Growth Hacking

Dr. Rohit Kumar Sachan

Growth Hacking
also known as
‘Growth Marketing’.
 Growth hacking is a
subfield of marketing
focused on the rapid
growth of a company.
What is Growth Growth hacking is an
Hacking? umbrella
strategies
term for
focused
solely on growth.
• It is the use of resource-light and cost-effective digital marketing
tactics to help grow and retain an active user base, sell products and
gain exposure.
• Think ‘hacking’ in terms of life hacks – those little shortcuts that make
your life easier – rather than nasty bits of code that can ruin your
computer and your life.
• Growth hacking is most commonly associated with start-ups and
small businesses, i.e., those organizations that don’t have a huge
amount of cash to spare but need results quickly.
• However, it’s a scalable concept applicable to any online business
looking to maintain the growth and retention of an active user base.
Domains
Growth Hacking & Traditional Marketing
• Many people think of growth hacking and marketing as one and the same.
However, there are subtle yet important differences.
• Growth hacking is like marketing in that its ultimate aim is customer
acquisition or to encourage more people to use a particular product or
service. However, because of its origins within the start-up community, it
relies heavily on tactics that don’t involve spending massive budgets to
which larger businesses have access.
• Typically, growth hacking combines marketing, optimization and
developmental know-how to pull off automated marketing on a small
budget.
• For example, automated notification emails, simple sign-up forms or sign-
up driven homepages or streamlining onboarding for new customers.
What is a growth hacker?
• Someone whose profession is growth hacking is known as a ‘growth
hacker’.
• This term was first coined by Sean Ellis, founder and current chief executive
of GrowthHackers.com, who, among a wealth of other positions, was head
of growth at Dropbox.com.

• “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they

do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth...”

• “An effective growth hacker also needs to be disciplined to follow a growth

hacking process of prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company),
testing the ideas, and being analytical enough to know which tested
growth drivers to keep and which ones to cut. The faster this process can be
repeated, the more likely they’ll find scalable, repeatable ways to grow the
business.”
 A growth hacker is
someone who uses
creative, low-cost
Who is a Growth strategies to help
businesses acquire
Hacker? and retain
customers.
Growth Hacker
A growth hacker is someone who uses creative, low-cost strategies to help
businesses acquire and retain customers. Sometimes growth hackers are
also called growth marketers, but growth hackers are not simply marketers.
Anyone involved in a product or service, including product managers and
engineers, can be a growth hacker.

Growth hackers tend to be obsessive, curious and

analytical:
• Growth hackers focus solely on strategies related to
growing the business.
• They hypothesize, prioritize and test innovative
growth strategies.
• They analyze and test to see what’s working.
The ideal growth hacker knows how to set growth
priorities, identify channels for customer acquisition,
measure success, and scale growth.
Growth Hacking Funnel
Also known as the AAARRR funnel, it is one of the most widely used tools to bifurcate growth hacking strategies
based on different stages. These comprise the Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral
stages.
Famous growth hacking examples
Dropbox and their referral-program
AirBnB and their Craigslist-integration
PayPal and their eBay-bot
Hotmail ps I love you
How to Start with Growth Hacking?
Before you start, Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I have Product/Market-Fit?
If not, focus first on improving your product to have a sizeable audience that is enthusiastic about
your product. Growth hacking can’t fix a bad product.

2. Have I set up my analytics/Do I speak to customers regularly?

Without data/feedback, you can’t hack growth: You need to know what is slowing down your
growth and how best to improve it.

3. Do you have the skills/knowledge to set up some simple growth strategies?

Your business won’t grow from just analyzing data or coming up with strategies, because nobody
knows what will and will not work. You have to execute and grow from there.
References
• https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/growth-hacking/
• https://neilpatel.com/what-is-growth-hacking/