be applying all this stuff in email and where we go there.

So right out of the gate, though, there’s one thing, and you really focus the argument because I think myself, like yourself, as a VP of Marketing, kind of hear this growth hacking phrase.

Ryan Holiday – 04:46
I think it’s a buzzword.

John Wall – 04:47
It’s a buzzword. And worse yet, though, and then finally, you put your finger right on it, which is it ties into product marketing because you have to have a product fit for it to work. The buzzword and the hatred came from the fact that I’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh yeah, what we really need is a growth hacker.” But, at these companies, they’re never going to change the product, and, in fact, they’re even going to have a problem with, they would never be doing kind of some of the stunts you talk about, and especially, in *Trust Me, You’re Lying*, of setting up fake profiles, or kind of really getting to the edge of marketing. They’re just way too conservative for that.

So it kind of has a stigma around it and a buzzword around it, but again, like I said, by hitting on product marketing, you grabbed me immediately as you were right on the mark with that. So talk about that a little bit, about product fit and how that gets into it.

Ryan Holiday – 05:33
Marketers see themselves as being only responsible for marketing. “My job is to take your product once it’s finished and get attention for it. That’s how the relationship works.” But growth hacking comes from the people who, in often cases, designed or made the product, are now responsible for launching it. That’s sort of the startup mentality of, there’s no job titles, just everyone works, everyone tries to make this thing a success. So they sort of came to it from the other side of the table. And I think they were able to see something that I experienced over the course of my marketing career too many times, which is, you can’t market a broken product, and that oftentimes the best marketing decision that you can make is a product development decision.

So Instagram is an amazing example of this. It launches as a social network, like a geotargeted geolocation social network called Burbn that you happen to be able to add some photos with filters to. It turned out that one tiny feature was the overwhelming, sort of got the overwhelming response. It wasn’t the social network that anyone liked, they liked this feature. And so they pivoted, they changed the entire company to zoom in on this one feature. That’s what made them a billion-dollar company, not what their marketers did. And so I think what a growth hacker does is they go, instead of trying to do all this external stuff, what if the best marketing we can do is change and improve and iterate our product until it has that explosive potential?

John Wall – 07:13
Yeah, right. And so you start with product fit there. And then in the book, you kind of jumped, okay, step two is finding the growth hack, which is just what you’re kind of talking about, finding.

John Wall – 07:21
The thing that makes it spark.

John Wall – 07:23
But so there is, there’s like no recipe for this. Now I’m kind of, it’s kind of interesting in that, in the past, you could just get a marketing professional, and you’d be all set, whereas now you need somebody that kind of understands the product and the audience and, maybe can code around what needs to be done. I mean, it seems like it’s a lot more difficult to find people who can do this. Now, you could talk about that.

Ryan Holiday – 07:43
Well, I would say, I would say the old model was: Make a thing, hire a marketer or a publicist to get attention for that thing, hope that it’s successful, rinse and repeat until it is. But the growth hacker mindset, I sort of go through these steps in the book. It’s tweak and iterate your product until it has explosive potential. Then, instead of some major blow the doors off blockbuster launch, it’s, “How can we find the core early adopters for this product?”

I think Uber is a great example of a company that said, “We’re not going to launch nationwide. Let’s start small. Let’s start in San Francisco. Let’s launch it at South by Southwest where we bring in our core customers.” It’s how do you find a small, contained group of people or a platform that you can use to bring those people in?

So another great example of this is, PayPal didn’t say, “Hey, how can we replace credit cards or become the dominant online payments platform?” They said, “Look, a lot of people are using eBay to sell things. What if we insert ourselves into that transaction and add value?” They sort of took advantage of that platform. Upworthy is another great startup that’s doing millions and millions of pages because they figured out how to master Facebook and the Facebook feed.

So it’s all about figuring out the platform or the initial trick. By trick, I don’t mean like deceive people. I just mean the unexpected or unusual way to bring people through the front door. And then, from there, your other things. So if you’ve built in viral features, like, you have a good referral program, you have a way that encourages the network effect. So if your product is better, the more people use it, if you bring in people through a growth hack, well, then the product is going to get bigger virally because those people are going to want to bring more people in.

