Welcome to the Tech for Non-Techies podcast

Why do some products go viral and others die a quiet death? The answer lies in growth hacking. 

Growth hacking is a type of marketing that combines working on the product, which is an inside job, and working on promotion, which is an outside job. It is a new discipline born with the tech sector, and growing in popularity today.

Learning notes from this episode:

• The Dropbox growth hacking case study is still seen as the Holy Grail in the sector. The team created a double referral program to grow 3900% in just 15 months.

• A growth hacking effort is always done by a multi-disciplinary team, and will often involve a product manager, a designer, a community manager, engineers, someone with a marketing or PR background, and maybe a data scientist.

• Traditional marketing is outside facing: billboards, TV ads and articles in the press.  Growth hacking is different because it looks at the inside of the product, and adjusts it to grow users and revenue.

• PR...

It's so tempting to dive into making a product the moment you have an idea. But, this is a sure way to lose time and money.

Before speaking to developers or designers, take a deep dive into the users and the problem you are aiming to solve. This is an ideal opportunity for non-techies to shine: user research and idea validation.

Listen to this episode to learn from Ronan Walsh, founder of Digital Trawler, a digital marketing agency, about how he helps his SaaS clients create better products.

Learning notes from this episode:

• A product is a solution to a people problem. Before even contacting a product team, take time to investigate the people and the problem.
• Marketers and designers go through a very similar process to validate the user problem at the start. This is because both are very user focussed.
• User research is done in two ways: quantitative and qualitative. For qualitative research be careful not to use steering questions to feed answers to the research...