30 Growth Hacking Tools Startups Actually Use

On average, it takes a startup between seven and ten years to become a full-fledged company. 

Sadly, less than half of startups will make it to their fourth year. 82% of these startups point to cash flow problems as the reason behind their startup’s failure.

That’s why startup founders are obsessed with growth hacking. Growth hackers deliver massive results through innovation, creativity, analytics, and having access to the right growth hacking tools.

In this blog post, I will be sharing with you 30 growth hacking tools tried and tested by successful startups. Many of them are either free or come with a free trial period so you can get your growth team to try them out.

Are you ready? Let’s begin.

Big Data Management growth hacking tools

Even if you’re running a startup, there’s an excellent chance that your growth hackers will be dealing with large amounts of complex data. Equipping them with Big Data management tools will not only make your growth team efficient collecting and analyzing data, but also prepare your startup to scale.

Apache Hadoop

Apache Hadoop is perhaps the most favorite Big Data management tool. This open-source, Java-based framework effectively stores and process massive data sets. It’s also powerful enough to handle concurrent tasks or jobs without you having to worry about hardware crashes and failures.

DataCleaner

As its name suggests, DataCleaner is a growth hacking tool that helps your growth team quickly clean up the data you’ve collected and organize them into well-structured data sets so that they are easier to interpret and analyze.

DataCleaner also provides you and your growth team a host of other services like data warehousing and management services. All their subscription plans offer a 30-day trial, which is more than enough time for your growth team to test.

SalesIntel

Other teams in your startups also turn to data to make crucial decisions regarding your startup’s marketing activities.

SalesIntel is a sales intelligence and relationship platform that helps reduce your startup’s sales cycle by providing your sales team with quality data about your target market. With this, they’ll be more able to find the right people to build relationships with, and convert into paying customers.

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a free data and business intelligence visualization tool. It automatically takes your data, big and small, organizes it, and present this visually the way you like so that you can offer them to your investors, board of directors, and employees.

What’s great about this growth hacking is that it also has a web connector that allows you to link to a database or API without requiring any programming. That means members from other teams in your startup can use this tool even if they are not as tech savvy as your growth team.

Pentaho

Pentaho is a data integration growth hacking tool that makes it easy for you to integrate other tools and resources used by the different teams in your startup.

This growth hacking tool is vital because not all tools and resources you are using “talk” very well with each other. It’s not uncommon that one tool or platform clashes with another, causing one—or both—tools to crash.

Pentaho serves as the bridge to make it possible to integrate all the tools you use so you can maximize the data they gather. At the same time, it addresses any barriers that cause your data to get blocked or corrupted.

Analytics growth hacking tools

As with other software stacks used by the different teams in your startups, analytics tools are perhaps among the most crucial. That’s because these tools give you a clear picture on how your growth hacking experiments are impacting your startup’s bottom line. These tools can even help your growth team find even more opportunities that you can use to accelerate your growth further.

Mopinion

Mopinion is a user feedback tool that allows you to collect feedback from your customers, but also help you analyze these feedback in real-time. The results are then presented to you and your growth team in a visual chart to make it easy to understand.

Since everything is presented to you in real-time, you and your teams can quickly take the necessary action to address any negative feedback you receive. That way, you’re able to address their concerns so that they won’t take their business elsewhere.

Mopinion also enables you to create feedback forms that you can send to visitors to your site that are not converting. Your growth team can then use these data as the basis for creating a growth hacking experiment to improve your conversion rates.

Qubole

Qubole is an analytics platform that’s specifically designed to work with Big Data. It efficiently amplifies and scales Big Data and organize it in a way that’s not only easy to understand but also small enough that it could be stored in Google, AWS or Azure cloud storage.

Although Qubole was designed for large enterprises, it’s a great growth hacking tool to include in your startup because it saves you the need to upgrade to a more powerful analytics tool as you scale.

Databox

Databox is a robust, yet simple to use, analytics platform that allows you to monitor your KPIs in over 50 different platforms in real-time. It comes with a Template Gallery, allowing your growth team to present the analytics it generates in a format your sales and marketing teams can use in their reports and presentations.

