Seth Godin wrote the other day…

Marketing used to be advertising
Now, marketing is everything you do

And he’s right—marketing now touches on almost every aspect of the business. What used to be an industry of ad agencies and PR campaigns… now has completely new rules.

In that shifting landscape, “growth marketing” was born.
An effort to integrate Marketing with Data and Product.

We’ll get to those concepts soon enough.

But at the core is the acknowledgment that marketing needs to become integrated with all other parts of the business… to see the best growth results.

In the rest of this email series, we’ll try to break down marketing, and build it up “from first principles”, to give you a strong foundation of how to reason about marketing.

Growth marketing has also changed a lot…

It’s no longer about hacks as much as a much bigger umbrella of professionalized frameworks.
What we have now is a set of mature frameworks to structure growth.

I had a moment of zen-like euphoria when I learned how this works, but I need a few additional emails to do it justice. Here’s the thing…

Growth marketing is much simpler than you think.

The frameworks and mental models are there, to approach this problem with confidence and clarity. There are systems that drive startup growth.

Nowadays, most entrepreneurs can learn growth marketing in a matter of weeks…

The 2 first principles to “how to get users” for any startup business…

1. Your growth strategy—how well you can acquire users at scale—is the biggest predictor of startup success/failure
Startups need a scalable, durable path to acquire customers. You make that happen through a series of systems… which I’ll show you tomorrow

2. Growth won’t happen automatically. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks
Those systems don’t build themselves. Early-stage startups should probably split resources 50/50 between product development and “getting users” and finding early growth.

In other words:
+ Pay attention to distribution (because it’s the biggest predictor of success/failure)…
+ …and allocate resources accordingly