Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, published by Currency in 2017, is a guide to building a growth process inside a company. Ellis coined the term growth hacker in 2010 after leading early growth at Dropbox and other startups, and Brown is a product and growth leader who co-founded the GrowthHackers community with him. The book turns the methods used at companies such as Airbnb, Facebook, Uber and Dropbox into a system any team can run.
What is Hacking Growth about?
The authors argue that classic marketing departments are poorly set up for software products. Growth happens across the whole customer journey, from the first visit to the hundredth purchase, and no single department owns all of it. Their answer is a growth team: a small, cross-functional group of product, engineering, data and marketing people with the authority to test changes anywhere.
Part one sets the foundations. Before chasing growth, check that the product is a must-have; Ellis’s well-known test asks users how disappointed they would be if the product disappeared. Then find the aha moment, the point where new users first feel the value, and pick a north star metric that reflects that value. Next comes the growth process itself: a cycle of analysing data, generating ideas, ranking them with a simple scoring system, running tests and starting again, at a high and steady tempo.
Part two applies the method to each stage of the funnel: acquiring customers, activating them, keeping them and earning more from them, with a closing chapter on keeping the growth engine running as a company matures. Each chapter mixes company stories with specific experiment ideas.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Fix the product before the funnel. If fewer than a large share of active users would be very disappointed to lose your product, more traffic will only leak away.
- Find the aha moment. Study the users who stay and work out what they did early on. Then redesign the first session so everyone gets there faster.
- Choose one north star. Nights booked, messages sent or files shared: pick the number that shows customers getting value, and align the team around it.
- Test fast and keep testing. A steady cadence of small experiments, reviewed weekly, beats a few big launches a year.
- Remember retention. Keeping customers is cheaper than finding new ones, and every gain in retention lifts every other number.
Who should read Hacking Growth?
It suits startups that already have users and early signs of fit and want to grow in a disciplined way: SaaS companies, consumer apps, marketplaces and online shops. Product managers, marketers and engineers on growth teams will use it as a working manual. Founders planning their first growth hire will learn what to ask for.
Pre-launch founders and companies with very few users can skip it for now, since experiments need traffic to give clear answers.
How do you put Hacking Growth to work this week?
- Send a short survey to active users asking how they would feel if they could no longer use your product, and count the share who say very disappointed.
- Look at your retained users and list the first three actions they took. Define your aha moment from that pattern.
- Hold a 45-minute growth meeting: collect ten experiment ideas, score them on impact, confidence and ease, and launch the top one.
If you are still shaping the business model behind your growth tests, the free Business Model Canvas generator on Fe/male Switch lays it out on one page.
Where does Hacking Growth fall short?
The examples come almost entirely from well-funded US tech companies with millions of users, so small startups will find the testing volume hard to copy. The book also says little about the ethical line between persuasion and manipulation, or about growth tactics that annoy customers. Its process can reward short-term gains in clicks over long-term brand. Read Hooked for the product psychology behind repeat use and Traction for picking channels when you are still small.