How to get started with growth hacking

To get started with growth hacking, first make sure people actually want your product. Then pick one narrow audience and one growth metric, map your funnel with the AARRR model, and run small, cheap experiments at the stage where you lose the most people. Keep what works, drop what doesn't and repeat.

What is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is a subfield of marketing focused on the rapid growth of a company. It is popular with startups because they need a lot of growth on a small budget.

Sean Ellis coined the term in a blog post called "Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup" on 26 July 2010. He described a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth." Everything a growth hacker does is judged by its effect on scalable growth.

Growth hacking is less a bag of tricks than a working habit: form a hypothesis, test it quickly, measure the result and scale only what works.

What does a growth hacker do?

A growth hacker focuses on getting and keeping customers with creative, low-cost methods. The role is not the same as a traditional marketer. Growth teams often combine marketers, developers, engineers and product managers, and anyone who is curious and good with data can do the work.

A typical growth hacker:

• sets growth goals for the business and its customer base
• comes up with hypotheses and ranks them by likely impact and effort
• designs and runs experiments, often several at once
• analyses the results to find out what works and what doesn't
• shares what they learn so the rest of the company can use it

How does growth hacking work?

Growth hackers try to understand why a company grows and how to make that growth happen on purpose. Many use the pirate funnel, also called AARRR or pirate metrics. Dave McClure presented it in a talk called "Startup Metrics for Pirates" at Ignite Seattle in 2007. The name comes from the way the letters sound when read aloud.

The five stages, with the question to ask at each one:

1. Acquisition: how do potential customers find us?
2. Activation: do they get a good first experience and reach the moment where the product proves its value?
3. Retention: do they come back and keep using it?
4. Referral: do they tell colleagues and friends about us?
5. Revenue: do they become paying customers?

Some teams add Awareness as an extra first stage, which turns the model into AAARRR. Whatever version you use, measure each stage. The stage where most people drop off is usually where your next experiment should go.

How do you start growth hacking?

1. Build a product people want

Don't spend a lot of money bringing a product to market only to find that nobody wants it. Talk to potential customers about their problems and collect as much feedback as you can.

Get a first version out quickly. A minimum viable product lets you learn from real users before you build everything. Then keep improving it based on what you learn. Read more about the lean startup methodology.

2. Don't target everybody

Start with a small niche: the innovators and early adopters who feel the problem most. They need to use and like your product before the majority will follow.

Write down who benefits most from your product. Think of a real person, with a job title, a company size and a problem, and shape your message for them. If they feel the product was made for them, they are more likely to recommend it in their community. For B2B, LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you find these people by job function, seniority and company.

3. Pick one metric that matters

Choose a single metric for this stage of your company, such as activated trial users per week or demo requests. One clear number keeps experiments focused and makes results easy to compare.

4. Run experiments and measure them

Growth hacking is about running tests and getting the product in front of customers quickly. For each experiment, write down the hypothesis, the change, the metric and the result. A/B testing is the most common method: show two versions to comparable groups and keep the winner. Our guide to split testing explains how to set up a fair test.

5. Keep improving

Update the product regularly and keep gathering feedback. Test the details, from onboarding emails to the pricing page, so the product keeps getting better for the people using it.

Which growth hacking strategies work?

Most growth hacking tactics fall into three groups.

Content marketing. A low-cost way to tell people your product exists. Publish a regular blog, create posts for social media, write a guide or whitepaper, start a podcast or work with relevant creators and reviewers.

Product marketing. Build growth into the product itself. Examples are an invite-only launch that creates demand, an onboarding flow that feels rewarding to complete, and a referral incentive that rewards both sides. Dropbox famously gave users extra storage for referring friends.

Advertising. Paid social and pay-per-click ads let you test messages and audiences quickly. Start small, measure cost per activated user rather than cost per click, and scale what pays back.

Which tools help you start?

You don't need many tools to start. These cover the basics:

• Analytics: Google Analytics shows where visitors come from and what they do. Google's free dashboard tool, called Looker Studio from 2022 until it went back to its original name Data Studio in April 2026, turns that data into reports.
• Behaviour insights: heatmaps and session recordings show where people get stuck. Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and new users sign up through Contentsquare.
• Prospecting: LinkedIn Sales Navigator for finding and saving B2B leads.
• Automation: Zapier moves data between apps that don't integrate natively. Its site lists more than 9,000 apps.

Be careful with LinkedIn automation. LinkedIn's help center says it does not permit third-party software that scrapes the site or automates activity, and that such tools violate its User Agreement. Accounts using them can be restricted or closed.

Where to go next

Once you have your first experiments running, read our B2B growth hacking strategies and growth hacking strategies for startups, listen to the best growth hacking podcasts, or browse growth marketing tools and marketing courses.