And then, the final step that I talk about in the book is this idea of, look, focus on retention rather than acquisition. So it’s like, okay, I brought in 1000 people, but only 100 of them signed up and became customers. Well, what’s wrong with my landing page? What’s wrong with my product? Why are my users leaving? And then, how do you improve and iterate and tweak the product until that problem goes away? That sort of four-step cycle is the way that growth hackers think about the world, and I think that’s so much more effective and efficient than just hoping that an article in The New York Times makes you a success or hoping that ten articles in The New York Times will finally make you a success.

John Wall – 10:29
Right. Right. They’re going to land TechCrunch, and that’d be great for the first month and then dry up and go, “Okay, we’ve.”

John Wall – 10:35
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John Wall – 11:16
Check it out over at wixstudio.com, and we thank them for their support of the show.

The interesting thing is, although at first, people might feel, “Hey, this is,” well, it’s like any technology shift, too, that people will feel it’s threatening. But the reality is if you’re doing this right now, it’s going to tie you right into both customer service and product marketing and sales. It actually makes you a lot more valuable as a marketer in the mix here.

Ryan Holiday – 11:39
Yeah, totally.

John Wall – 11:40
One question to throw back, you were talking about at certain scale, awareness and brand building makes sense, but for the first year or two, it’s a waste of money. That was a quote that was in the book, talking about how it’s all about this acquisition and making that happen as a repeatable process. But I mean, do you ever feel now that there’s a point where brand awareness does make sense? Or is that just something like.

Ryan Holiday – 12:02
Of course, look, I guess what I’m saying is so much of the marketing advice that people get and study is designed for really big companies. It’s like you read something like *The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing*, which is a fantastic book, and I definitely recommend it. It’s like giving you advice on how one airline beat out another airline. But that’s so far from the reality of where most of us live. And even my first book, I’m talking about getting attention and doing marketing stunts for, a company that did $700 million in sales and has stores all over the world. It’s not hard for us to be newsworthy because we’re a big company. But what growth hacking does? Growth hacking is designed for a startup to go from zero users to 10 users to 100,000. Right.

It’s designed to take a project from nothing to something. And that’s so much more similar, or more like the situation that most people coming to marketing are in. We’re trying to launch a restaurant, or a podcast, or a blog, or a book, or a startup, like, we’re trying to take, or even, we’re trying to just get more attention for ourselves or our personal brand. We’re trying to go from nothing to something, just like these startups are, although the startups try to do it on a much larger scale than, than we do. But I think their lessons and their innovations are what we should focus on because there’s a lot of value there.

John Wall – 13:39
Yeah, absolutely. That’s funny. I’ve often said that the biggest mistake a lot of companies make is trying to ape Coca-Cola, or, like you said, an airline, that’s perfect. Those are not the decisions you need to be making. You’re playing in a different arena completely.

Ryan Holiday – 13:56
Right. Yeah. It’s total apples and oranges. And yet I’m trying to launch this book or do this project, and the thinking of the person who’s giving me advice was, “How to, how to make Visa’s sales 2% larger, or how Johnson and Johnson can spin off one brand into another brand.” Their thinking and what they judge to be success is so, is so drastic. And it’s not like, okay, they spent $10 million, I should spend $10,000. It’s not a matter of scale, it’s a fundamentally different approach.

Whereas the startups are, we’ve got to get people in the door, we didn’t exist yesterday, and now we’re open for business, how do I get people to come? And that’s what I wanted to write this book for, and I wanted to take their lessons because, look, Facebook went from zero users when it launched in 2004, 2005, to a billion users in less than 10 years. A billion users, that’s insane. And they did it without a marketing team. They had a growth team instead. And I wanted this book to be the lessons from those growers and those growth teams, and growth hacking is the philosophy that came out of those experiments now.

John Wall – 15:20
And interesting, too, it’s a Penguin imprint. It’s actually a shorter book. It’s like a 50-page read. Is the book itself an experiment? Are you trying anything different with the marketing of this? And how’s it all going?

Ryan Holiday – 15:32
Totally, look, so my first book, and actually I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May, both of those were sort of the traditionally published book. There are 300 pages they took a year to write, and then they took a year to publish after that. That’s how traditional book publishing is done. But I didn’t want to sit down and write a book about growth hacking, which is this thing that’s changing all the time and improving, new factors are introduced, and whatever.

