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What it argues
Hacking Growth is Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown's guide to building a growth function — an organizationally distinct, cross-functional team focused on finding and exploiting opportunities to accelerate customer acquisition, retention, and revenue. Ellis coined the term "growth hacker" and led early growth at Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite. The book is his comprehensive account of the growth hacking methodology, including how to build the team, what its process should be, and how to apply it to each stage of the customer lifecycle.
The book's core methodology is the Growth Hacking Process: analyze data to identify opportunities, generate ideas for experiments, prioritize by impact and ease, run the experiments, and analyze results to determine what scales or kills the hypothesis. The process is designed to be continuous — the team runs experiments on a regular cadence and uses the accumulation of small wins to produce compounding growth rather than betting on a single large initiative.
What it gets right
- 1.
Growth hacking is a cross-functional team process, not a collection of growth tricks. The process — analyze, ideate, prioritize, test, learn — must be systematic and continuous.
- 2.
The AARRR framework organizes the customer lifecycle into five stages: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. Each stage has distinct metrics and typical leverage points.
- 3.
The North Star Metric is the single number that best captures whether customers are experiencing the core value of the product. It guides experiment prioritization across the entire lifecycle.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Sean Ellis is the entrepreneur who coined the term "growth hacker" and led early growth at companies including Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite. He is the founder of GrowthHackers, an online community for growth practitioners, and hosts the How to Win at Growth podcast. Morgan Brown is a growth executive and writer who has worked in marketing and product leadership at companies including Qualaroo and TechCrunch. Hacking Growth, published in 2017, is the most comprehensive book-length treatment of the growth hacking process both men have developed and taught over more than a decade.
