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

Growth teams should bring together staff who have a deep understanding of the strategy and business goals, those with the expertise to conduct data analysis, and those with the engineering chops to implement changes in the design, functionality, or marketing of the product and program experiments to test those changes.

For SaaS companies, particularly important junctures are the page or pages explaining the features and prices of different services or plan levels and pages promoting add-ons and upgrades.

And indeed, eBay determined that number of items sold is such an important metric for its growth that it designated gross merchandise volume (GMV) as the most important one to follow,8 or what’s commonly called in the growth hacking community the North Star metric.

The other is taking advantage of the enormous satisfaction people feel when they are in the brain state known as flow, a theory pioneered by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who showed that people get into this optimal state when they feel challenged just the right amount by a task they are engaged in; not so challenged as to feel frustrated,

Speed of testing alone isn’t the goal; scattershot experimentation is a sure way to waste time and effort, and that’s true even if you’re testing at high tempo. Growth hacking is not about throwing ideas against the wall as fast as you can to see what sticks, it’s about applying rapid experimentation to find and then optimize the most promising are

“By making it easier for shoppers to view and reorder previously purchased items, the number of people who make repeat purchases will increase by 20 percent.” Some teams may elect to state an expected gain in their hypothesis while others will not. The pro of doing so is that it gives the team a clear idea of what success looks like. If they’re exp

While single sign-on is more commonly used by companies offering consumer products, it can also work for B2B companies as well, as the growth team at Kissmetrics, a data analytics company, found when they tested using “Sign Up with Your Google Account” as the one and only call to action on their home page. There was no option to enter an email addr

We advise a prioritization method based on one devised by Brian Balfour, HubSpot’s former head of growth, who created a simple scheme for ranking channels according to a set of six factors: Cost—how much you expect to have to spend to run the experiment in question. Targeting—how easy it is to reach your intended audience and how specific you can b

Similarly, though it is hard to believe today, YouTube started as a video dating site, pivoting to be the home for all video online only once the founders saw that users weren’t only uploading video profiles to find dates, but rather sharing videos of all types.