Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

spending on online ads in the US has doubled since 2010,1 and what’s more, in the US, Canada, and Western Europe at least, the growth of the Web audience is slowing, which essentially means companies are spending (and will continue to spend) more money to chase fewer potential customers.2

One of the cardinal rules of growth hacking is that you must not move into the high-tempo growth experimentation push until you know your product is must-have, why it’s must-have, and to whom it is a must-have: in other words, what is its core value, to which customers, and why.

How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow? a) Very disappointed b) Somewhat disappointed c) Not disappointed (it really isn’t that useful) d) N/A—I no longer use it

through a technique called cohort analysis. This allows you to probe more deeply into your data to make discoveries about why those who are staying are doing so—and why others are not.

in-depth analysis of customer churn (meaning identifying those who recently abandoned the product)

While creating a must-have product alone is not sufficient for breakout success, it is the baseline requirement for rapid and sustainable growth. Of course, building a must-have product isn’t easy, and one result is that too often those launching new businesses or products put the cart before the horse, pouring resources and staff into trying to dr

The first phase of work in scaling up your acquisition of customers should be devoted to achieving two additional types of fit: language/market fit, which is how well the way you describe the benefits of your product resonates with your target audience, and channel/product fit, which describes how effective the marketing channels are that you’ve se

The growth hacking process is designed to help discover the most cost-effective ways to acquire new customers—and then optimize those efforts to drive growth.

We advised earlier that you should not launch into a full-court press for large-scale customer acquisition until you’ve achieved product/market fit—i.e.,