When you’ve ever poured weeks right into a advertising and marketing marketing campaign solely to observe it flop, you’re not alone. I’ve been there too; late nights tweaking messaging, second-guessing channel selections, and praying the outcomes justify the spend.
That frustration is precisely why “progress hacking” has develop into the buzzword on each marketer’s feed. It’s develop into the go-to method for early-stage startups and rising companies that want traction quick. However what precisely is progress hacking?
What’s progress hacking?
Development hacking is a advertising and marketing technique that focuses on fast experimentation throughout digital channels to determine the best methods to develop a enterprise. It combines advertising and marketing, knowledge, and product improvement to drive person acquisition, engagement, and retention with out counting on conventional promoting.
To make that occur, progress entrepreneurs depend on a mixture of methods, techniques, and instruments, similar to advertising and marketing analytics software program, A/B testing instruments, and advertising and marketing automation platforms, to measure experiments, check concepts shortly, and scale what works.
On this article, I’ll unpack how progress hacking tackles entrepreneurs’ greatest ache factors, share actionable progress hacking methods you should utilize instantly, and present how the suitable software program stack accelerates sustainable progress.
TL;DR: Development hacking at a look
- What’s progress hacking: A quick, experiment-driven method that blends advertising and marketing, knowledge, and product tweaks to drive progress with out huge advert spend.
- What are the important thing traits: Knowledge-led, resource-light, inventive, cross-functional, product-oriented, and constructed for scalability.
- How is it completely different from conventional advertising and marketing: Steady low-cost assessments targeted on speedy person or income beneficial properties vs. huge, sluggish campaigns monitoring model metrics.
- What are the core fashions: AARRR funnel, Development Loops, North Star Metric, and ICE scoring to prioritise and measure experiments.
- What methods do you have to strive: Freemium, referrals, influencer partnerships, invite-only signups, content material hacking, gamification, group focusing on, product-led options, partnerships, and retargeting/personalisation.
- What does it imply to be a progress hacker: Somebody whose “true north” is progress, mixing creativity, evaluation, and technical know-how to continuously check, be taught, and scale.
- What instruments assist: Analytics, A/B testing, automation, onboarding, web optimization, and collaboration instruments — evaluate on G2 to choose what matches your metrics and stage.
- How do you select and execute: Discover your greatest funnel bottleneck, match techniques to your product and viewers, prioritise by influence and ease, run small assessments, scale what works.
- What examples are you able to be taught from: Dropbox’s referral loop, Airbnb’s Craigslist hack, Pinterest’s “Pin It Ahead,” Hotmail’s viral footer
What are the important thing traits of progress hacking advertising and marketing?
If you strip away the hype, progress hacking is a means of working born out of startup constraints. Coined by Sean Ellis, it’s an experiment-driven method that blends pace, knowledge, creativity, and cross-functional abilities. Right here’s what units it aside:
- Give attention to progress above all else. The first aim isn’t model consciousness or vainness metrics; it’s fast, scalable, and sustainable progress in customers, income, or engagement.
- Knowledge-driven and experimental. Development hackers deal with the whole lot like a check. They analyze knowledge, run experiments, and double down on what really works.
- Useful resource-light and cost-effective. This method prioritizes techniques that ship outsized influence with minimal spend, particularly helpful for startups and small groups.
- Cross-disciplinary abilities. Development hacking blends advertising and marketing, product improvement, analytics, and know-how to drive acquisition and retention.
- Artistic and unconventional pondering. Standing out in a crowded market means attempting issues greater groups wouldn’t threat.
- Constructed for scalability. Each tactic is designed to be repeatable and expandable so that you’re not simply rising as soon as; you’re making a system for steady progress.
- Product-oriented pondering. Methods typically faucet straight into the product expertise itself (referrals, built-in loops) fairly than relying solely on exterior campaigns.
When you perceive these traits, the distinction with conventional advertising and marketing turns into clear.
What is the distinction between progress hacking and conventional advertising and marketing?
Conventional advertising and marketing has all the time been about planning and execution. Groups construct annual or quarterly campaigns, allocate huge budgets, and deal with metrics like impressions, consciousness, or market share. This mannequin works for established manufacturers with money and time to spare, nevertheless it leaves little room for fast iteration or scrappy testing.
Development hacking, as we noticed earlier, emerged as a response to these limits. Early-stage startups didn’t have the finances for TV spots or months-long campaigns, they wanted quick, scalable methods to accumulate and retain customers. That urgency created a brand new playbook. Development hackers are relentlessly analytical, utilizing knowledge to validate each determination and specializing in a single “one metric that issues” at every stage of progress.