I didn’t want to go out into the woods for a year working on this thing. I wanted to get something out quickly. I wanted it to be short, and then I wanted people to be able to receive it digitally and not have to wait for a printer to spit back many tens of thousands of copies. And so what we did with the book was we kept it short. We priced it really cheaply, it’s $3. We got it out there fast. And then, hopefully, if we do a paperback, or if I do an expanded edition, I can improve based on their feedback and based on that reader feedback. And that is very much the growth hacker mindset, for sure.

John Wall – 16:36
All right, that’s cool. And then, of course, we get the bonus, too, talking about *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, which had come out earlier.

So the great thing about this book is that, and we’ve talked for years on this podcast about the way you make arguments and shades of meaning, talking about the difference between persuasion versus manipulation. That’s a very big deal. But you basically, with this book, just went right to the other side and said, “Look, now there’s a whole realm of dirty tricks and interesting things going on here.” And you’ve explained everything that goes on. It’s amazing to read some of the stuff that you’ve done.

The crazy part is I remember seeing some of that stuff that you did in American Apparel go down, and it’s like, now you get the backstory and how it all happened and everything that went into that. But I guess, set it up for us first. Kind of tell us where that book came from and what it’s done for you.

Ryan Holiday – 17:24
Yeah, sure. So what I wanted to do in that book, sort of being a marketer for a big, successful company, and then a handful of other really controversial clients, that tends to be who I represent, I felt like I was not so much given access, but maybe when I wasn’t supposed to peek behind the curtain. And I really saw how the media works, and I saw how vicious and competitive and unscrupulous it really was. And look, I’m not going to lie, the book is about how I took advantage of that system, thinking that sort of all is fair in love and war, and how I benefited my clients accordingly.

But also sort of understanding what the costs are of a media system that will print anything and publish anything, and doesn’t care if they’re sort of incorrect, where it’s sort of this self-interest rules the day rather than ethics or the truth. And so the book is a very blunt, honest guide to operating in that environment. I wanted it to be a tell-all. I didn’t hold any of my sort of secrets back. Anything that I had done that I thought other people could do, or might want to do, I showed exactly how to do it. It was a tell-all, for sure. And naturally, that was a bit controversial, both with marketers who didn’t want me to disclose this information and the media who was fairly embarrassed by a lot of the disclosures that I made.

John Wall – 18:54
Yeah, no, that’s. You never look at Huffington Post the same way again after you’ve read.

Ryan Holiday – 18:59
The reality is, I haven’t looked at The Huffington Post or Gawker or Business Insider the right way in many years because I’d sort of seen this stuff before. It was like I just realized, why am I the only one who was worrying about this, and has to feel, why am I carrying this burden alone? And I wanted everyone to see it. I hope that exposing this stuff would lead to some change. I’m not sure that’s happened, but I feel like I did my duty blowing that whistle.

John Wall – 19:33
Yeah, no, I would agree for it. And it’s required reading for anybody in marketing. If you’re dealing with the press or market, you’ve got to. You may never want to even be involved with any of this kind of stuff, but it will, you’ll greatly benefit from understanding what’s going on behind the scenes and why you were ignored, to be honest, is what you’re going to learn from that.

All right. So that’s the books. How about, before we wrap, just like what’s up in the future? Kind of what’s on your radar right now that you’re looking at, and what’s coming up next?

Ryan Holiday – 20:00
Yeah, so I have a marketing company that represents authors and brands. We just worked with Mark Eco, who did a book, and he has Complex Media, who we may be advising. So I represent a variety of really interesting people that are sort of eager to try new things. It’s going great. I have another book with Penguin that comes out in May 2014 that will actually be about stoicism, the Roman philosophy. And then, I try to write every day. I write for my site at ryanholiday.net. I’m the media columnist for The New York Observer, and I write for Thought Catalog. So those are all places you can check out my stuff if you want. And I look forward to talking to everyone.

John Wall – 20:43
That sounds great. Again, the book, *Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising* is available over on Amazon. I’ll have links to that in the show notes. And of course, *Trust Me, I’m Lying*. You can check that out there, also. Ryan, thanks for stopping by and talking to us today.

Ryan Holiday – 20:56
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. This is great.

John Wall – 20:58
That’ll do it for this week. And until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Speaker 2 – 21:02
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. More from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters, and you can find it at Music Alley from Mevio, or follow the link in our show notes.
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