This book will not contain any growth hacks. #

This book is about building a sustainable business and giving you the tools and information that will guide you as you make marketing decisions for your business.

That word up there: sustainable. It's important.

When you've been doing this as long as I have (ok, only 15 years, but that's more than a lot of people in this industry) you learn that a lot of "hacks" that look good at first can turn around and shoot you in the foot.

That SEO hack that sent you to the top of Google results for all your keywords can get you kicked off Google all-together or completely disappear a week later.

That referral hack that massively improved your numbers? It's actually just bringing in a ton of bots.

Or maybe a privacy law changed, making the email list you built with a great hack illegal to use now.

On top of shooting you in the foot, the other issue with growth hacks is they often focus on the wrong metric. They usually prop up vanity metrics like reach or page views. More on why that is problematic later.

The last issue is that they only actually work in very specific circumstances.

Those circumstances are: you are a b2c business with broad appeal and your target market is everybody.

If you are building a unicorn like that? Well, then only the first two problems apply.

If you are like the majority of startup founders, that doesn't apply. You have an actual audience you are going for that is far more specific.

While this book will not have any growth hacks, that does not mean I won't give tips and tricks. The tricks I will give are instead going to be things I have done in the past and have been proven to work. They are also generally good for the customer AND help with growth.