Right here’s a transparent comparability of the 2 approaches:
| Conventional advertising and marketing | Development hacking advertising and marketing |
| Marketing campaign-based with mounted timelines | Steady, iterative experiments |
| Give attention to model consciousness and advertising and marketing share | Give attention to fast, measurable person or income progress |
| Huge finances and devoted groups | Useful resource-light, cross-functional groups |
| Depends on established channels like PR, advertisements, and occasions | Explores unconventional and quickly rising new channels and product tweaks |
Each conventional advertising and marketing and progress hacking in the end care about buyer acquisition, retention, and income. The distinction is that progress hacking treats these metrics because the speedy success standards for every experiment, whereas conventional advertising and marketing typically measures them on the marketing campaign or model degree over longer timeframes.
What are the core progress hacking fashions?
When you perceive the important thing traits of progress hacking, the following step is understanding the best way to construction your efforts. Frameworks give progress groups a repeatable approach to plan, measure, and optimize experiments. Essentially the most extensively used is the AARRR funnel, however there are a couple of others value understanding.
1. The AARRR pirate funnel
Created in 2007 by entrepreneur and investor Dave McClure, the AARRR framework breaks a buyer’s journey into 5 phases:
- Acquisition: How individuals first uncover your services or products.
- Activation: The primary “aha” second when customers expertise actual worth.
- Retention: Conserving customers engaged so that they return repeatedly.
- Referral: Encouraging glad customers to ask others.
- Income: Turning utilization into sustainable earnings.
To make this framework actionable, you possibly can map a couple of key metrics to every stage of the funnel, for instance, web site visits for acquisition, onboarding completion for activation, churn price for retention, referral sign-ups for referral, and income per person for income.
Listed below are some widespread (however not exhaustive) metrics progress hackers monitor at every stage of the AARRR funnel; your personal metrics will rely in your product and targets.
| Phases | Metrics |
| Acquisition | Web site visits, signups, price per acquisition (CPA), click-through price (CTR), ad-to-site conversion price, natural search site visitors, content material downloads |
| Activation | Account creation, onboarding completion, first key motion taken (e.g., first file uploaded, first mission created), time-to-value, characteristic adoption price, % of customers reaching “aha” second |
| Retention | Each day/month-to-month energetic customers (DAU/MAU), churn price, session frequency, repeat purchases, subscription renewal price, common days between classes, cohort retention |
| Referral | Invitations despatched, referral signups, social shares, viral coefficient, internet promoter rating (NPS), % of customers sharing content material, variety of referral codes redeemed |
| Income | Common income per person (ARPU), conversion price, upsells/cross-sells, buyer lifetime worth (CLV), month-to-month recurring income (MRR), common order worth (AOV), trial-to-paid conversion |
By specializing in one or two “one metrics that matter” (OMTM) per stage, you possibly can pinpoint bottlenecks and run experiments with measurable influence.
Whereas AARRR is essentially the most well-known, progress hackers typically borrow from different fashions to construction and prioritize their work. These frameworks assist groups assume past a linear funnel and switch experimentation right into a repeatable course of
2. Development Loops
As an alternative of treating progress as a straight funnel, loops deal with self-reinforcing cycles that feed again into acquisition. Consider referral applications, user-generated content material, or market listings the place every new person brings in additional customers. Loops are highly effective as a result of they compound over time fairly than ranging from zero with every marketing campaign.
3. North star metric
That is the only, guiding metric that displays the core worth you ship to customers. It retains everybody, product, advertising and marketing, and engineering, aligned on what “success” means. For a streaming platform, it is perhaps “hours watched per person per thirty days,” whereas for a SaaS device, it is perhaps “energetic tasks created.”
4. ICE scoring
Development groups generate dozens of check concepts; ICE (Influence, Confidence, Ease) is a straightforward scoring system to determine which experiments to run first. Every concept will get rated on its potential influence, your confidence in that influence, and the way straightforward it’s to execute; the upper the rating, the earlier it will get examined.
What are the highest 10 progress hacks to strive in your advertising and marketing technique?
Frameworks like AARRR present the place to focus, however methods present the best way to transfer the needle. Development hacking methods are concrete techniques you possibly can adapt and check to drive fast, scalable outcomes. Under are 10 extensively used approaches, every with a fast rationalization of why it really works and the way you would possibly apply it.
1. Use the freemium mannequin
Decrease the barrier to entry by letting customers expertise your product’s worth earlier than they pay. This accelerates person acquisition and builds a pipeline for paid conversions. SaaS leaders like Slack and Dropbox used this mannequin to create huge person bases earlier than monetizing.
