GROWTH HACKING: EXAMPLES, TOOLS AND THE STATE OF
GROWTH HACKING GLOBALLYThe term growth hacking, and the community driving its widespread adop7on
have made way for a fundamental shi: in the way we think about scaling businesses today.
A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of tradi7onal marke7ng and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-‐mails, pay-‐per-‐click ads, blogs, and pla?orm APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money – Ryan Holiday
With over 236 growth hacking courses listed on Udemy, and a Google Trend chart that shows a massive upswing in the number of searches for the term growth hacking, there’s clearly a lot of interest
around what growth hacking is and how it’s done.
WHAT IS GROWTH HACKING? While the term may have been around since 2010, and gained serious momentum over the years, there’s yet to be one universally agreed
upon defini7on for what growth hacking actually is.
Back in 2010, when Sean Ellis first coined the term, and later when Andrew Chen wrote the post that shook up most of the marke7ng
world, early growth hacking was focused around a cunning combina7on of product, engineering and persuasive marke7ng to
offset massive o:en7mes viral growth.
Sean set a clear tone for what growth hacking would soon become in his defini7ve post saying:
“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scru8nized by its poten8al impact on scalable growth.”
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GROWTH HACKING AND MARKETING?
Here’s how Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at Hubspot compares tradi7onal marke7ng with growth.
DEMAND FOR GROWTH HACKING BY CITY AND COUNTRY
Over 72 Growth Hacking Agencies have sprung up worldwide while more than 341 companies are staffing up internal growth teams. A simple LinkedIn job 7tle search shows 2491 growth hacker 7tles while Angellist has 3,382 individuals
lis7ng growth hacking as a skill set.
GREATEST GROWTH HACKS OF ALL TIME
Paypal’s friend referral bounty By paying $10 cash to each new customer and $10 to the customer who referred them, Paypal was able to hack early growth to tens of millions of users before no longer offering the bonus.
Hotmail Tagline In Hotmail whenever a user would email another user, the email would have a message saying something similar to “This email sent with Hotmail, Join Hotmail now” and “Get your free email at Hotmail.”
Airbnb’s craigslist integra7on By reverse engineering the craigslist pos7ng process and automa7ng it to the point where it became dead simple to cross-‐post your airbnb lis7ng to craigslist, AirBnb was able to hack early growth to 10ʹ′s of millions of users.
Dropbox Incen7vized Referral Program Roughly based off of Paypal’s invite system, dropbox allows users to invite their friends for more space. This worked to help dropbox grow from 100,000 users to 4,000,000 in under two years.
THE MOST FAMOUS GROWTH HACKERS ONLINE
Sean Ellis (@SeanEllis)
Brian Balfour (@bbalfour)
Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic)
Morgan Brown (@morganb)
Casey Armstrong (@CaseyA)
Nichole Elizabeth (@NikkiElizDemere)