A Beginner’s Guide to Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is an experimental business strategy focused on achieving exponential growth in a short time frame.

Marketing teams—especially those working on a tight budget—use growth-hacking techniques to rapidly generate brand awareness and grow their customer base.

Today we’ll explain how growth hacking works and review examples of growth hacks that have helped marketers achieve fast, low-cost growth. We’ll also provide a simple growth-hacking framework to get you started.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking focuses on growth above all else. To that end, growth hackers constantly ideate and run experiments to bring in new customers. When an experiment results in positive growth, they scale it and iterate some more.

Startup advisor and entrepreneur Sean Ellis, who founded the online GrowthHackers community, coined the term in 2010. Ellis defines a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth,” regardless of their title or job description.

But growth hacking isn’t just an abstract state of mind. It refers to specific marketing techniques and channels that target fast, low-cost growth. This is why many now associate the term with early-stage startups chasing rapid expansion on small budgets.

Growth Hackers Constantly Experiment and Iterate

Trying out new tactics and approaches is key to growth hacking.

Usually, this means running a number of small experiments simultaneously. Once you know which tactics work best on a small scale, you can integrate them...