Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

The growth hacking canvas is a tool and framework to have a set of processes that allow you to ask the right questions to generate growth ideas, consistently.

Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation, that is meant to unlock growth ideas to allow startups and less structured organizations to gain traction, as quickly as possible.

This process goes through four main phases that as in a loop comprise data analysis and insight gathering, idea generation, experiment prioritization, and running tests.

The process is ongoing, and it needs to happen over and over before being able to determine whether it works:

One key ingredient of growth hacking is the team. Indeed, the growth hacker isn’t a magician that makes companies grow magically. Instead, it is a member of a team that coordinates it to analyze the data and prioritizes the activities. Usually, this is a so-called T-shaped profile:

A T-shaped profile is a person that has broad competencies in several areas, together with deep competence in one or two areas of expertise.

Growth hacking is first of all also a way to acquire clients and grow a business. This means being able to track the activities of the growth marketer and assess in which stage of a sales funnel an activity falls into.

Usually, growth hackers refer to the pirates’ funnel, also called AARRR funnel:

The AARRR funnel has the following stages:

Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral

This, of course, is an abstract framework and just one way to assess the path to acquire customers, users and gain traction.

The 10 building blocks of the growth hacking canvas

The growth hacking canvas has ten building blocks. We’ll specifically look at two growth hacking canvas, from alexandercowan.com and growthhackingcanvas.com.

According to the growth hacking canvas from alexandercowan.com, those are the following building blocks and questions to ask:

Segments & Personas: Who are the customers? What do they think? See? Feel? Do?
Value Propositions: What’s compelling about the product to these personas? Why do they buy it, use it?
Brand Experiences: What are the key experiences customers have with the product? How do they find it? Buy it? Use it? How does this differ across actors? If a CIO or parent buys it and then a support person or child uses it, how does that work?
Branding: What is the personality of the brand? Its positioning? How does it talk about itself? How do is that executed?
Lexicon: What words and phrases do customers use to talk about the area? What do they type into Google?
Assets: What are the product’s most important brand assets?
Activities: What are the most important growth activities?
Organic Channels: What organic (unpaid) channels are most important to the product’s branding and growth?
Paid Channels: What paid channels are most important to the product’s branding and growth?
Promotional Infrastructure: What promotional infrastructure (email lists, in-store displays, social media accounts) is working for the brand?

You can go more in-depth here.

The growth hacking canvas from growthhackingcanvas.com comprise ten building blocks that can be summarized in:

S.M.A.R.T GOALS: Goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely
TARGET AUDIENCE: Who are you targeting with your specific marketing actions? Why are these segments so important?
ACQUISITION: How do users find you?
ACTIVATION: How can people refer to their friends?
RETENTION: Why would users come back?
REFERRAL: How can people refer to their friends?
REVENUE: How will you get paying customers?
BUDGET: What budget will you allocate to which actions?
GROWTH AREAS: Which areas will you focus on?
TOOLS: Which tools do you use for each area?