Growth Hacking For Dummies

Chapter 1

Defining Growth Hacking

IN THIS CHAPTER

The goals of growth hacking

The basic process

Separating growth hacking from other practices

Sorting through controversies, misunderstandings, assumptions, and falsehoods

Looked at one way, this book is years too late, and yet, from lots of other perspectives, this book is right on time. Growth hacking as a concept became highly popular around 2013 and became, for the next few years, the hot new thing everyone was talking about. So, from that perspective, publishing this book in 2020 would appear to be unnecessary because so much discussion on the topic has happened since then and people have already had a chance to learn more about it. The problem I’ve noticed is that, outside of a relatively small percentage of true practitioners, no one really seemed to articulate the growth hacking concept correctly. Many people applied an interpretation I thought to be unrepresentative of the ethos of the phrase — an ethos I had learned directly from the person who coined growth hacking in the first place. And, as with all things that become ...