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

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/hacking-growth-how-todays-fastest-growing-companies-drive-breakout-success/
- Published: 2017-04-30T10:27:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when AirBnB was the best-kept
secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented
only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives
and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace’s sorry step-brother, and Uber was
a scrappy upstart that didn’t stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York
City Yellow Cabs.

So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses
they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t explode to massive worldwide
popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping
it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind
these companies’ extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, 
and it’s practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, but also companies
like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers,
managers and executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers.

Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean
Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves
cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses _customers_
attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back 
and buy more.

An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can
use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through
the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy.
It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to
replace wasteful big bets and spaghetti-on-the-wall approaches with more consistent,
replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

Author Sean Ellis is founder of growthhackers.com.

[The Seedcamp Podcast](https://soundcloud.com/seedcamp) · [Growth hacker Sean Ellis on expanding through experimentation](https://soundcloud.com/seedcamp/growth-hacker-sean-ellis-on-expanding-through-experimentation)