Everything begins by focusing on a narrow, actionable goal. This is important because a growth hacker can easily have a focus that is so broad it becomes meaningless. Yes, the overall aim is growth, but you don’t attain that kind of end-result without breaking it into smaller, achievable, tasks.
Let’s say you have a product and you want your DAU (daily active users) to increase, but that’s too broad of a goal. Then you decide to focus just on the retention of existing users since this will increase the DAU, but retention is still too broad. Then you choose to focus on helping current users create content because your numbers show that when someone becomes a content creator (and not just a consumer) within your product, then their activity on the site is far greater. Content creation leads to retention which leads to increased DAU. Therefore, you decide to make the goal to increase content creation by 2x.
Too Broad: Increase daily active users
Appropriate: Increase content creation by 2x
Many people have a hard time knowing when they’ve narrowed their goal enough. Here is a rule of thumb that I use. Think about your goals as nested hierarchies, and until you reach the “nest” where things can be marked off as individual tasks which can be completed once and for all, then you’re not narrow enough. In this case, our hierarchy might look something like this:
Will there ever conceivably be a day when you can mark off grow my business from a to-do list? No. The goal is too broad. Is there ever going to be a time when you can say that you’ve finished “increasing DAU.” No. Too broad. However, you can mark off that you’ve “educated members about content creation through an email.” When you find yourself on the part of the hierarchy that can be checked off as done, then you’ve narrowed your goal appropriately.