What’s great about Databox is that it allows you to view the analytics either on your desktop or through their mobile app. On top of that, it will notify you and your team if the analytics are showing that you’re not hitting your set benchmarks so that you can quickly address them.

Geckoboard

Geckoboard is a live TV dashboard that gives an entire department real-time analytics based on your set goals and KPIs. This format is excellent to help not just your growth experiments but also other business activities.

At the same time, it increases transparency within your startup. This is crucial if you want to foster a growth-oriented culture. When things are transparent, your employees that they’re able to trust what you tell them. In turn, it will encourage increased employee engagement and loyalty.

Datadog

While the first four analytics tools focus on tracking data related to your campaigns, Datadog monitors on metrics that affect the overall health of the servers you use in your startup.

This is crucial because it allows your growth team and IT team to quickly debug any issues in your servers to prevent them from crashing and your data from getting corrupted.

Customer acquisition growth hacking tools

The majority of growth hacks used by startups focus on getting more customers. Naturally, it makes sense to equip your growth team with tools that will help exponentially grow your customer base.

Colibri.io

Perhaps the most prominent challenge startups face when it comes to customer acquisition is the fact that not very many people know about them and their business because they’re new.

Colibri.io helps you find people that match your buyer persona, specifically those that are already in the process of looking for the products and services you offer. Since they are already willing to make a purchase, getting in front of them and providing them with the information that they are looking for increases the likelihood of them buying from you rather than your competitors.

Hello Bar

Hello Bar is a free lead generation tool that allows you to place a visible call-to-action (CTA) button right at the top of your website. Offering them precisely what they are looking for as soon as they come to your site helps you significantly increase your conversion rate.

OptinMonster Exit-Intent

The majority of startups tend to put their CTAs at the middle or bottom part of their blog post or articles. Unfortunately, not all of your visitors will get this far.

OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent can detect whether your site’s visitors are about to leave your page. When that happens, it displays a large message containing your content offer. That way, you’re able to grab their attention and still have the ability to convert them into leads.

LeadCrunch

LeadCrunch is a growth hacking tool that uses artificial intelligence to help you find pinpoint the customers and companies that are most likely going to buy your products or service.

It does this using a two-step process. First, it matches your current customer base with lookalikes online. After it gathers the information, it then ranks these leads so that you know who first to prioritize. So not only does your sales team have a list of high-quality leads, but know exactly who to reach out first to get immediate results.

HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing is a tool that’s often associated with inbound marketing strategies. Still, it is worth including in your stack of growth hacking tools because it’s a fantastic tool to build relationships with your customers. By doing this, your current customers will remain loyal to you and even be encouraged to bring in more customers to your business.

Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with social media channels to help you get in front of your customers where they hang out.

User Experience (UX) growth hacking tools

Your customer’s overall user experience is vital to the success of any growth hacking experiment. You need to make sure that your website is easy to use whether they view it on their desktops or mobile device.

Crazy Egg

Founded by Neil Patel, Crazy Egg is a web-based tracking application that gives you in-depth insights into your visitors’ behavior when they visit your website through their Heatmap feature. That way, you can see which sections of your site are getting the most attention from your visitors and which ones are ignored.

Crazy Egg’s Overlay tool gives you a breakdown not just on which links on your visitors are clicking on your page, but also which ones are getting the most clicks. Additionally, its Scrollmap feature gives you insight as to how far down your visitors scroll on a page before they exit.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a UX growth hacking tool that gives you heat maps to show which sections of your website that grabs your visitors’ attention most effectively.

What makes Mouseflow unique is that it records your visitors’ activity on a specific page on your website. By seeing exactly how your visitors interact with the content on your web pages, your growth team will know what specific areas on your site to adjust to improve your visitor’s experience.

ClickTale

In addition to providing heat maps and the number of clicks each of the links on your web page receives, Clicktale also provides insights on the drop off rate on the forms on your page. It also reports page errors that appear, where do they appear, and how often.

These insights are vital because they can point to your growth team possible reasons why your visitors are not converting so they can fix them.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)

Visual Website Optimizer is a growth hacking tool that provides your growth team an easy-to-use platform to conduct A/B testing.

What makes this tool powerful is that it provides your growth team with heatmaps and behavioral targeting tools. That way, your team gets a better insight on how each version will perform once it goes live.

