What is Growth Hacking?

Most growth hacks, when applied individually, lead to +5% to +500% boosts to the growth momentum.

Applying five growth hacks, each with an impact of 15% alongside your growth cycle, doubles your growth momentum.

The most excellent part of growth hacks is that they are usually free and don’t take much time to implement.

In my growth hacking advisory with Winspyre, we have easily achieved 8X growth cycle boosts in a few weeks.

So, what is growth hacking?

Growth hacking is all about being creative and intelligent with the growth process.

The essence of growth hacking requires two mental shifts:

• Shift-1:

  Break away from the managerial growth culture that is heavily linear, reductionist, and traditionalist.

  Starting Shift-1 as early as possible is critical. Because as a start-up grows, it becomes exponentially harder to change the culture. And once started, Shift-1 must be constantly cultivated. Because as the organization grows, it becomes more susceptible to the irresistible ease of linear, reductionist, and traditionalist mentality.

  This is a deep topic. But here are some conspicuous symptoms that scream the need to make the Shift-1:

• Departmental siloes alongside CX: presales, sales, implementation, etc.

• Many generals, few soldiers

• Salesy attitude: focus on sales, not on customer success

• Organizing around regions and verticals

• Chain of very similar titles

• Low Glassdoor score

• More employees than subscribers to social media accounts

• Insufficient or low-quality digital content

• Big unescapable pictures of executives

• Shift-2:

  Embrace sweet spots, virtuous cycles, leverages, choke points, blind spots, technology, and experimenting totally new ideas.

  Without curation, Shift-2 is paralyzingly complex to initiate. There are two main reasons for that. First, most people are not trained to hack the real world of outcomes. Instead, they are educated to repeat the abstractions of the managerial routines, templates, and procedures. The second reason is that creativity faces complexity. So, it requires its own language, tools, and mindset to cut through complexity.

  For this reason, I developed a periodic table of 311 growth hacks and an insanely simple and liberal process to formulate hacks rapidly for any context.

  Again, it is a very deep topic, but here are some major symptoms that show need for Shift-2:

• Disconnect with field outcomes

• The internal language lacks terms like leverage, sweet spot, synergy, virtuous cycle, automation, etc

• Little or no intelligence in plans and actions

• Costs want to grow faster than outcomes

• Little experimentation

• Little competitive intelligence

• Little focus on the business model

• Doing for the sake of doing

• Input and resource dominant language

© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023