Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

The definitive playbook for growth hacking, written by the man who coined the term. Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown lay out a complete, step-by-step methodology for building cross-functional growth teams and running the rapid experimentation process that drove companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and LinkedIn to massive scale.

Why Start Here

Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” in 2010 while looking for someone to replace himself at Dropbox. He needed a person whose north star was growth, not someone who thought in terms of press releases and ad buys. This book is the distillation of everything he learned building growth engines at LogMeIn, Dropbox, Eventbrite, and Lookout, combined with Morgan Brown’s deep startup marketing experience.

The book is structured as a practical manual. It walks you through setting up a growth team, identifying your core value metric, building a testing pipeline, and optimizing each stage of the funnel: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. Every concept is illustrated with real case studies. You learn how Uber used referral loops to expand into new cities, how Pinterest optimized its onboarding flow to boost retention, and how BitTorrent turned free users into paying customers.

What separates this book from lighter treatments of the subject is its depth. Ellis and Brown do not just explain what growth hacking is. They give you the operating system for doing it: how to prioritize experiments, how to analyze results, and how to build the organizational muscle that keeps the process running week after week.

What to Expect

A thorough 320-page guide that balances strategy with tactics. The first half covers mindset, team structure, and how to identify your “aha moment.” The second half works through each stage of the growth funnel with detailed examples and frameworks. Suitable for founders, product managers, marketers, and anyone responsible for growing a business. Some familiarity with startups or digital products is helpful but not required.