What is growth hacking? Definition and examples

Babak Nivi, co-founder of the Angel List site, published a blog post in 2013 entitled”The entrepreneurial age”. There, he developed a thesis suggesting the advent of the third industrial revolution and of an economic world led by Entrepreneurs.

Of course, marketing is no exception to the transformation of the economy: it has become more agile and more effective. We can identify three basic trends:

• An increasingly fierce competition since the number of businesses is increasing (the cost of creating a startup on average has increased from 5,000,000 dollars to 5,000 dollars in 10 years).
• Cheaper campaigns. As with the rest of the digital economy, marketing costs are essentially becoming variable and entry barriers are disappearing.
• More data. Digital technologies making it possible both to collect more but also to process more (you know, the famous “” movement”Big data”).

Moreover, most of these new entrepreneurs come from the world of computer development, where the hacker mindset prevails (”Hacker Mindset”). So, when it comes to marketing, this mindset is reflected in the campaigns that are carried out. All this has led to the emergence of a new discipline called “growth hacking”.

Growth hacking is above all a hacker mindset

Of course, growth hackers like to emphasize the originality of their position. However, growth hacking largely fulfills the functions of marketing by working on the product, price, promotion and distribution (The famous “4P”). Does this mean that growth hacking is just smoke and mirrors? No 😉

The main revolution in growth hacking is not to be found in Process or in the method but in the state of mind. The benefit of growth hacking is to find unconventional ways to respond to marketing problems — to hacker marketing.

This state of mind is based on three main principles:

1. Inventing without resources or permissions, the mission of the growth hacker

Creativity develops under duress. The hacker therefore knows how to “tinker”, “manage” to achieve his goals. Thus, the marketer/hacker must know how to find new niches, growth drivers. It's probably the most intangible part of the discipline.
However, there is always a reliable way to find new targets: ask yourself whom buy my product and when ? The answer to these two questions is generally a place (physical or virtual) where you will try to contact your target.

Example: AirBnB and Craigslist. This is probably one of the most emblematic examples of growth hacking. To generate traffic on their site, AirBnB established that it primarily frequented the Craigslist classifieds site. In order to divert some of the traffic, AirBnb engineers found an access point in the API and displayed AirBnb ads on Craigslist. (stream)

2. Doing it yourself, a foundation of growth hacking

One of the great strengths of this new marketing is that it relies on a very large number of tools that are easily available. With the advent of SaaS (software as a service), it has become easy to create a website, send email campaigns or even conduct an A/B test.
Therefore, the development of tailor-made software is no longer necessary and marketing can develop its own solutions without using an agency — thus gaining agility and saving a substantial part of the budget.

Example: Zapier is a SaaS that allows you to automate actions between several web services. For example, the sender of an email that arrives on Gmail can automatically be added as a lead in Pipedrive. See This article for a more complete example.

3. Spending smartly

One of the big myths about growth hacking is that it's supposed to be free. However, this is once again missing the very definition of the term which consists in doing things in an unconventional way — which does not necessarily mean on a zero budget!

Thus, the expense (advertising or other) is part of marketing but it still needs to be optimized. Again, it's about finding the right channel, trying to spend as little as possible or achieve an extraordinary conversion rate.

Example: the Eat24 teams, anxious not to spend too much on a media campaign, had the idea of placing the advertising budget on a pornographic site. Since advertising was much cheaper there, Eat24 was able to benefit from a much lower acquisition cost than the rest of the industry. (stream)

Growth hacking is putting the user at the center

The other major pillar of growth hacking is part of a more general trend in the entrepreneurial world to put the user at the center of concerns. It is what Nicolas Colin Call The alliance with the multitude — that is to say a company that chooses to be on the side of its customers rather than its suppliers or shareholders.

In this respect, the entrepreneurial approach to marketing is interesting, rather than the famous “4Ps”, the Framework The most used by startups is certainly the AARRR framework proposed by Dave McClure. It describes the different stages of the user's life: from acquisition to income through retention.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/irjgfW0BIrw

What's interesting is that rather than focusing on business goals, it focuses on user experience goals: making sure the customer is happy at every stage of their journey to maximize the conversion from one to the other until they create revenue.

It is also interesting that, from a business perspective, it is better to start at the middle of the process (retention/activation/recommendation) and then go to the ends (acquisition/income).

Putting the user at the center always seems obvious but in practice, doing so is always difficult. In fact, this involves making decisions that may be sub-optimal in terms of business but that improve the use of the product by the customer. All this therefore requires a certain radicality... and data!

Measuring user behavior

The latter are probably one of the major benefits of digital technology: measuring user behavior and drawing from it good quality and accurate data has become relatively easy. However, while most businesses collect it, you still need to know what to do with it.

As such, the Framework AARRR provides an interesting answer to the problem of data saturation. By organizing them into a conversion funnel, you can easily prioritize your actions between the various stages.

This new way of thinking, far from being “new marketing” is much more of an increase, an outgrowth of marketing. It is by no means a substitute. Of course, the temptation is strong, in the wake of the Framework AARRR, to offer numerous tools to replace traditional marketing. But fundamentally, growth hacking remains difficult to understand and certainly cannot be conceptualized only in the form of”Process”, tools and”Metrics”.

So how do you learn growth hacking?

Mainly by going through two phases:

1) Acculturation and theoretical foundations

2) Through experience, by doing (see This article of Alice Zagury for an example).

In Fine, in the term “growth hacking”, the most important part is not growth, it's hacking. Saying that a business should be obsessed with growth is self-evident. What business is not? The real added value of the growth hacker comes from this state of mind and this user obsession that allows him to find opportunities that are not on the radar of traditional marketing.

All of this is very similar to the behavior of an entrepreneur. Maybe we shouldn't talk about growth hacking but about entrepreneurial marketing 😉 😘

Read also: Startup: less reporting, more experiences!