Get up to speed with "Growth Hacking"

If you’re based in the UK, you may not have heard about “growth hacking”, but the chances are you’re going to pretty soon. “ Growth Hacking”, a term coined by Sean Ellis, emerged in Silicone Valley in around 2006 and has gradually spread around the world. It is an approach to growth which has fuelled the success of the likes of Facebook, eBay, Pinterest, Uber and AirBnB, to name just a few. It is also widely practiced around Europe, and is just starting to bubble up in the UK — which has been slower to adopt.

Growth hacking offers a low budget, alternative approach to traditional big bang marketing campaigns. It adopts many of the lean practices common in software and product development — using data to drive decision making and running experiments. It encourages a cross-functional approach, advocating a growth team of marketers, product managers, engineers, designers and analysts which collectively take ownership for growth across the funnel.

I discovered the concept of growth hacking about 18 months ago, and it fundamentally altered my world view. I was simply blown away by the potential. I have since been more than mildly obsessed with the concept, and have spent a lot of time reading about it. To that end I’ve gathered together some of the most helpful material I’ve come across, the combination of which has helped me both to learn how to practice growth and how to create growth teams and processes.

If you have come across growth hacking and dismissed it as a set of slightly grubby, underhand tactics, read on. These posts challenge head on that perception of growth hacking, explaining that real growth hacking is actually about rigorous, scientific process, not a single silver bullet. Similarly, if you think growth hacking, or growth marketing, is simply about running tests to increase traffic, you’ll find there’s much more to it than that — and MUCH greater potential for growth!

Read the full post on my blog on Medium.