The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Air Bnb was the best-kept secret known of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pintrest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was My Space's sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn't stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.
So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn't explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies' extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking.
Yet despite the popularity of the method - whose practitioners include virtually all of today's hottest start-ups, to "traditional" companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft to the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who have visited the fast-growing community of GrowthHackers.com - there is a void of knowledge about what Growth Hacking is and how to implement it. This book is here to fill that void, walking readers step-by-step through the process of creating and executing a growth hacking strategy, and showing how it can be tailored to any team, product, or company of any shape or size.
Doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity, Hacking Growth involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration. But, the key difference is that it drives rapid growth by focusing on the maximizing the potential of each product by working on just the things that matter to customers: attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more.
An accessible and practical toolkit that that teams and companies in all industries can use to grow their customer base and increase market share, this is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.
Industry Reviews
"In an increasingly erratic business landscape where new competition can emerge overnight, customers' loyalties can shift unexpectedly, and markets are constantly being disrupted, finding growth solutions fast is crucial for survival. Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to this urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology for finding and optimizing new strategies to increase their market share and quickly."
-Eric Ries, bestselling author of The Lean Startup
"It used to be that designers and engineers were responsible for developing new products, data teams were responsible for number-crunching reports, and marketers were responsible for acquiring and monetizing as many customers as possible. But today's companies can't afford to be slowed down by organizational silos. Here, growth-hacking pioneers Ellis and Brown show how to break down those traditional barriers and marry powerful data analysis, technical know-how, and marketing savvy to quickly devise and test ways to fuel breakout growth."
-Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked
"Ellis and Brown have accomplished what we've been talking about for twelve years, which is to compile and organize an accurate view into the inner workings of an emerging discipline. Their wisdom (plus the anecdotes and stories) have rarely been discussed outside of a small circle of people, and they give real insight into how digital growth hacking is done at the highest levels. As all companies become digital, this is a must-read for anyone in business."
-James Currier, managing partner, NFX Guild
"There is nothing more important for any business than attracting users and customers to your products. The tools to do this in today's online-driven world are very different from the past. Hacking Growth will teach you how to think like a marketer of tomorrow. You will learn how to do deep data analysis, and how to think about developing features into your products that drive growth directly."
-Josh Elman, partner, Greylock Partners
"Marketers realize that marketing as we've known it will be replaced by growth hacking. So what is it, how do you do it, and why do you need to? Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis help you ask and answer those questions in this brilliant book, made for those new to the art and science on how to hack growth."
-Geoffrey Colon, Communications Designer at Microsoft and Author of Disruptive Marketing
"Two of the best marketers I know, Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis, have written a fun and accessible guidebook to growth hacking and marketing. If your mandate is to drive high leverage growth, then is book is your new best friend."
-Patrick Vlaskovits, New York Times Bestselling Author of Hustle and The Lean Entrepreneur
"Hacking Growth is the definitive guide to building authentic, sustainable, compounding growth for your company. If you want to know how proven growth practitioners at fast-growing companies do what they do-- pick up this book." --Annabell Satterfield, Growth Mentor, 500 Startups
"A terrific book [that] belongs up there with Geoffrey Moore, Eric Ries and Steve Blank's books as a fundamental part of the canon of StartUpLand" -- Jeff Bussgang, Harvard Business School Lecturer, and general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners
