Course Description
The road to 100 million users was 1 month for Instagram Threads, 2 months for ChatGPT, and 9 months for TikTok. While these companies have the fastest-growing products in history, 90% of startups actually fail to grow at all (Startup Genome, ‘19). Growing customers is especially hard in the age of AI – products are faster to build and harder to differentiate, and the only thing separating successful and failed products is how well they can be distributed to customers. That’s why growth marketing is a crucial skill set for the modern entrepreneur who wants to build a successful business.
This is a hands-on, project based course in which students directly apply growth marketing frameworks to business ideas. Teams will enact real data-driven growth marketing campaigns and quantify outcomes from activities such as generating demand for product launches, running A/B tests, optimizing ads, setting up email marketing and push notification campaigns, and conducting keyword research to grow search traffic.
By the end of the course, students will have honed their growth marketing skills by acquiring traffic and users on a website, validating a product idea without zero ad spend, and attracting ten or more customers. Students will also get to hone and improve pitching skills by presenting their growth marketing campaigns to other teams and seasoned product and growth executives.
Instructor
Sandy Diao
Diao is a growth executive with over 12 years of experience leading teams at companies such as Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Pinterest, Indiegogo, and Descript (OpenAI-backed). Diao is the founder of Drift, a growth advisory focused on early stage startups, and invests in fractional founders building tools that help people save time or money. Diao is a keynote speaker and lecturer at over thirty conferences on the topics of growth strategy and entrepreneurship.