If you’ve ever poured weeks into a marketing campaign only to watch it flop, you’re not alone. I’ve been there too; late nights tweaking messaging, second-guessing channel choices, and praying the results justify the spend.
That frustration is exactly why “growth hacking” has become the buzzword on every marketer’s feed. It’s become the go-to approach for early-stage startups and growing businesses that need traction fast. But what exactly is growth hacking?
Growth hacking is a marketing strategy that focuses on rapid experimentation across digital channels to identify the most effective ways to grow a business. It combines marketing, data, and product development to drive user acquisition, engagement, and retention without relying on traditional advertising.
To make that happen, growth marketers rely on a mix of strategies, tactics, and tools, such as marketing analytics software, A/B testing tools, and marketing automation platforms, to measure experiments, test ideas quickly, and scale what works.
In this article, I’ll unpack how growth hacking tackles marketers’ biggest pain points, share actionable growth hacking strategies you can use right away, and show how the right software stack accelerates sustainable growth.
When you strip away the hype, growth hacking is a way of working born out of startup constraints. Coined by Sean Ellis, it’s an experiment-driven approach that blends speed, data, creativity, and cross-functional skills. Here’s what sets it apart:
Once you understand these characteristics, the contrast with traditional marketing becomes clear.
Traditional marketing has always been about planning and execution. Teams build annual or quarterly campaigns, allocate big budgets, and focus on metrics like impressions, awareness, or market share. This model works for established brands with time and money to spare, but it leaves little room for rapid iteration or scrappy testing.
Growth hacking, as we saw earlier, emerged as a response to those limits. Early-stage startups didn’t have the budget for TV spots or months-long campaigns, they needed fast, scalable ways to acquire and retain users. That urgency created a new playbook. Growth hackers are relentlessly analytical, using data to validate every decision and focusing on a single “one metric that matters” at each stage of growth.
Here’s a clear comparison of the two approaches:
| Traditional marketing | Growth hacking marketing |
| Campaign-based with fixed timelines | Continuous, iterative experiments |
| Focus on brand awareness and marketing share | Focus on rapid, measurable user or revenue growth |
| Big budget and dedicated teams | Resource-light, cross-functional teams |
| Relies on established channels like PR, ads, and events | Explores unconventional and rapidly growing new channels and product tweaks |
Both traditional marketing and growth hacking ultimately care about customer acquisition, retention, and revenue. The difference is that growth hacking treats those metrics as the immediate success criteria for each experiment, while traditional marketing often measures them at the campaign or brand level over longer timeframes.
Once you understand the key characteristics of growth hacking, the next step is knowing how to structure your efforts. Frameworks give growth teams a repeatable way to plan, measure, and optimize experiments. The most widely used is the AARRR funnel, but there are a few others worth knowing.
Created in 2007 by entrepreneur and investor Dave McClure, the AARRR framework breaks a customer’s journey into five stages:
To make this framework actionable, you can map a few key metrics to each stage of the funnel, for example, website visits for acquisition, onboarding completion for activation, churn rate for retention, referral sign-ups for referral, and revenue per user for revenue.
Here are some common (but not exhaustive) metrics growth hackers track at each stage of the AARRR funnel; your own metrics will depend on your product and goals.
| Stages | Metrics |
| Acquisition | Website visits, signups, cost per acquisition (CPA), click-through rate (CTR), ad-to-site conversion rate, organic search traffic, content downloads |
| Activation | Account creation, onboarding completion, first key action taken (e.g., first file uploaded, first project created), time-to-value, feature adoption rate, % of users reaching “aha” moment |
| Retention | Daily/monthly active users (DAU/MAU), churn rate, session frequency, repeat purchases, subscription renewal rate, average days between sessions, cohort retention |
| Referral | Invites sent, referral signups, social shares, viral coefficient, net promoter score (NPS), % of users sharing content, number of referral codes redeemed |
| Revenue | Average revenue per user (ARPU), conversion rate, upsells/cross-sells, customer lifetime value (CLV), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average order value (AOV), trial-to-paid conversion |
By focusing on one or two “one metrics that matter” (OMTM) per stage, you can pinpoint bottlenecks and run experiments with measurable impact.
