Hacking Growth breaks down the process behind the fast growth journeys of unicorns like Facebook, Dropbox, and Uber.

Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown present a systematic approach to growth hacking - a data-driven, experiment-focused method that helps businesses accelerate:

• user acquisition 🪝

• retention ♻️

• revenue 💰

The book provides a step-by-step framework that any company, regardless of industry, can use to achieve sustainable growth. Saying goodbye to traditional marketing.

Successful growth hacking starts with a cross-functional Growth Team consisting of marketers, product managers, engineers, and data analysts.

Led by a Growth Lead, the team runs high-tempo experiments focused on improving key business metrics across the entire customer journey.

Growth is only possible if the product is something users can’t live without.

The Must-Have Survey helps determine customer attachment to the product and whether it solves a critical pain point.

Similar to the famous Product-Market-Fit Survey for B2B SaaS by Superhuman - How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman? A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed.

You could also analyze what people say about your product in customer feedback surveys, support chat like Intercom, product demos, or on comparison sites like G2.

If the product isn’t a must-have yet, the number one priority should be iterating until reaching product-market fit (PMF).

Another great sign of PMF is user telling others about you product organically. For example:

• Getting tagged in organic posts on social media

• Attributing new demos to existing customers referring others Being shared in internal Slack channels amongst your ICP

What you want to do next, is use Growth Hacking to fuel the Product Market Fit that is already happening. To get outsized growth returns.

You do that by pulling growth levers - key inputs that drive expansion. And every business has unique growth levers. To pull them, you first have to know which they are. And use them to set your North Star metric.

Example of North star metric: For my B2B SaaS Univid, the North Star metric is the number of events on the platform. As it has been proven to feed virality.

Example of growth levers: Amazon’s levers include (1) product selection, (2) conversion rate, and (3) traffic acquisition.

Understanding these levers helps prioritize the experiments that yield the biggest impact for your business.

Growth hacking relies on a test-and-learn mindset, continuously running A/B tests and data-driven experiments.

The best teams rapidly test ideas and either (A) discard what doesn’t work, or (B) scale what does work.

Insights from analytics -> new experiment ideas -> continuous growth loop.

A growth experiment of 5 days on TikTok as growth channel, with over 120K views

Growth doesn’t just come from new customers. Retention and monetization are just as important.

Companies should optimize every stage of the funnel:

• Acquisition: Find the best-performing channels to acquire new customers.

  • KPIs: CAC, # customers.

• Activation: Ensure users quickly experience the product’s core value.

  • KPIs: Product Engagement, Time-to-Value.

• Retention: Reduce churn by keeping users engaged.

  • KPIs: NRR, Churn Rate.

• Revenue: Experiment with pricing and upsells to maximize lifetime value.

  • KPIs: Expansion MRR, LTV.

• Growth hacking is a repeatable process, not a one-time trick. But first, you need to find PMF and have a product that people NEED.

• Experiment with high velocity, make decision based on data and find your growth levers to be able to prioritize experiments.

• Sustainable growth comes from improving retention and monetization. Not just acquiring new users.

• A well-structured Growth Team - across functions and able to experiment with high velocity execution is critical to outpace competitors.

Need cheat codes to grow your SaaS in 2025?

The startup founder's playbook to hack growth on Reddit. Proven tactics to:

• ✅ Find high intent buyers for your SaaS
• ✅ Get large exposure to relevant prospects
• ✅ Show up in AI search and Google without SEO
• ✅ Get deal flow from Reddit

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