Most startup advice is not worth reading.

This handbook is appropriate for anyone involved in growth — including managers, new startup founders, and the top of 1% growth marketers who want to understand why they’re failing to execute.

This handbook is a comprehensive growth marketing reference. It leaves you with an agency-level proficiency in user acquisition and conversion optimization. 

You’ve never read anything on growth that’s as comprehensive nor as insightful as this. If you read it and conclude I’m wrong, you can call me a fool on Twitter.

What makes this handbook so good is that it’s a distillation of my real-world insights running a growth agency for Y Combinator alumni. And it’s modern as of mid-2017.

(Prior to my agency, I was VP of Marketing for Webflow. Prior to that, I developed and grew one of the most popular open source libraries. )

Whereas most growth advice consists of uninsightful walkthroughs and basic SEO tips, this handbook is different. You will learn all the things you suspected you never really understood about growth.

The upcoming pages on A/B Testing, Ads, and Copy are especially insightful.

Contents

You will learn to:

• Run agency-level Facebook Ads to generate signups and purchases. 
• Design high-conversion landing pages. Then A/B test them.
• Write clever ads that generate clicks.
• Determine which ad channels (e.g. Instagram, Twitter) are best for your product.
• Automate user outreach to increase engagement.
• Successfully execute B2B sales.
• Write blog posts that convince readers to convert.

Because there’s a lot to cover, I’ve made this handbook hyper-concise: I get right to the point in each section. And I provide bullet-point summaries for easy referencing. 

Unlike most guides, there’s zero rambling.

That said, this is a dense handbook — not a short blog post. Only read pages as they become relevant to your work. Otherwise, you’ll never get through all the dry material.

About Julian

I spend months researching topics so I can write concise, book-quality handbooks.

If you were impressed with the quality of my Build Muscle handbook, you know I deliver on lofty claims of quality. I want you to have everything you need to kick ass.

I release all my work online, and for free, because books are required to hit page counts, which results in filler content that annoys readers.

My day job is running the growth agency, Bell Curve. Before that, I built an open source animation engine, Velocity.js, and grew it into one of the biggest front-end libraries.

Say hello on Twitter ✌

How to use this handbook

This handbook isn’t going to be exciting, but it will be extremely insightful. And it’ll leave you in the best position you’ve ever been to grow a company efficiently.

The knowledge herein is applicable to companies of all sizes and verticals. I cover a range of introductory and advanced B2B and B2C tactics, making this appropriate for marketers of all skill levels.

The growth funnel

The growth funnel is the lifetime journey your customer experiences when interacting with your company. It’s actually just a cute name for the customer acquisition pipeline:

Growth marketers know how these funnel steps interrelate:

Acquisition

• Acquisition channels (e.g. press, ads, blogging) fill the top of the funnel with leads.

Conversion

• When leads arrive, a percentage of them are converted to users or customers by the enticing text and imagery on your site.

Engagement

• Once a visitor converts, they need to be onboarded through their initial product experience to become confident, engaged users.
• Confident users are expert users, and expert users get the most value out of your product. They’re most likely to make repeat purchases.
• If they’re not making repeat purchases, we at least want them to become regularly engaged users. We do this through delivering a great product experience and reminding them of this experience.

Revenue

• Average revenue per user (ARPU) is maximized through pricing optimization and up/cross-selling.
• Up/cross-selling consists of email marketing and in-product messaging to contextually pitch the increased value users get out of the product when they pay more.

Referral

• Customer referrals (or word of mouth) is the least expensive user acquisition channel. 
• Your goal is to make your product so good that your customers do your selling for you. You don’t need to be a viral social app to accomplish this.

If you don’t have processes for optimizing each of these steps, you’re not fully implementing growth marketing. And you’ll especially benefit from this handbook.

Funnel prioritization

To spend your marketing budget efficiently, prioritize your optimization of the growth funnel’s steps in reverse: When each step past Acquisition performs better, every dollar spent on Acquisition goes further! 

Think about it: The more new customers are likely to repeat buy and refer others, the more you can afford to spend acquiring each one of them.

When we reverse the funnel, the order of our priorities is:

1. Referrals: I cover this on the Content page.
2. Revenue: This will be written into the guide at a later date.
3. Engagement and conversion: This is the domain of Landing Pages, A/B, and Onboarding, which I fully cover in this handbook.
4. Acquisition: This is the domain of Ads, Sales, and Content, which we also fully cover. 

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Continue to the next page

Every page in this handbook is dry. So read the pages that are most immediately relevant to you then bookmarking this guide for whenever the remainder are too!

The next page demystifies the design of high-conversion landing pages.

I hope you kick serious ass with all this content.