Sylvia Ng

Looking for growth blogs? I don’t know about you, but I am sick of reading hokey growth hacks promising to increase your customer base from 0 to 1M in 60 seconds.  So here are personal favorite 11 blogs, all ones from thought leaders that give practical advice on acquiring and retaining customers. Quality content with personal anecdotes, case studies, visuals and a mix of media that’ll satisfy your need for thought provoking reads.

11 Serious Growth Hacking / Marketing Blogs to Follow

1. Aaron Ginn, Growth Product Manager @Everlane. I liked 8 Practical Tips for Growth but my favorite was How to Hire a Growth Hacker – “Growth hacking is a mindset, not a toolset”. Also check out his great predictions for tech trends in 2016.

2. Andrew Chen, Supply Growth @Uber. Andrew is extremely well respected and has thoughtful, helpful essays including Highest ROI Way to Increase Signups and Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing.

3. Brian Balfour, VP Growth @Hubspot. Brian of course needs no introduction but here are a few of my favourite essays from his collection: Growth is Never Done (why you need to take a long term view on growth), How to Drive Insights for Growth and Why Focus Wins.

4. Dan McKinley, Engineer @Stripe. Dan gives a more technical perspective with deeper dives such as Effective Experimentation as a Homo Narrans and Data Driven Products Now!

5. Danielle Morrill, Co-Founder and CEO @Mattermark . Lots of insights on start-up marketing; check out Embracing the Incrementality Mentality and Revenue vs Value.

6. Hiten Shah, Co-founder @QuickSprout. Just great advice from a seasoned entrepreneur, from 7 Lessons Learned Growing SaaS Companies to personal improvement advice such as 5 Hacks to Increase Your Daily Consumption of Information  and 7 Books Every Lifelong Learner Should Read.

7. Jamie Quint, Co Founder of Interstate Analytics. Jamie doesn’t write often but he has great articles on measurement and analytics. Interesting reads include How to Not F*** up Your First Marketing Hire and How to Lose Money on Paid Marketing (explains attribution modeling).

8. Jon Egan, Growth Engineer @Pinterest. Great blog with specific examples and visuals to back up the case studies. Check out 27 Metrics in Pinterest’s Internal Growth Dashboard, and his thoughts on When Features Drive Growth.

9. Morgan Brown, COO @InmanNews. He’s the author of one of my absolute all-time favorites: 5 Phases of the Startup Lifecycle. He also has some great growth case studies posted on GrowthHackers.com.

10. Neil Patel, Co-Founder @CrazyEgg and @KISSMetrics (with Hiten Shah). Author of the Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking, his blog covers more “how to tips” than some of the others, from How to Use Emojis to Increase Conversions to How to Do Content Marketing When You’re Dead Broke.

11. Sean Ellis, Founder and CEO of GrowthHackers.com. From the fellow who helped coin the term “growth hacking” we get succinct advice on key topics such as Less is More, How to Analyze Retargeting, and how to do High Tempo Testing.

Want a broader list?

Zack Onisko has a 50+ Growth Hackers list that includes experts from various fields such as marketing guru Seth Godin, Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, and SEO God Rand Fishkin.

Where are the women?

This is not the main point of this post but I just realized having gone through Onisko’s list and my own that there aren’t very many woman here. Onisko’s list includes Shana Carp and Joanna Wiebe. Other notables via Lauren Bass are Cat Lee (Pinterest), Naomi Pilosof Ionita (Invoice2go), and Tammy Camp (500 Startups)… are there any others that we’ve missed?

Update: thanks to @jamiequint for adding one more suggestion on the women’s list – @adelynzhou.

Others? Let me know in the comments!