Ryan Holiday

Focusing on customer
acquisition over ‘awareness’
takes discipline. . . . At a certain scale,
awareness/brand building
makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money

Turn 1 into
2 and 2 into
4—Going
Viral
Virality isn’t luck.
It’s not magic

Only a specific type of
product or business or piece of content will go viral—it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it

Get this deal for free”: if you buy the deal and recommend it to three friends who buy it via a special link, it’s free for you

because every
offer had advertising built into it—they were paying
their users to do it for them

Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which
makes them more likely to
become popular. . . . We need to design products and
initiatives that advertise
themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or
espoused the idea

a growth

hacker doesn’t think

branding is worthless, just

that it’s not worth the premium that traditional marketers pay for it.

If you want to go viral, it must be baked into your product.

Virality is not an accident.

It is engineered

the focus needs to be on
improving customer
retention