For those who’ve ever poured weeks right into a advertising 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 strictly why “progress hacking” has grow to be the buzzword on each marketer’s feed. It’s grow to be 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?
Progress hacking is a advertising technique that focuses on speedy experimentation throughout digital channels to determine the best methods to develop a enterprise. It combines advertising, information, and product growth to drive consumer acquisition, engagement, and retention with out counting on conventional promoting.
To make that occur, progress entrepreneurs depend on a mixture of methods, ways, and instruments, corresponding to advertising analytics software program, A/B testing instruments, and advertising 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 use instantly, and present how the suitable software program stack accelerates sustainable progress.
TL;DR: Progress hacking at a look
- What’s progress hacking: A quick, experiment-driven method that blends advertising, information, and product tweaks to drive progress with out large advert spend.
- What are the important thing traits: Information-led, resource-light, inventive, cross-functional, product-oriented, and constructed for scalability.
- How is it totally different from conventional advertising: Steady low-cost assessments targeted on quick consumer or income features vs. large, gradual campaigns monitoring model metrics.
- What are the core fashions: AARRR funnel, Progress Loops, North Star Metric, and ICE scoring to prioritise and measure experiments.
- What methods do you have to attempt: Freemium, referrals, influencer partnerships, invite-only signups, content material hacking, gamification, neighborhood concentrating 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 consistently check, be taught, and scale.
- What instruments assist: Analytics, A/B testing, automation, onboarding, search engine marketing, and collaboration instruments — evaluate on G2 to select what suits your metrics and stage.
- How do you select and execute: Discover your greatest funnel bottleneck, match ways to your product and viewers, prioritise by affect 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?
While you strip away the hype, progress hacking is a manner of working born out of startup constraints. Coined by Sean Ellis, it’s an experiment-driven method that blends pace, information, creativity, and cross-functional abilities. Right here’s what units it aside:
- Concentrate on progress above all else. The first aim isn’t model consciousness or self-importance metrics; it’s speedy, scalable, and sustainable progress in customers, income, or engagement.
- Information-driven and experimental. Progress hackers deal with every part like a check. They analyze information, run experiments, and double down on what really works.
- Useful resource-light and cost-effective. This method prioritizes ways that ship outsized affect with minimal spend, particularly helpful for startups and small groups.
- Cross-disciplinary abilities. Progress hacking blends advertising, product growth, analytics, and expertise to drive acquisition and retention.
- Inventive and unconventional pondering. Standing out in a crowded market means attempting issues larger 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) somewhat than relying solely on exterior campaigns.
When you perceive these traits, the distinction with conventional advertising turns into clear.
What is the distinction between progress hacking and conventional advertising?
Conventional advertising has all the time been about planning and execution. Groups construct annual or quarterly campaigns, allocate large budgets, and concentrate on metrics like impressions, consciousness, or market share. This mannequin works for established manufacturers with money and time to spare, however it leaves little room for speedy iteration or scrappy testing.
Progress hacking, as we noticed earlier, emerged as a response to these limits. Early-stage startups didn’t have the price range for TV spots or months-long campaigns, they wanted quick, scalable methods to accumulate and retain customers. That urgency created a brand new playbook. Progress hackers are relentlessly analytical, utilizing information 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 | Progress hacking advertising |
| Marketing campaign-based with fastened timelines | Steady, iterative experiments |
| Concentrate on model consciousness and advertising share | Concentrate on speedy, measurable consumer or income progress |
| Large price range 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 progress hacking in the end care about buyer acquisition, retention, and income. The distinction is that progress hacking treats these metrics because the quick success standards for every experiment, whereas conventional advertising 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 realizing methods to construction your efforts. Frameworks give progress groups a repeatable technique to plan, measure, and optimize experiments. Essentially the most broadly used is the AARRR funnel, however there are a couple of others price realizing.
1. The AARRR pirate funnel
Created in 2007 by entrepreneur and investor Dave McClure, the AARRR framework breaks a buyer’s journey into 5 levels:
- Acquisition: How folks first uncover your services or products.
- Activation: The primary “aha” second when customers expertise actual worth.
- Retention: Protecting customers engaged so that they return frequently.
- Referral: Encouraging blissful customers to ask others.
- Income: Turning utilization into sustainable earnings.
To make this framework actionable, you may map a couple of key metrics to every stage of the funnel, for instance, web site visits for acquisition, onboarding completion for activation, churn fee for retention, referral sign-ups for referral, and income per consumer for income.