2. Implement a referral program
Referral applications and different reward-based applications are an effective way to scale enterprise progress. Supply incentives to each referrers and invitees, like credit, reductions, or unique options. Dropbox’s well-known “get free storage for every referral” program is a traditional instance of a viral loop that compounded progress.
3. Leverage the influencer market
Companion with credible voices whose audiences align together with your product. Micro-influencers typically ship greater engagement and belief at decrease price than huge names. Cluely, for instance, constructed its model by hiring content material creators and influencers from the get-go, utilizing them to supply viral short-form content material that drives attain and consciousness. This tactic can amplify attain and social proof far more shortly than many conventional channels.
4. Make use of the invite-only signup system
Create buzz by limiting entry. Invite-only signups, waitlists, or restricted beta releases can generate urgency and shortage. Gmail, Clubhouse, and ChatGPT all used this method to spark early curiosity and speed up adoption.
5. Content material hacking
Content material hacking is one other approach to scale progress. Principally, it is a mixture of progress hacking and content material advertising and marketing efforts. By enhancing your content material advertising and marketing sport, you possibly can improve the site visitors to your web site and, in consequence, develop your person base.
Deal with content material like an experiment. Check completely different codecs (movies, carousels, interactive instruments), repurpose high-performing items throughout channels, and use web optimization to drive natural site visitors. This method turns content material into a gradual acquisition engine.
6. Gamify the person expertise
Gamifying the person expertise is one other approach to enhance progress. With gamification, each interplay will really feel like an achievement, and your prospects will really get pleasure from partaking together with your merchandise. Reddit is a superb instance: it makes use of upvotes, karma factors, badges, and group awards to reward contributions and sign standing. These game-like mechanics preserve customers posting, commenting, and returning, which in flip drives deeper engagement and natural progress.
7. Neighborhood focusing on
Go the place your viewers already congregates and add worth there as an alternative of attempting to tug everybody to you first. Neighborhood can take a number of varieties: a group of product (like GitHub or Salesforce Trailblazers), group because the product (Stack Overflow, Discord), group of follow (skilled Slack teams, HubSpot Academy), or group of pursuits (topic-based subreddits). Exhibiting up authentically in these areas can drive early traction and model advocacy.
8. Product-led progress options
Bake progress loops straight into your product so each new person turns into a possible acquisition channel. Collaboration options, in-app sharing, or built-in referral mechanisms encourage natural unfold with out additional advertising and marketing spend. Canva’s collaborative design sharing and Zapier/Make’s freemium integrations are traditional examples of product-led progress options in motion.
Each time a Canva person shares a design, the recipient is prompted to log in or create an account, exposing new customers to actual worth and rushing up activation. Zapier and Make’s free tiers let individuals check integrations, which frequently results in team-wide adoption and publicity to linked apps. These built-in loops cut back acquisition prices and scale progress sustainably.
9. Partnerships and co-marketing
Collaborate with complementary manufacturers or creators to faucet into one another’s audiences. This could imply joint webinars, bundled affords, built-in options, and even e-newsletter swaps.
Manufacturers associate with high-reach newsletters like Morning Brew to entry its demographic of younger professionals serious about enterprise and tech. Partnerships give on the spot publicity to 1000’s of heat, extremely related potential prospects at minimal price whereas boosting model credibility via affiliation.
10. Retargeting and personalization
Use behavioral knowledge to retarget engaged guests or personalize onboarding, emails, and affords. This will increase conversions and maximizes the ROI of your acquisition efforts. Userpilot, for instance, segments its customers and tailors onboarding flows and in-app messages to assist every section attain worth quicker.
Customized experiences transfer customers from curiosity to “aha” second extra shortly and preserve them engaged longer. Retargeting nudges prospects who’ve already proven curiosity, making acquisition spend extra environment friendly and lifting conversion charges throughout the funnel.
How to decide on and execute your progress hacking technique?
Realizing these methods is one factor; selecting the correct ones is what drives outcomes. A tactic that fuels explosive progress for a D2C e-commerce model could fall flat for a B2B SaaS firm, so all the time check and adapt to your viewers, funnel stage, and sources.
1. Begin together with your greatest bottleneck
Take a look at your funnel. The place are you leaking essentially the most alternative: getting site visitors however no sign-ups (acquisition), sign-ups however no engagement (activation), a number of engagement however poor retention? Your first progress hacks ought to goal the weakest stage, not the flashiest tactic.
Match the tactic to your product sort
Ask your self: How do individuals naturally expertise worth in my product?
