Search the term growth hacking and you’ll find dozens of different definitions.

Laura Moreno, a growth hacker and host of the Growth Hacking Podcast, says:

“Growth Hacking is the next generation marketing for start-ups. It describes the use of technical skills and creativity to develop and implement marketing strategies that get real users. The goal of growth hacking is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. Growth hacking combines technical, sales, marketing, design and customer experience to GROW a product, service or platform. Growth hacking is doing everything you possibly can to help the company grow.”

Ryan Holiday, former director of marketing for American Apparel and author of Growth Hacker Marketing, defines it this way:

“A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like ‘branding’ and ‘mind share,’ growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth — and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.”

Kamil Szybalski, growth coach and advisor, says:

“In essence, growth hacking is this. Instead of building a product and then marketing it, you understand that the product is the marketing; let that settle in. Your growth marketer should ideally, in a properly functioning company, be involved from ideation phases right up to executing the whole GTM (go to market). You can’t build a product and then say, ‘Here, now go hack some growth.’ All that brings is epic magnitudes of failure. I’ve seen the latter too often and each time it just doesn’t work, period. When you think ‘Growth,’ think horizontal ideology across your whole organization; just like your tech stack.”

So that’s perfectly clear, right?

Perhaps it would be useful to go back to the beginning.

Sean Ellis invented the term growth hacker in 2010. As a consultant for companies such as Dropbox, he helped start-ups attain accelerated growth. When he moved on from these businesses, he had difficulty finding replacements. What was needed was someone who could apply marketing principles in a new way — using analytics, creativity and little funding — to rapidly expand the customer base. He called it growth hacking.

Ellis says: “A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth. The common characteristic seems to be an ability to take responsibility for growth and an entrepreneurial drive (it’s risky taking that responsibility). An effective growth hacker also needs to be disciplined to follow a growth hacking process of prioritizing ideas (their own and others in the company), testing the ideas, and being analytical enough to know which tested growth drivers to keep and which ones to cut.”

The founder and CEO of GrowthHackers.com, Ellis later added to his definition of growth hacking, describing it as “a process of rapid experimentation across the full customer journey to accelerate customer and revenue growth.”

Hotmail, Airbnb, and Uber are examples of companies that have used growth hacking to achieve success.

Hotmail’s ‘P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail’ tagline is a famous instance of a growth hack. Adding the tagline to emails sent by its users is credited with Hotmail’s rapid growth, as the product itself became the avenue of promotion and distribution. A year and a half after its 1996 launch, Hotmail reached 12 million users, and was sold to Microsoft for $500 million. It became one of the first recorded growth hacks. (Note: While ‘P.S. I love you’ was part of the original idea, it didn’t actually appear in the emails.)

So what does all of this mean? Basically, growth hacking is a mindset. It’s a process of experimentation, monitoring, analyzing and tweaking to achieve sustainable growth, and it’s evolving.

If you want to learn more about growth hacking and how to apply its principles in your established business or a new venture, Velsoft’s September softskills courseware release Growth Hacking will walk you through it.