Usability Hub

Usability Hub is an end-to-end testing platform that offers a host of testing tools to help your growth team not only find the best version of a landing page, web page, or form but also quickly detect potential design issues before they go live.

One of the most useful tools in its arsenal is its Five Second Test. We all know that it takes website visitors just 8 seconds to decide whether to stay or leave. Usability Hub’s Five Second Test helps optimize your landing pages so that it quickly makes a great impression to your visitors with seconds left to spare.

Revenue generation growth hacking tools

Generating revenue is the lifeblood of your startup. It’s what provides you with the cash flow to help keep your business running. It’s also what would get VCs and angel investors to open their checkbooks and provide your startup with the funding you need to scale and take it to the next level.

Masskom

Masskom is a free platform that helps gamify the overall selling experience of your sales team. By making their jobs more enjoyable, the productivity level of your sales team will increase. More sales mean more revenue for your startup.

Snip.ly

Snip.ly is a growth hacking tool that enables you to add a call-to-action with every link you share. That way, you can drive traffic to your website. More importantly, you can direct them to related ads, further encouraging them to click and convert.

Amplitude

To generate more sales, your growth team needs to stay updated with buying behaviors specific to your target market.

Amplitude is a platform that provides your growth team with insights on how your customers make their buying decisions.

On top of that, Amplitude also can help you segment your customers and leads based on where they are in your growth hacking funnel. Doing this will help you send the right information, increasing the likelihood for them to convert.

Totango

Totango is a growth hacking tool that helps you weed out potential customers from visitors who are only after getting free information. That way, your marketing team can pass highly qualified leads to your sales team for them to nurture and convert.

Fomo

Fomo is an online platform that allows you to quickly create and embed a widget on your landing pages to encourage more conversions.

The philosophy (and name) of this growth hacking tool is based on the known fact that people don’t want to be left out. When they see that they are missing out on something that everyone else is enjoying, it will entice them to make a purchase.

What’s great about this tool is that it’s not as intrusive as pop-up ads or messages. Instead, it gives visitors to your landing page a nudge now and then as they try to learn more about your products and services.

Project management growth hacking tools

Setting up a growth hacking experiment doesn’t take as much time as an inbound marketing strategy. However, it is still as complex—perhaps even more meticulous—to execute because of the components involved. It’s for this very reason why every growth hacking team should have a useful project management tool to use.

Asana

Asana is arguably the most widely used project management tool, even among growth hackers. Aside from the fact that it’s free to use up to 15 members, Asana gives your growth team a customizable platform that allows them to break down the tasks into different milestones, set deadlines, share files, and collaborate with each other effectively.

JIRA

JIRA is a project management platform that is specifically designed for software development teams and growth hackers.

In addition to providing your growth team with all the features found in most project management platforms, JIRA has an issue and bug tracking software to help your growth team immediately address them to prevent crashes, errors, and even hardware failure.

Slack

I know that Slack wasn’t designed to be a project management tool. However, I decided to include this in this list for several reasons.

For starters, you can create channels where you can invite certain members of your team. That way, those that are not part of a particular project won’t get access to sensitive and confidential information.

Another is its robust integration capabilities. That means that you and your team won’t have to keep on jumping from one app to another to get specific tasks done.

More importantly, it allows you to make group calls with your team so you can do quick sprint meetings about specific tasks to you need to complete.

Branch Messenger

Branch Messenger is a team collaborations platform designed for startups that employ remote workers.

Along with the standard project management features, Branch Messenger also gives your team the ability to view each others’ schedules. That way, they know exactly when someone would be available to communicate. It also provides team members the option to send reminders so that they can receive these the moment they go online.

ClickUp

Last, but certainly not the least, in our growth hacking tools list, is ClickUp.

This project management tool provides you and your team with a host of customizable features including views and statuses so that it fits your growth team’s needs. It also integrates with a host of different apps and tools.

However, perhaps its best feature is that it allows team members to track their time when working on a particular task. That way, you can make the necessary adjustments if there are any delays because of specific bottlenecks and barriers so that you and your team still meet the deadline.

Which of these growth hacking tools do you use for your startup? Did I miss a tool that’s worth including here? Share them in the comments below so I can check them out.