While AARRR is the most famous, growth hackers often borrow from other models to structure and prioritize their work. These frameworks help teams think beyond a linear funnel and turn experimentation into a repeatable process
Instead of treating growth as a straight funnel, loops focus on self-reinforcing cycles that feed back into acquisition. Think of referral programs, user-generated content, or marketplace listings where each new user brings in more users. Loops are powerful because they compound over time rather than starting from zero with each campaign.
This is the single, guiding metric that reflects the core value you deliver to users. It keeps everyone, product, marketing, and engineering, aligned on what “success” means. For a streaming platform, it might be “hours watched per user per month,” while for a SaaS tool, it might be “active projects created.”
Growth teams generate dozens of test ideas; ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) is a simple scoring system to decide which experiments to run first. Each idea gets rated on its potential impact, your confidence in that impact, and how easy it is to execute; the higher the score, the sooner it gets tested.
Frameworks like AARRR show where to focus, but strategies show how to move the needle. Growth hacking strategies are concrete tactics you can adapt and test to drive rapid, scalable results. Below are 10 widely used approaches, each with a quick explanation of why it works and how you might apply it.
Lower the barrier to entry by letting users experience your product’s value before they pay. This accelerates user acquisition and builds a pipeline for paid conversions. SaaS leaders like Slack and Dropbox used this model to create massive user bases before monetizing.
Referral programs and other reward-based programs are a great way to scale business growth. Offer incentives to both referrers and invitees, like credits, discounts, or exclusive features. Dropbox’s famous “get free storage for each referral” program is a classic example of a viral loop that compounded growth.
Partner with credible voices whose audiences align with your product. Micro-influencers often deliver higher engagement and trust at lower cost than big names. Cluely, for example, built its brand by hiring content creators and influencers from the get-go, using them to produce viral short-form content that drives reach and awareness. This tactic can amplify reach and social proof much more quickly than many traditional channels.
Create buzz by restricting access. Invite-only signups, waitlists, or limited beta releases can generate urgency and scarcity. Gmail, Clubhouse, and ChatGPT all used this approach to spark early interest and accelerate adoption.
Content hacking is another way to scale growth. Basically, it's a combination of growth hacking and content marketing efforts. By improving your content marketing game, you can increase the traffic to your website and, as a result, grow your user base.
Treat content like an experiment. Test different formats (videos, carousels, interactive tools), repurpose high-performing pieces across channels, and use SEO to drive organic traffic. This approach turns content into a steady acquisition engine.
Gamifying the user experience is another way to boost growth. With gamification, every interaction will feel like an achievement, and your customers will actually enjoy engaging with your products. Reddit is a great example: it uses upvotes, karma points, badges, and community awards to reward contributions and signal status. These game-like mechanics keep users posting, commenting, and returning, which in turn drives deeper engagement and organic growth.
Go where your audience already congregates and add value there instead of trying to pull everyone to you first. Community can take several forms: a community of product (like GitHub or Salesforce Trailblazers), community as the product (Stack Overflow, Discord), community of practice (professional Slack groups, HubSpot Academy), or community of interests (topic-based subreddits). Showing up authentically in these spaces can drive early traction and brand advocacy.
Bake growth loops directly into your product so every new user becomes a potential acquisition channel. Collaboration features, in-app sharing, or built-in referral mechanisms encourage organic spread without extra marketing spend. Canva’s collaborative design sharing and Zapier/Make’s freemium integrations are classic examples of product-led growth features in action.
Every time a Canva user shares a design, the recipient is prompted to log in or create an account, exposing new users to real value and speeding up activation. Zapier and Make’s free tiers let people test integrations, which often leads to team-wide adoption and exposure to connected apps. These built-in loops reduce acquisition costs and scale growth sustainably.
