What is Growth Hacking?

Most startups face a common challenge; they try to reach their target group, but they don’t have a budget to hold a large marketing campaign. The answer relies in growth hacking, which refers to advanced methods that can be applied to increase the speed of growth with higher revenues in the shortest possible time. In a startup, a growth hacker specializes in service growth through many marketing and development tactics.

The name has nothing to do with the commonly known hacking. To further explain this term, here are some examples of companies that have implemented Growth Hacking. In 1998, Hotmail had difficulty in reaching users through traditional marketing methods such as radio, television and newspapers, so it added a simple sentence (I love you) at the end of each message an existing user sends to others with a link to the Hotmail’s homepage.This simple sentence brought to Hotmail mail 12 million users in less than two years.

Twitter also used a creative way when they noticed that the site registration rate is good but visitors are not returning to it and that the visitors who returned to the website follow at least 10 people. They then required that the user chooses a number of users to follow them when registering.

Dropbox relied on the trick of increasing the customer's storage space for every friend you invite. "Bring a friend and get an extra 500 megabytes for both of you." That was why the registration rate increased to 60%.

YouTube’s embed video feature, where you can easily add any video on YouTube to your site, achieved a great spread for YouTube at the beginning.

PayPal paid $10 per person on site and $10 for each person you invite to sign up. All these tricks and creative ideas are used by companies to increase the number of users and increase their profits.

There is a difference between a growth hacker and a marketer. The marketer simply targets the audience and markets them a specific product, while the role and function of the growth hacker is the growth of the service. All of their decisions, strategies and methods are designed for one thing, service growth. This does not mean that the marketer does not help the service growth or cannot be performed. The difference is that the growth hacker is specialized and only dedicated to growth.

If you are interested in learning this method and strategy to apply it in your company, I recommend you this course on Udemy, this site also provides most of the tools used, and this article also has some helpful resources.