Corporate Strategy

The companies that grow the fastest are the ones that learn the fastest. The more experiments you run, the more you learn. It's really that simple. The high volume is ideal, because most experiments fail to produce the results you're hoping for.

Others produce some indication of success but are inconclusive, not producing results significant enough to support making the change tested. Some produce small but not earth-shattering wins. Only very few tests produce dramatic gains. Finding wins, both big and small, is, in other words, a numbers game.

Remember that, generally, big successes in growth hacking come from a series of small wins, compounded over time. Each bit of learning acquired leads to better performance and better ideas to test, which leads to more wins, ultimately turning small improvements into landslide competitive advantages.

To illustrate the power of small gains for an organisation, Peep Laja, a renowned expert in conversion rate optimisation - the science of getting more visitors to a website or app to become customers - loves to point out that a 5% improvement in conversion rate every month nets an 80% improvement in a year due to the compounding nature of wins.

If you were generating visitors through search ads, that increase in conversions would cut your costs of advertising per customer just about in half. This same principle applies everywhere in a company. In fact, small increases in retention can be even more powerful.

From "Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success"