Growth hacker Sean Ellis on expanding through experimentation

“If you don’t have experimentation across the full customer journey, you’re going to have a hard time growing any business,” says Sean Ellis, who coined the term ‘growth hacker’ in 2010 after using such techniques to ignite spectacular, low-cost growth for Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn and Lookout – each now worth billions of dollars.

Sean is an entrepreneur, investor and startup advisor. He founded and sold customer insights company Qualaroo, growing it to millions of dollars in recurring revenue with customers such as Uber, Starbucks and Amazon, and is the co-author of Hacking Growth, published in April 2017. He founded and runs GrowthHackers.com, the number one online community built for growth hackers.

Speaking to Seedcamp partner Carlos Espinal, Sean demystifies the principles of growth hacking. He goes behind the scenes of the Silicon Valley giants famous for having deployed innovative, experimental and data-driven methods to drive growth, including Uber, Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox, where he served as the company’s first marketer.

Sean discusses some of the actionable insights from his new book – including how startup founders can build growth teams, validate product decisions, discover the right ‘north star metric’ (such as drives taken in Uber’s case) to guide business decisions, and generate insights from data that spans the entire customer journey.

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