Growth hacking

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a method for growing a product or company quickly by running many low-cost experiments and keeping what the data proves. The term was coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis and became associated with early startups that grew without large marketing budgets. A growth hacker mixes marketing, product, data and light engineering skills, and measures every idea against one question: does it move a key metric?

It is not a bag of tricks. It is a repeatable process where hypotheses are ranked, tested for a short period, and either scaled or dropped.

How the growth hacking process works

• Define a north star metric, such as weekly active users or monthly recurring revenue.
• Collect ideas across the funnel from the team, customer feedback and analytics.
• Prioritise with a scoring model like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease).
• Run the experiment for a fixed duration, often one to two weeks, with a clear success threshold.
• Analyse and decide: scale the winners, document the losers, and feed the learnings into the next cycle.

A simple hypothesis reads: "If we shorten the signup form from six fields to three, signup conversion will rise by 15 percent."

The AARRR funnel

Growth experiments are usually organised around the "pirate metrics" model created by Dave McClure.

Growth hacking vs traditional marketing

Traditional marketing plans campaigns over months, with brand reach as a common goal. Growth hacking works in short cycles, ties every action to a measurable metric and often involves the product itself: a referral mechanic, a free tier, an in-product prompt. The two are complementary. Growth experiments find what works, and marketing scales it with a consistent brand.

Examples and common pitfalls

• Dropbox rewarded users with extra storage for each friend invited, turning customers into an acquisition channel.
• Many SaaS products offer a free tier or trial so that activation happens before any payment.

Typical mistakes include chasing vanity metrics such as page views, testing without enough traffic to reach a reliable result, and optimising acquisition while the product does not retain users. Growth works best after product-market fit, not before it.

Growth hacking at BeBranded

We apply the logic of growth hacking without the hype: define the metric, map the funnel, test one change at a time and keep the evidence. For clients, that means analysing behaviour with tools such as Hotjar, structuring leads in HubSpot and prioritising the experiments most likely to pay off. Find out how our team supports growth decisions on our Consulting service.