What is growth hacking?

The term growth hacking was coined by Sean Ellis in his 2010 article “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup”.

His definition is:

A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth

Their role is to find scaleable, repeatable ways to grow the businesses through fast learning cycles and trying new ideas alongside industry standard ones. The activities include marketing and product changes and optimisations.

Sean notes that this activity is only valuable once a company has found product market fit and has a profitable business model.

We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it in volume

As an example, early on in Airbnb’s growth they added a button that automatically posted the listing to Craigslist. This is both a technical exercise and a marketing exercise, as listing on another platform helped the discoverability and share-ability of the platform.

From a strategic point of view growth at all costs matters when the win condition for a company is large market share (and overcoming critical mass). For example two sided marketplaces need enough users on both sides to make the business model work.