Hacking Growth

How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

By: Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Narrated by: Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

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 Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest 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 MySpace’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, and it’s practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers.

Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers: attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more.

An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It 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.

Critic 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

“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. 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

Prtty great growth primer, just a bit redundant

Good points overall, but a bit long and redundant at times on some of the points. I'd recommend it to anyone new to growth, though.

Amazing Book!

What did you love best about Hacking Growth?

Just listened to Hacking Growth. Very well written and easy to follow. Narration by one of the authors, Morgan Brown was a great bonus. Recommend getting this book.

What other book might you compare Hacking Growth to and why?

Platform Revolution because it covers the same industry but better written.

What does Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Morgan has an easy to follow voice.

A must read for every startup

Because I consume 60-80 books per year, I typically judge a book by the notes I take. If I don't take a lot of notes, I didn't take away very much or the content didn't provoke many new ideas. Not only did I take lots of notes but I took away a laundry list of new ideas and concepts to test with our own startup. I'll be ordering the print version as well to keep as a desk reference. Well done, guys and thank you!

Jam Packed - No Fluff

This is the best Internet marketing boom I've read. It's full of wisdom and covers topics and ideas that you probably wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Highly recommend it.

How to grow a startup

Many books take a small idea, add an elaborate introduction, throw in anecdotes from multiple companies and fluff up what ought to be a one-pager into a 200 page book.

Not this one!

There is enough information here to read and re-read. This book might as well have been titled “How to grow a startup into a large, vibrant business”

Buy now and read. Read again every year.