Collaborate with complementary brands or creators to tap into each other’s audiences. This can mean joint webinars, bundled offers, integrated features, or even newsletter swaps.
Brands partner with high-reach newsletters like Morning Brew to access its demographic of young professionals interested in business and tech. Partnerships give instant exposure to thousands of warm, highly relevant potential customers at minimal cost while boosting brand credibility through association.
Use behavioral data to retarget engaged visitors or personalize onboarding, emails, and offers. This increases conversions and maximizes the ROI of your acquisition efforts. Userpilot, for example, segments its users and tailors onboarding flows and in-app messages to help each segment reach value faster.
Personalized experiences move users from curiosity to “aha” moment more quickly and keep them engaged longer. Retargeting nudges prospects who’ve already shown interest, making acquisition spend more efficient and lifting conversion rates across the funnel.
Knowing these strategies is one thing; picking the right ones is what drives results. A tactic that fuels explosive growth for a D2C e-commerce brand may fall flat for a B2B SaaS company, so always test and adapt to your audience, funnel stage, and resources.
Look at your funnel. Where are you leaking the most opportunity: getting traffic but no sign-ups (acquisition), sign-ups but no engagement (activation), lots of engagement but poor retention? Your first growth hacks should target the weakest stage, not the flashiest tactic.
Ask yourself: How do people naturally experience value in my product?
Where does your audience spend time and what do they trust? A niche subreddit? A trade association? A Discord server? Pick tactics that meet them there instead of trying to drag them to a new channel. For a young consumer audience, FOMO tactics or gamification may resonate. For an enterprise buyer, content hacking, partnerships, or retargeting might be safer bets.
Once you have a list of ideas, score them quickly on potential impact and ease of implementation. Start with one or two high-impact, low-effort experiments. Don’t run five new tactics at once; get a clean read on what works.
Run the smallest version of a tactic that can still generate a signal like a simple referral incentive for one week, a single webinar with a partner, or a small gamified challenge in your app. Watch your “one metric that matters” for that stage. If it moves, scale it. If not, drop it and try the next.
The bottomline is that the right growth hack is the one that fits your product, your funnel stage, and your audience’s behaviour. By diagnosing where you’re stuck and picking a tactic that directly addresses that bottleneck, you turn a grab-bag of ideas into a focused growth engine.
Now, as you know what growth hacking is and how to enable it, let’s take a look at the big-name companies that have done it right!
Dropbox is a perfect growth hacking case study. They used growth hacking practices to implement an automated referral program that operated on the following idea - the more friends you refer, the more free space you get. This growth hacking method has helped Dropbox to become a multi-billion dollar company with more than 700 million users.
Growth hacking put another giant, Airbnb, on the map. The founders of Airbnb initially used Craigslist, a platform with millions of users, to market to people searching for affordable accommodation. This growth hacking strategy succeeded as Airbnb skyrocketed into becoming one of the top app for affordable accommodation.
In 2010, following three months of its original launch, Pinterest had acquired only 3,000 users. To scale growth, the founders started the “Pin It Forward” campaign in which users would make a pinboard and get more invites by getting other users to create their pinboards. The campaign resulted in Pinterest’s rapid take-off, and now the platform has over 570 million monthly active users.
Every outgoing email included a tiny footer — “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.” That simple, zero-cost message reached millions through users’ own networks and drove explosive signups, making Hotmail one of the earliest viral email services.
LinkedIn embedded growth into its product by prompting users to invite their email contacts and by making profiles public-by-default, so profiles ranked in Google search. Those loops powered its jump to 100M+ users without heavy advertising spend.
Before it was mainstream, PayPal paid people to join and refer friends ($10 per referral). This direct incentive seeded its user base and drove viral adoption on eBay, where it became the default payment method.
Robinhood built a waitlist system for its commission-free trading app. Users could move up the queue by inviting friends, turning the signup process itself into a viral loop that created massive buzz before launch.