- D2C e-commerce: Hacks round referrals, influencer seeding, or group can create bursts of consciousness and site visitors.
- SaaS or PLG product: Hacks round onboarding, in-app sharing, or collaboration options typically have extra leverage.
- Market or community merchandise: Hacks that stimulate each side of the market (content material loops, incentives) are inclined to work greatest.
2. Align together with your viewers’s behaviour
The place does your viewers spend time and what do they belief? A distinct segment subreddit? A commerce affiliation? A Discord server? Choose techniques that meet them there as an alternative of attempting to pull them to a brand new channel. For a younger shopper viewers, FOMO techniques or gamification could resonate. For an enterprise purchaser, content material hacking, partnerships, or retargeting is perhaps safer bets.
3. Prioritise by influence and ease
Upon getting a listing of concepts, rating them shortly on potential influence and ease of implementation. Begin with one or two high-impact, low-effort experiments. Don’t run 5 new techniques directly; get a clear learn on what works.
Check small, be taught quick, scale what sticks
Run the smallest model of a tactic that may nonetheless generate a sign like a easy referral incentive for one week, a single webinar with a associate, or a small gamified problem in your app. Watch your “one metric that issues” for that stage. If it strikes, scale it. If not, drop it and check out the following.
The bottomline is that the suitable progress hack is the one that matches your product, your funnel stage, and your viewers’s behaviour. By diagnosing the place you’re caught and choosing a tactic that straight addresses that bottleneck, you flip a grab-bag of concepts right into a targeted progress engine.
What are some confirmed progress hacking examples for startups and entrepreneurs?
Now, as you recognize what progress hacking is and the best way to allow it, let’s check out the big-name firms which have performed it proper!
Dropbox
Dropbox is an ideal progress hacking case research. They used progress hacking practices to implement an automatic referral program that operated on the next concept – the extra pals you refer, the extra free house you get. This progress hacking technique has helped Dropbox to develop into a multi-billion greenback firm with greater than 700 million customers.
Airbnb
Development hacking put one other large, Airbnb, on the map. The founders of Airbnb initially used Craigslist, a platform with tens of millions of customers, to market to individuals looking for inexpensive lodging. This progress hacking technique succeeded as Airbnb skyrocketed into turning into one of many prime app for inexpensive lodging.
In 2010, following three months of its authentic launch, Pinterest had acquired solely 3,000 customers. To scale progress, the founders began the “Pin It Ahead” marketing campaign through which customers would make a pinboard and get extra invitations by getting different customers to create their pinboards. The marketing campaign resulted in Pinterest’s fast take-off, and now the platform has over 570 million month-to-month energetic customers.
Hotmail
Each outgoing electronic mail included a tiny footer — “P.S. I like you. Get your free electronic mail at Hotmail.” That easy, zero-cost message reached tens of millions via customers’ personal networks and drove explosive signups, making Hotmail one of many earliest viral electronic mail providers.
LinkedIn embedded progress into its product by prompting customers to ask their electronic mail contacts and by making profiles public-by-default, so profiles ranked in Google search. These loops powered its soar to 100M+ customers with out heavy promoting spend.
PayPal
Earlier than it was mainstream, PayPal paid individuals to hitch and refer pals ($10 per referral). This direct incentive seeded its person base and drove viral adoption on eBay, the place it turned the default fee technique.
Robinhood
Robinhood constructed a waitlist system for its commission-free buying and selling app. Customers might transfer up the queue by inviting pals, turning the signup course of itself right into a viral loop that created huge buzz earlier than launch.
G2
G2 fueled its progress by turning person critiques into each content material and distribution. By encouraging verified customers to depart critiques and making these critiques indexable in Google search, G2 constructed tens of 1000’s of software program product pages. This created a self-reinforcing loop: extra critiques led to greater rankings, bringing in additional software program consumers, which introduced in additional distributors to G2 and once more resulting in extra critiques from their prospects and so forth. It’s a main instance of product-driven content material progress.
What it means to be a profitable progress hacker
Taking a look at how Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Hotmail, Ahrefs, G2, and Clay grew is inspiring however behind each tactic is an individual (or workforce) pondering like a progress hacker. Being a progress hacker isn’t about copying methods; Ellis notes {that a} progress hacker is “an individual whose true north is progress”.
A progress hacker isn’t outlined by a job title. They could be a mission engineer, an entrepreneur, or a marketer, anybody who focuses solely on methods to develop a enterprise. What issues most is the best way they assume. Each determination a progress hacker makes is knowledgeable by one query: Will this drive progress? Budgets, campaigns, and even conversions come second to the principle goal: sustainable progress.
