A lot of people view growth hacking as beating some sort of system. They figure out how to beat one system or find something that works on onechannel, and then, holding that hammer, start to look at everything as if it's a nail. You've probably noticed this if you've ever talked to a Search Engine Optimization agency. "You're a hot dog stand? What you need is SEO!"

That is the worst way to go about it, because it works well enough to get results but not well enough to learn what will get great ones. It also works poorly enough that your cost of user acquisition will be too high to justify paying it.

Instead of looking down the list of networks you know how to beat, I want you to learn to break every marketing effort down into these three steps:

1. Understand exactly who your customer is
2. Figure out where people like your customer tend to congregate
3. Figure out how to make contact with them where

Even though we ended up selling $4,000 of a highly-niched product on day one because of Instagram, we didn't start off knowing we would be using Instagram. That came as we explored the growth mindset.