Lesson: Consumer Growth with Jim Scheinman

Step #9 Data: You are what you know

Data is critical for growth hacking. One of the key components of a growth team would be a data scientist. It's often a data scientist who’s your growth hacker. Organic growth viral marketing is an art and a science. The art piece is creativity. If someone had to think about, "If we could just make it easier for someone to invite with SMS, then this would go so much faster."

"Oh, that's a good idea, why don't we just tap into the phone contact list and let people send these SMS messages to invite friends." Some of us can be creative and think outside the box and do that for the first time. Then it's a matter of implementing that, so you need the engineering resources to do that.

Then you need the data scientists to look at it and go, "How well are we doing? What if we changed the color from red to green? Maybe that would work better. What if we change the language? Instead of saying, 'invite friends,' it said, 'share this with so-and-so,' or maybe we could use this person's first name." Those kinds of details are what will drive incremental change. Incremental change, when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of customers can be significant.

Then you look at the results. This is really where the data scientists come in. They're analyzing results constantly and seeing what's working, what's not working, and then improving it. That could be one person who has all those skills, a creative engineer who has a data scientist background. It could be two or three different people.