BOOK SUMMARY

The 9 best Growth hacking books

Updated: August 2nd, 2025

Growth hacking is about finding ways to get outsized growth returns with fewer resources, to beat competition, and grow your startup faster.

Best growth hacking books

Hacking growth is about running scientific experiments to find the most efficient ways to grow. And it's as much art as science. You need to get practical - and get your hands dirty. However, reading books can accelerate your learning, and provide inspiration for what to try next.

Let's get into the carefully curated list of top books on growth hacking.

1. Growth Hacking Reddit

How to get customers and grow your startup using Reddit. The playbook to growth hacking on Reddit. Focused on B2B SaaS.
Jonathan Rintala

2. Product-Led Growth

The handbook on product-led-growth (PLG). In short - how to build a product that sells itself.
Wes Bush

3. The $150M Secret

How to bootstrap and sell a $150M company in 3.5 years. Practical tips - for example: screenshots of cold outreach templates to use, LinkedIn content plays, and learning from big startup failures. Finally, a hands-on guide on startup acquisition.
Guillaume Moubeche

4. Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

Explains the framework successful companies have used to find traction and how you can do it to.
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

5. Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Understanding the WHY behind word of mouth and mastering virality to make your product spread.
Jonah Berger

6. Trajectory: Startup: Ideation to Product/Market Fit

This book provides practical advice and learnings from the ideation phase to finding product-market fit. 14 different revenue models are presented, together with a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months.
Dave Parker

7. Growth Hacker Marketing

How to use a creative hacker mindset together with your product to grow beyond what’s possible in traditional marketing channels. 'A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising'.
Ryan Holiday

8. Hacking Growth

How to grow your startup - using 100s of proven tips to hack growth - from the most successful startups of all time like Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb.
Sean Ellis

9. Hooked: How to build habit-forming products

The formula of building a habit-forming product. How to engineer your product in a way that makes people crazy about using it. And do it over and over again.
Nir Eyal