Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Morgan Brown, Sean Ellis

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success is a book by Morgan Brown, a veteran growth hacker and successful marketing strategist. The book promises to teach readers the tools and tactics used by some of today’s most innovative companies to drive organic user growth. Throughout the book, Brown focuses on four key areas of growth: experimentation, learning, optimization, and scaling.

Borrowing from the tactics of entrepreneurs, investors, and technology giants, Hacking Growth is an essential resource for anyone hoping to develop a comprehensive understanding of the growth hacking process. Brown argues that neither product nor advertising is the sole factor needed to guarantee growth – instead, innovation must be ‘hacked’, a concept best described as a mix of intuition and quantitative research.

The book begins with a wide-ranging introduction that makes the case for the relevance of growth hacking in the modern business landscape. Brown then proceeds to categorize the different growth hacking techniques, dividing them into experiment-driven, knowledge-driven, and optimization-driven approaches. This comprehensive taxonomy allows readers unfamiliar with the terminology to quickly get up to speed, while offering insights and ideas to experienced readers.

Next, Brown dives into the specifics of each type of growth hack. Experiment-driven growth hacking, for example, involves running A/B tests and using creative strategies to push users in desirable directions. Knowledge-driven growth hacking is focused on understanding user behavior and creating product features to capitalize on that behavior. Optimization-driven growth hacking focuses on analyzing and improving current processes, such as website analytics. Brown also delves into more specialized topics that are essential for success, such as virality, multi-channel marketing, and personalization.

After exploring the nuts and bolts of growth hacking, Brown offers a helping hand for those aspiring to take their growth hacking initiatives further and achieve “breakout success”. This includes an exploration of the ecosystems around successful companies and the like-minded peers, mentors, and supporters necessary to monetizing success. Hacking Growth also looks at use cases and real-world examples of companies that have grown explosively.

Armed with the advice Brown provides in this book, readers will be more equipped to apply growth hacking to their own businesses, develop their skills, and maximize the impact of their efforts. By the end of the book, readers will have a wealth of actionable insights and proven strategies at their disposal, empowering them to launch and sustain winning products, campaigns, and businesses.