Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
One book, placed in its field — what Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown's book gets right, where it goes further than the rest, and what the rest of the field adds.
Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data · startupleader.guide/guides/profile-hacking_growth
Arrow keys or swipe to move · N for notes · F for full screen
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
One book, placed in its field — what Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown's book gets right, where it goes further than the rest, and what the rest of the field adds.
Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data · startupleader.guide/guides/profile-hacking_growth
The problem
Sustainable Revenue Growth erodes when it is left to instinct instead of method.
You were taught the moves piecemeal, never the whole model.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
The model
- 01Cross-Functional Growth Team
- 02High-Tempo Experimentation
- 03Data Instrumentation and Analytics
- 04Must-Have Product Value
- 05Aha Moment Activation
- 06Channel and Language Fit
- 07Funnel Friction
- 08Habit Formation and Engagement Loop
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Step 1 of 5 · Cross-Functional Growth Team
The growth lead must own a single north-star metric and have the executive air cover to reach across functions to move it.
Misconception
Practitioners think a growth team is a rebranded marketing or acquisition team that runs campaigns and buys traffic.
Reality
A growth team's power comes from touching the whole product experience—onboarding, features, pricing, messaging—which requires engineers and product managers embedded alongside marketers, not marketers reporting up a separate chain.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Step 2 of 5 · High-Tempo Experimentation
Measure tempo as experiments completed per week, and treat a low kill rate as a warning that you're testing timid ideas.
Misconception
Teams believe more tests automatically means more growth, so they chase raw test volume as the goal.
Reality
Tempo matters only when each cycle is closed with rigorous analysis and a decision; running many sloppy tests that no one reads produces noise, not learning, and most experiments will fail regardless.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Step 3 of 5 · Data Instrumentation and Analytics
Instrument the funnel's core events first; you cannot analyze a behavior you never captured.
Misconception
Companies assume that because they have Google Analytics or a BI tool, they are already 'data-driven' and ready to experiment.
Reality
Aggregate pageview dashboards tell you nothing about which behaviors predict retention; growth requires event-level tracking tied to individual users and organized into cohorts so you can trace cause and effect.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Step 4 of 5 · Must-Have Product Value
The 40 percent 'very disappointed' benchmark is your gate: below it, fix the product before scaling growth.
Misconception
Founders believe that strong early signups or press coverage indicate they've reached product/market fit.
Reality
Fit is measured by whether users would be very disappointed to lose the product and whether a retention curve flattens rather than decaying to zero—not by top-of-funnel excitement, which decays.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Step 5 of 5 · Aha Moment Activation
Define the aha moment quantitatively from retention data, not from what you assume the value is.
Misconception
Teams treat activation as getting users to complete signup or finish a product tour.
Reality
The aha moment is the specific action that correlates with long-term retention—like Facebook's seven friends in ten days—and finding it requires data analysis, not intuition about what onboarding 'should' include.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
A framework to use
The Full-Funnel Growth Framework
This framework is part of the full guide. See the guide →
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
The cheat sheet
- Cross-Functional Growth TeamThe growth lead must own a single north-star metric and have the executive air cover to reach across functions to move it.
- High-Tempo ExperimentationMeasure tempo as experiments completed per week, and treat a low kill rate as a warning that you're testing timid ideas.
- Data Instrumentation and AnalyticsInstrument the funnel's core events first; you cannot analyze a behavior you never captured.
- Must-Have Product ValueThe 40 percent 'very disappointed' benchmark is your gate: below it, fix the product before scaling growth.
- Aha Moment ActivationDefine the aha moment quantitatively from retention data, not from what you assume the value is.
- Channel and Language FitLanguage/market fit is testable: run message variants and let click-and-convert data pick the winner.
- Funnel FrictionTreat conversion as desire minus friction—reducing the subtrahend is often the faster win.
- Habit Formation and Engagement LoopThe strongest habits rest on stored value and internal triggers, not on external reminders you control.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data
Sources
- Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success — Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success · Mike West, Editor · Leading With Data