In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Before he became the most popular author on stoicism, we talked with Ryan Holiday about his marketing books!

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We put this episode together as part of some exclusive content, the feedback was so positive we’ve decided to put it in the feed for everyone!

You can still check out Growth Hacking here and Trust Me, I’m Lying!

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

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John Wall – 00:00

Hey everybody. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some backend plumbing with the website and some other stuff and playing around with some exclusive content. And rather than just sending out a blank file, I dug into the archives and got an interview with Ryan Holiday, who you may know from his books on stoicism. But before that, he actually had done a couple of marketing books, one called Growth Hacker Marketing and before that, a big hit, *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, which I still recommend to anybody in marketing as something to dig into. Only went out to about 300 people of all the subscribers because it was just out there for kind of a split second and got grabbed.

Well, I got feedback, and everyone was like, “Yeah, this is great.” And so I thought, why don’t I just throw it in the regular feed for everybody now that it’s been out there. This was just before Ryan hit it huge on the bestseller list with his books on stoicism. So it’s fun to hear where he was at that time. And also, it is amazing to me. I was surprised how this interview is almost 10 years old. The tools are so much better. The show actually sounds different. But this is one of my favorites from over the years. And so here we go.

Speaker 2 – 01:10

This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall – 01:17

Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today, we have a special interview with Ryan Holiday, the author of *Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising*. He’s also the author of *Trust Me, I’m Lying*, a great book that we’ll probably talk about a little bit, too. But Ryan, thanks for joining us today.

Ryan Holiday – 01:35

Thanks for having me. This sounds fun.

John Wall – 01:37

As we get started, I mean, give us the elevator pitch on growth hacking. What’s the idea here?

Ryan Holiday – 01:41

Yeah, so the idea was, one morning I’m sort of going about my day as a traditional marketer and I sit down and I read this article. The headline is, “Growth Hackers Are the New VPs of Marketing.” Now, I’m a VP of Marketing, I’m Director of Marketing and American Apparel, and I’ve never heard of a growth hacker, and I have no idea what it is. But I look at the companies that growth hackers are responsible for: Groupon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, a handful of billion-dollar brands that were built right in front of us, within the last five years, and they didn’t do any traditional marketing. They used a strategy they call growth hacking.

And so I thought, what does it mean that these people built billion-dollar brands using none of the things that I provide, or I, the services that I provided, I pride myself at being good at? Maybe they’re better marketers than me. And so I sat down to study what growth hacking is and how it works. The book is a result of those interviews and that research and trying it myself.

John Wall – 02:49

Right. And I thought one interesting point was talking about more about what it isn’t than what it is. Like you said, you were kind of doing VP of Marketing, so you had the book of business that you provided. But really, it came down to stuff that was testable, trackable, scalable. That was big three that you threw out there. So basically, the case studies, everything that you’re talking about in the book are people that have taken kind of this minimalist approach. Is that right?

Ryan Holiday – 03:12

I think so. I think what growth hacking is at its essence is, let’s say you’re an engineer in the Silicon Valley, and so your whole life is designed around sort of rules and languages and sort of what you see is what you get. It’s sort of coding mentality, this right-brain mentality. Don Draper is not a hero to them. That’s the opposite of what they do. But they still have things they have to promote, and they still have to launch startups and get millions of users.

And so what I think they did, right in front of us, is basically reinvent marketing because they didn’t like the things that marketing sort of held to be dear. And it turns out that the way of doing it that they came up with may, in fact, be more effective, more trackable, more efficient, and better than what people like me were trained to do.

John Wall – 04:07

Yeah, that’s true. And I noticed at the front of the book, you quote David Ogilvy. For this audience, folks that are heavy into marketing, I’m sure we have some listeners that kind of get that whole idea of, even Ogilvy back in the day was kind of like, it’s all about sales and it’s about driving the numbers, and he was so huge on direct marketing as being where the future was. And I think that’s because he, just like everyone else, had no idea what was going to happen with the web and the fact that we would be applying all this stuff in email and where we go there.

So right out of the gate, though, there’s one thing, and you really focus the argument because I think myself, like yourself, as a VP of Marketing, kind of hear this growth hacking phrase.

Ryan Holiday – 04:46

I think it’s a buzzword.

John Wall – 04:47

It’s a buzzword. And worse yet, though, and then finally, you put your finger right on it, which is it ties into product marketing because you have to have a product fit for it to work. The buzzword and the hatred came from the fact that I’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh yeah, what we really need is a growth hacker.” But, at these companies, they’re never going to change the product, and, in fact, they’re even going to have a problem with, they would never be doing kind of some of the stunts you talk about, and especially, in *Trust Me, You’re Lying*, of setting up fake profiles, or kind of really getting to the edge of marketing. They’re just way too conservative for that.

So it kind of has a stigma around it and a buzzword around it, but again, like I said, by hitting on product marketing, you grabbed me immediately as you were right on the mark with that. So talk about that a little bit, about product fit and how that gets into it.

Ryan Holiday – 05:33

Marketers see themselves as being only responsible for marketing. “My job is to take your product once it’s finished and get attention for it. That’s how the relationship works.” But growth hacking comes from the people who, in often cases, designed or made the product, are now responsible for launching it. That’s sort of the startup mentality of, there’s no job titles, just everyone works, everyone tries to make this thing a success. So they sort of came to it from the other side of the table. And I think they were able to see something that I experienced over the course of my marketing career too many times, which is, you can’t market a broken product, and that oftentimes the best marketing decision that you can make is a product development decision.

So Instagram is an amazing example of this. It launches as a social network, like a geotargeted geolocation social network called Burbn that you happen to be able to add some photos with filters to. It turned out that one tiny feature was the overwhelming, sort of got the overwhelming response. It wasn’