Hacking Growth

Hacking Growth presents methods for growing from Product Market Fit to virality through creative growth tactics. While it provides many examples of companies successfully executing 'growth hacks', it doesn't succeed in convincing one that there is a blueprint for it. Clearly the biggest requirement for these growth hacks is simply creativity.

The book provides many examples of companies successfully 'hacking growth', such as Airbnb crossposting on craigslist, or Hotmail embedding links for users to sign up in their emails. These hacks are industry specific and not necessarily repeatable broadly.

One of the biggest takeaways was that it's necessary to have technical folks embedded on these teams. Technical contributors have the ability to actually ship changes, experiment on the product, such as for onboarding, usage patterns, dark patterns, etc. These sorts of changes can have a massive impact on revenue.

Ellis and Brown try to convince the user that there is a repeatable blueprint for this sort of team. While I agree that it's useful to have growth teams, I don't think building these teams can be done in a vacuum. Rather, this team would need to have broad access to the different business units: marketing, sales, success, engineering, etc. and have buy-in from leadership.

Thus, while establishing that this sort of team can be beneficial for teams, it struggles to give readers actual ways to spur growth rather than various examples of how other teams have done it.