Review of the book called Growth Hacker by Ryan Holiday

Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
Easy to read: ★★★★
Easy to understand: ★★★★
This was a quick read but does require a bit of focus to fully absorb all of the concepts.
Relevant during the age of social media: ★★★★★
Yes, this book relies entirely on social media tactics. If you are looking to create growth online for a product, series, or concept, these tactics will apply at least loosely to you.
Relevant for an independent artist: ★★★
If you are looking to create any sort of marketed product as an artist, these concepts should be able to apply to you. The book spends a great deal of time focusing on apps, and particularly large mass marketed apps, but the underlying concepts can be taken and applied to whatever you are trying to market.
The general idea is to find your core audience, market exclusively, directly, and powerfully to them, and then design your product so that it will spread itself from there. Create ways that people will want to share your product for you. Focus on the people who are the best fit and they will do the work for you, rather than trying to market to everybody (as the vast majority of the world will not be the best fit for your product).
As an artist, this means asking questions like “who is the target audience for my artwork? Where do they congregate? How can I target them directly? Why should they want to share my artwork?”
Relevant for a small and/or independent art or media company: ★★★★
If you are creating any sort of app or website, there will be information for you. If you are creating video content, a book, an album, and sort of product that needs to be marketed, there will be information for you.
Relevant for running a kickstarter, patreon, or indiegogo: ★★★★
Though these are never covered by name, the concepts in the book can be, perhaps, MOST easily applied to these crowdfunding projects for an independent artist. If you plan to run any sort of crowdfunding campaign, I recommend at least skimming this book for ideas.
Relevant for selling and advertising a product: ★★★★★
Yes, this is precisely the main focus of the book.
Main takeaways from the book:
Find a product that is a good fit for your target audience first. It has to be something that your audience will want to share and propagate themselves. Be iterative with your refinement process, putting work out into the world to test and then improving it based on feedback until you have a solid product-market fit. Design share-ability into your product so that it becomes an inherent part of the loop. From there, people will spread the word of your product for you. Focus on the people who are the best fit for your product; retaining them and inspiring them to spread the word for you will lead to success.
I would recommend this book to:
-Someone running any sort of art or media related Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign
-Someone trying to sell any sort of art related product online
-Someone trying to spread the word about their art and get more social media interaction
-Someone as a primer, if they are interested in learning more about growth hacking


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