Growth hacking

Sean Ellis coined the term "growth hacker" in 2010.[9] In the blog post, he defined a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth."[9] Andrew Chen introduced the term to a wider audience in a blog post titled, "Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing"[10] in which he defined the term and used the short term vacation rental platform Airbnb's integration of Craigslist as an example.[11][12] He wrote that growth hackers "are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of 'How do I get customers for my product?' and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph."[13][12] In the book "Growth Hacking", Chad Riddersen and Raymond Fong define a Growth Hacker as "a highly resourceful and creative marketer singularly focused on high leverage growth" [14]

The second annual (2013) "Growth Hackers Conference" was held in San Francisco set up by Gagan Biyani.[15] It featured growth hackers from LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube among others.[15] In 2015, Sean Ellis and Everette Taylor created GrowthHackers - the largest website community dedicated to growth hacking and now host the annual GrowthHackers Conference.

To combat this lack of money and experience, growth hackers approach marketing with a focus on innovation, scalability, and user connectivity.[16][17] Growth hacking does not, however, separate product design and product effectiveness from marketing.[18][19] Growth hackers build the product's potential growth, including user acquisition, on-boarding, monetization, retention, and virality, into the product itself.[20] Fast Company used Twitter's "Suggested Users List" as example: "This was Twitter's real secret: It built marketing into the product rather than building infrastructure to do a lot of marketing."[21] However growth hacking isn't always free. TechCrunch shared several nearly free growth hacks[22] explaining that growth hacking is effective marketing and not mythical marketing pixie dust. As new tools(SaaS) come out specifically that focus on more advanced forms of Growth Hacking, more and more tools are being offered as free.[23]

The heart of growth hacking is the relentless focus on growth as the only metric that truly matters.[24] Mark Zuckerberg had this mindset while growing Facebook.[25] While the exact methods vary from company to company and from one industry to the next, the common denominator is always growth. Companies that have successfully "growth hacked" usually have a viral loop naturally built into their onboarding process.[26] New customers typically hear about the product or service through their network and by using the product or service, share it with their connections in turn. This loop of awareness, use, and sharing can result in exponential growth for the company.[27]

Growth hacking frames the user acquisition process through the "Pirate Funnel" metaphor (in short, new users flow through a 6-stage funnel - awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral), which got its name from the abbreviation of the first six letters spelling AAARRR. Rapidly optimizing this process is a core goal of growth hacking, since making each stage of the funnel more efficient will increase the number of users in the most advantageous stages of the funnel.[28]

Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Pinterest, YouTube, Groupon, Udemy, Instagram and Google are all companies that used and still use growth hacking techniques to build brands and improve profits.[29]