Growth hacking is one of those hot marketing jargon we’ve all gotten so used to hearing from startup founders or in innumerable articles describing them as the holy grail of success. But in the course of this constantly developing success, the actual meaning and value of what it really offers get swept under the carpet in the noise-created chaos.
Image Source: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/growth-hacking/
But let’s clear that up: beyond the buzzword, growth hacking is a pretty compelling way to scale a business, thinking companies like Facebook or Airbnb—growth from tiny user bases to millions of active users using strategic growth-focused tactics.
However, not every tactic that results in growth is a true “growth hack.”
In the cheat sheet that follows, we will try to understand the principles of growth hacking and a checklist of actionable steps that can put your business on the path to success. Let’s begin by first understanding exactly what is growth hacking.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking more or less misleadingly refers to this culture of having the overnight ability to take any business from zero to success – miracles just magically come around and set your business on fire. But it’s much more complex and way off from that.
Growth hacking refers to fast experimentation across hundreds of dimensions—including product development, marketing, and sales discover and highlight the most effective tactics for growing a business. It stands in stark contrast with traditional marketing, which remains as data-driven and built on rigorous testing and continuous iteration.
For the holy grail of growth hackers: scalable and sustainable growth.
An early pioneer on the term, Sean Ellis, has seen some of those companies develop strongly without using those traditional channels of marketing that may have slowed them or cost too much to the startup.
Examples of Growth Hacks in Action
Let’s see how companies like Dropbox and PayPal revamped strategies for customer acquisition.
Dropbox: Dropbox initially resorted to paid advertising for its traffic but later realized that its customer acquisition costs were unsustainable. Growth hack! Implemented a referral program where users would receive money for referring their friends. That directly cut acquisition costs and scaled growth exponentially!
Paypal: PayPal also paid its customers $10 each for every referral that was actually acquired. In this manner, it delegated the responsibility of customer acquisition to its user base. Over time, they did scale the amount to $5, but it still stands as a ludicrously low-cost scalable methodology.
Twitter: Studying the behavior of its users, it was found that those who follow more than 30 accounts are more active. In a nutshell, as soon as it felt that this was evident, it pushed first-timers to sign in to follow some of the recommended accounts. It automatically increased engagements and growth (this was conducted before Twitter became X).
Growth Hacking Key Takeaways
Growth hacking is the opposite of quick wins-just really building scalable, sustainable growth through experimenting and iteration over all aspects of your business.
Key principles:
- Scalable, repeatable actions
- It needs rigorous testing and repetition
- All teams work together-from product to marketing to sales.
If that sounds inane, it’s just because it kind of is: it can be anything that drives sustainable growth. The whole thing is an experiment where you explore new avenues and keep refining it.
Growth Hacking Checklist
- 1. Break down the Goal into Actionable Steps: Never set yourself a fuzzy goal like “become the best SaaS company”; instead, break that goal into SMART goals with Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound characteristics. Some sample SMART goals could be:
- Increase blog traffic to 15% for the month.
- Send 250 leads from an e-mail campaign.
- 10,000 new visitors must come monthly.
As you start to break up big goals into manageable sub-goals, you have created for yourself a kind of roadmap of actionable tasks driving the results you want.
- 2. Get Creative with Ideas: Apply brainstorming techniques to generate ideas about how you can assist yourself in achieving your top-level goal. Write out your top goal as a question: “How can we double our customer base in the next year?” Then just start listing out as many answers as you can—referrals, SEO, partnerships, etc. Don’t judge yet—all about quantity at this point.
Once you settle on ideas, refine and test them. Get your team to come up with various products or solutions to the ideas. Then, based on what you brainstorm, run experiments.
- 3. Run Experiments to Validate Your Ideas
Growth hacking is founded on the scientific method
- A. Ask questions: What shall we test?
- B. Research: How do others solve this problem?
- C. Hypothesis: “If we do X, Y will happen.
- D. Test: Try the variation of one variable at a time.
- E. Interpret results: Was the Hypothesis true?
- F. Iterate: From the result, iterate and keep experimenting.
 Example: A/B testing can be super fast in determining what works best. It could be testing several headline variations on a blog post, or it could be testing variations of Facebook ads; experimentation is the key here.
ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) Framework Prioritization
Use the ICE Framework to push ideas up or down the pile, as you would not want to waste your time with tests that are too small and pay neither. The framework has been taken from Sean Ellis and every single idea is scored against three criteria, namely:
Impact: How big of a difference will it make?
Confidence: How sure are you that it is going to work?
Ease: How easy is it to deploy?
Focus on high-leverage, high-confidence tests, easy to deploy. You get more bang for your buck than burnt effort.
Conclusion
Growth hacking refers to a dynamic approach or a process in achieving scalable and sustainable growth. As you break down goals into actionable steps, get creative with solutions, and rigorously test, you can find the strategies that will take your business to the next level.
The secret to growth hacking? Non-stop, infinite experimentation and iteration. You are probably not gonna find the proper process, but you may only get better over time and scale up.