G2 fueled its growth by turning user reviews into both content and distribution. By encouraging verified users to leave reviews and making those reviews indexable in Google search, G2 built tens of thousands of software product pages. This created a self-reinforcing loop: more reviews led to higher rankings, bringing in more software buyers, which brought in more vendors to G2 and again leading to more reviews from their customers and so on. It’s a prime example of product-driven content growth.
Looking at how Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Hotmail, Ahrefs, G2, and Clay grew is inspiring but behind every tactic is a person (or team) thinking like a growth hacker. Being a growth hacker isn’t about copying tricks; Ellis notes that a growth hacker is “a person whose true north is growth”.
A growth hacker isn’t defined by a job title. They can be a project engineer, an entrepreneur, or a marketer, anyone who focuses solely on strategies to grow a business. What matters most is the way they think. Every decision a growth hacker makes is informed by one question: Will this drive growth? Budgets, campaigns, and even conversions come second to the main objective: sustainable growth.
The job of a growth hacker is to brainstorm innovative growth strategies. Besides, growth hackers' responsibilities include the following:
This mix of creativity, analysis, and execution requires a unique skillset that can be broken down into three levels: fundamental, generalistic, and specialist.
A successful growth hacker combines all three levels, pairing a growth-first mindset with the right mix of fundamental, generalist, and specialist skills to continually discover and scale new opportunities.
Knowing the mindset, frameworks, and strategies behind growth hacking is one thing. Actually running dozens of tests, tracking results, and scaling the winners requires a solid toolkit. The right tools help you move faster, see what’s working, and double down without burning out your team.
You can’t grow what you don’t measure. Analytics platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Google Analytics 4 let you instrument key actions, build funnels, and monitor your “one metric that matters” in near real time. They’re essential for spotting bottlenecks in acquisition, activation, and retention.
To run rapid experiments you need an easy way to test variations. Tools such as Optimizely, VWO, and LaunchDarkly and other CRO software lets you split-test landing pages, features, and messaging without heavy developer work. This speeds up your testing cycle dramatically.
Automating outreach and nurturing saves time and keeps prospects moving through your funnel. HubSpot, Customer.io, Mailchimp, and Klaviyo are popular popular options for sending segmented, behavior-triggered emails and drip campaigns.
If content hacking is part of your strategy, SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo help you find high-impact topics, monitor keyword performance, and track competitors’ backlinks to drive organic traffic.
Growth teams are cross-functional, so keeping ideas and tests organized is key. Project management tools like Notion, Airtable, and Trello make it easy to maintain an experiment backlog, Iscore your ideas, and track results across marketing, product, and engineering.
Now, you don’t need every tool on this list. The key is to pick the handful that fit your metrics, strategy, and stage of growth.
If you’re not sure where to start, platforms like G2 let you quickly compare the top marketing, analytics, and experimentation tools in each category based on real user reviews, so you spend less time looking for tools and more time running growth experiments.
If I have to leave you with one thought, it is that growth hacking isn’t a checklist of clever tricks; it’s a muscle you build. The real power isn’t in copying Dropbox’s referral loop or Airbnb’s platform piggybacking; it’s in training yourself to see unconventional paths to growth inside your own product and market. Every company’s “hack” looks different because every audience, funnel, and moment is different.
The unique advantage you have over the big case studies is proximity: you’re closer to your users, your data, and your experiments than a massive marketing team at an established brand. That intimacy makes it easier to notice small opportunities and test bold ideas quickly. If you build a habit of framing every marketing, product, and partnership idea as an experiment and measuring it against one clear growth metric, you’ll develop your own playbook of scalable wins and maybe be the next example people cite when they talk about growth hacking done right.
Want to take the next step? Check out G2’s guide to go-to-market strategy
for more ways to plan, launch, and scale your experiments with a structured approach.
This article was originally published in 2020 and has been updated with new information.
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