The growth hack is really just a growth test

Jonathan Martinez Contributor

Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum, and growth marketing enthusiast who helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime, and various startups.

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Who knew "growth hacking", a term coined in 2010 by Sean Ellis, Dropbox's first marketer, would become so mainstream in 2022? Considering the fact that Growth Marketing wasn't even a formal function in startups 12 years ago, I think it's fair to say that we couldn't have predicted how Growth Hacking would evolve. /p>

But let's discuss what growth hacking is and isn't. First, growth hacking is not a way to code or hack your way to 100x growth with smart tactics. Nor is it a magic solution that only a few people in this world have.

Growth hacking actually means growth tests. Comprehensive growth tests.

Growth hacking involves using creative strategies with minimal resources to help startups acquire and retain customers. At the heart of growth hacking are growth marketers who use rigorous experimentation frameworks to run countless A/B tests to achieve rapid growth.

Let me give you an example.

During my tenure as Head of Growth at Postmates, we faced tremendous challenges due to limited budgets and ambitious fleet (driver) acquisition targets. This was before the company raised the $300M Series E from Tiger Global Management, so we had to be resourceful and find new ways to acquire a fleet.

If each test can result in a 1% improvement, you are on track to achieve 100% improvement after running 100 tests.

For example, we signed up on platforms such as Handshake, a student job site, to recruit students to drive for us for extra cash in their spare time. Although it was a manual operation, it allowed us to hypertarget a specific profile (e.g. students) for free. We tried many other tactics to "hack" growth, but there was never a single great solution that ultimately got us acquired by Uber.

In other words, it takes countless tests and a lot of analysis to tell the winners from the losers.

Every great company has done growth hacking at some point. Let's dive into some growth hacking examples and explore how you can start thinking about the next steps.

When trying to hack growth, you should start by thinking about increasing test throughput while being as methodical as possible. With a fairly simple framework in place, every startup can succeed with growth hacking:

Ideation of hypothesis. Stack ranking. Test. Analysis.

For starters, hypothesis ideation can be fueled by key answers to questions at each stage of the funnel (more on that later). It is important to have a good number of assumptions as this will help to ensure that there is an adequate trail for the tests launched.