Growth Hacking
Etymology
Coined by the marketer Sean Ellis in 2010, who wanted a title for a role focused purely on growth rather than traditional marketing. "Hacking" borrows from software culture the sense of a clever, unconventional shortcut. The term captured a whole ethos of the 2010s tech boom, in which viral loops and referral tricks mattered more than brand-building.
noun · /GROHTH HAK-ing/
A marketing approach focused on rapid, cheap, data-driven experiments to grow a product’s user base, often by exploiting quirks of a platform or of human behavior.
What it names
A handle for a startup-era mindset that treats growth as an engineering problem to be hacked, and a lens for spotting the tactics engineered into products to make them spread.
Example
Their entire growth hacking playbook was one referral loop that gave both users free storage for every friend they invited.
Related idea
It leans on the network effect: many growth hacks are just clever ways to trigger the point where each new user makes the product more valuable to the next.