The job of a progress hacker is to brainstorm modern progress methods. Moreover, progress hackers’ obligations embrace the next:
- Setting progress priorities and defining success metrics
- Figuring out and testing new buyer acquisition channels
- Creating progress methods, instruments, and strategies
- Measuring and analyzing the efficiency of each progress initiative
This mixture of creativity, evaluation, and execution requires a novel skillset that may be damaged down into three ranges: basic, generalistic, and specialist.
- Basic progress hacking abilities indicate an understanding of the elemental work varieties, fashions, and progress hacking mindset. For instance, understanding the best way to implement the AARRR framework (which we’ll cowl within the subsequent part) is a basic progress hacking ability. Technical abilities are additionally basic progress hacking abilities.
- Generalistic progress hacking abilities consult with the skilled abilities required in each process you’ll do as a progress hacker. For instance, understanding the basics of buyer psychology, knowledge monitoring and evaluation, and visible design are basic progress hacking abilities.
- Specialist progress hacking abilities consult with the abilities required particularly inside your organization. Specialist abilities differ from group to group. The widespread examples are understanding of referral advertising and marketing and channel advertising and marketing.
- Technical know-how means the particular person is aware of sufficient HTML/CSS or analytics setup to launch touchdown pages, run A/B assessments, or instrument occasions with out ready for one more workforce.
A profitable progress hacker combines all three ranges, pairing a growth-first mindset with the correct mix of basic, generalist, and specialist abilities to repeatedly uncover and scale new alternatives.
What are the instruments that assist progress hackers experiment and scale?
Realizing the mindset, frameworks, and methods behind progress hacking is one factor. Truly operating dozens of assessments, monitoring outcomes, and scaling the winners requires a strong toolkit. The precise instruments show you how to transfer quicker, see what’s working, and double down with out burning out your workforce.
Analytics and monitoring
You’ll be able to’t develop what you don’t measure. Analytics platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Google Analytics 4 allow you to instrument key actions, construct funnels, and monitor your “one metric that issues” in close to actual time. They’re important for recognizing bottlenecks in acquisition, activation, and retention.
A/B testing and experimentation
To run fast experiments you want a straightforward approach to check variations. Instruments similar to Optimizely, VWO, and LaunchDarkly and different CRO software program allows you to split-test touchdown pages, options, and messaging with out heavy developer work. This hastens your testing cycle dramatically.
Advertising automation and electronic mail
Automating outreach and nurturing saves time and retains prospects transferring via your funnel. HubSpot, Buyer.io, Mailchimp, and Klaviyo are fashionable fashionable choices for sending segmented, behavior-triggered emails and drip campaigns.
web optimization and content material instruments
If content material hacking is a part of your technique, web optimization instruments like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo show you how to discover high-impact subjects, monitor key phrase efficiency, and monitor rivals’ backlinks to drive natural site visitors.
Collaboration and backlog administration
Development groups are cross-functional, so conserving concepts and assessments organized is essential. Venture administration instruments like Notion, Airtable, and Trello make it straightforward to take care of an experiment backlog, Iscore your concepts, and monitor outcomes throughout advertising and marketing, product, and engineering.
Now, you don’t want each device on this listing. The bottom line is to choose the handful that suit your metrics, technique, and stage of progress.
When you’re undecided the place to start out, platforms like G2 allow you to shortly evaluate the highest advertising and marketing, analytics, and experimentation instruments in every class primarily based on actual person critiques, so that you spend much less time in search of instruments and extra time operating progress experiments.
Hack your approach to progress
If I’ve to depart you with one thought, it’s that progress hacking isn’t a guidelines of intelligent methods; it’s a muscle you construct. The true energy isn’t in copying Dropbox’s referral loop or Airbnb’s platform piggybacking; it’s in coaching your self to see unconventional paths to progress inside your personal product and market. Each firm’s “hack” seems completely different as a result of each viewers, funnel, and second is completely different.
The distinctive benefit you will have over the large case research is proximity: you’re nearer to your customers, your knowledge, and your experiments than a large advertising and marketing workforce at a longtime model. That intimacy makes it simpler to note small alternatives and check daring concepts shortly. When you construct a behavior of framing each advertising and marketing, product, and partnership concept as an experiment and measuring it towards one clear progress metric, you’ll develop your personal playbook of scalable wins and perhaps be the following instance individuals cite once they speak about progress hacking performed proper.
Wish to take the following step? Try G2’s information to go-to-market technique
for extra methods to plan, launch, and scale your experiments with a structured method.
This text was initially revealed in 2020 and has been up to date with new info.
