Even though everyone is talking about "growth hacking" - there are websites, guides, and online courses on this topic - no one seems to agree on exactly what that means, especially when applying the methodology to the architecture industry and independent architects.

According to Andrew Chen, "Growth hackers are a marketer-developer hybrids who look at the traditional question "How do I get customers for my product? " and work through A / B Tests, Landing Pages, Viral Factor, Email Deliverability and other drivers to see how to get these customers in the most convenient, and cheapest, way.

To paraphrase Sean Ellis, the entrepreneur and blogger who coined this phrase, the authors of The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking state, “A growth hacker is not going to replace a marketer. A growth hacker is no better than a marketer, it is a person whose true north is growth”.

However, how would we implement growth hacking for a boutique architecture firm?

There is a simple yet incredibly powerful methodology which, if taken seriously, can bring us new projects and clients for our architecture firm as well as position us among the top.

We should always start with setting up a goal. A goal can be to win new tender, but it could also be related to enterprise or corporate clients or selling directly to large constructors. Any type of tangible way of getting revenue or growing the company should become one of the core KPIs, and then this KPI is specified in form of a goal. The important aspect of KPIs is that it should always bring us closer to achieving our growth: to turn a potential client from lead to opportunity could be a potential goal, and it should also be SMART: how much does an architecture boutique want to grow in next 3 or 6 months, and measured with the help of KPIs themselves.

Once we have a goal, we design growth drivers. Drivers, or growth levers, are the hypothetical ways in which an architecture boutique or an individual architect can reach this goal. Can we closely monitor upcoming tenders? Maybe there are list of constructors that we could start a collaboration with? Are there any possible partners that could incorporate our services in their portfolio in exchange for a percentage of our revenue from the project? The broad ways to achieve these goals are called growth drivers, and then we will use the methodology to test these drivers through experimentation.

Experiments are the way to see whether a growth driver, or growth lever, is the one that will actually bring us growth. If we seek long lasting partnerships, maybe we should start first with one or two partners and then design the program based on the result of these experiments. If we are planning to go for open tenders, we could monitor these based on the probability of winning, after a set of experiments.

The most important part of the methodology is tracking the learnings. Learnings are essential to track what worked and what didn’t in a context of future experiments to be implemented, and, therefore, never to make the same mistake again. You can get examples of drivers, experiments and learning from the architecture boutiques industry if you sign up for Hypertry and ask specifically for these materials.