Listed here are some frequent (however not exhaustive) metrics progress hackers monitor at every stage of the AARRR funnel; your personal metrics will rely in your product and objectives.
| Levels | Metrics |
| Acquisition | Web site visits, signups, value per acquisition (CPA), click-through fee (CTR), ad-to-site conversion fee, natural search site visitors, content material downloads |
| Activation | Account creation, onboarding completion, first key motion taken (e.g., first file uploaded, first undertaking created), time-to-value, characteristic adoption fee, % of customers reaching “aha” second |
| Retention | Day by day/month-to-month lively customers (DAU/MAU), churn fee, session frequency, repeat purchases, subscription renewal fee, common days between classes, cohort retention |
| Referral | Invitations despatched, referral signups, social shares, viral coefficient, web promoter rating (NPS), % of customers sharing content material, variety of referral codes redeemed |
| Income | Common income per consumer (ARPU), conversion fee, 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 may pinpoint bottlenecks and run experiments with measurable affect.
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 suppose past a linear funnel and switch experimentation right into a repeatable course of
2. Progress Loops
As a substitute of treating progress as a straight funnel, loops concentrate on self-reinforcing cycles that feed again into acquisition. Consider referral packages, user-generated content material, or market listings the place every new consumer brings in additional customers. Loops are highly effective as a result of they compound over time somewhat 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 engineering, aligned on what “success” means. For a streaming platform, it could be “hours watched per consumer monthly,” whereas for a SaaS instrument, it could be “lively tasks created.”
4. ICE scoring
Progress groups generate dozens of check concepts; ICE (Affect, Confidence, Ease) is a straightforward scoring system to determine which experiments to run first. Every concept will get rated on its potential affect, your confidence in that affect, and the way simple it’s to execute; the upper the rating, the earlier it will get examined.
What are the highest 10 progress hacks to attempt in your advertising technique?
Frameworks like AARRR present the place to focus, however methods present methods to transfer the needle. Progress hacking methods are concrete ways you may adapt and check to drive speedy, scalable outcomes. Beneath are 10 broadly used approaches, every with a fast rationalization of why it really works and the way you may 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 consumer acquisition and builds a pipeline for paid conversions. SaaS leaders like Slack and Dropbox used this mannequin to create huge consumer bases earlier than monetizing.
2. Implement a referral program
Referral packages and different reward-based packages are a good way to scale enterprise progress. Provide 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 value than large names. Cluely, for instance, constructed its model by hiring content material creators and influencers from the get-go, utilizing them to provide 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 technique to scale progress. Principally, it is a mixture of progress hacking and content material advertising efforts. By enhancing your content material advertising recreation, you may enhance the site visitors to your web site and, in consequence, develop your consumer base.
Deal with content material like an experiment. Check totally different codecs (movies, carousels, interactive instruments), repurpose high-performing items throughout channels, and use search engine marketing to drive natural site visitors. This method turns content material into a gentle acquisition engine.
6. Gamify the consumer expertise
Gamifying the consumer expertise is one other technique to enhance progress. With gamification, each interplay will really feel like an achievement, and your clients will really take pleasure in participating together with your merchandise. Reddit is a superb instance: it makes use of upvotes, karma factors, badges, and neighborhood 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 concentrating 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 neighborhood of product (like GitHub or Salesforce Trailblazers), neighborhood because the product (Stack Overflow, Discord), neighborhood of observe (skilled Slack teams, HubSpot Academy), or neighborhood of pursuits (topic-based subreddits). Displaying 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 consumer turns into a possible acquisition channel. Collaboration options, in-app sharing, or built-in referral mechanisms encourage natural unfold with out further advertising 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 consumer 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 folks check integrations, which frequently results in team-wide adoption and publicity to linked apps. These built-in loops scale 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 will imply joint webinars, bundled provides, built-in options, and even e-newsletter swaps.
Manufacturers accomplice with high-reach newsletters like Morning Brew to entry its demographic of younger professionals fascinated about enterprise and tech. Partnerships give on the spot publicity to 1000’s of heat, extremely related potential clients at minimal value whereas boosting model credibility by affiliation.
10. Retargeting and personalization
Use behavioral information to retarget engaged guests or personalize onboarding, emails, and provides. 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 sooner.
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?
Understanding 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 assets.
1. Begin together with your greatest bottleneck
Have 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), plenty 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 folks naturally expertise worth in my product?
- D2C e-commerce: Hacks round referrals, influencer seeding, or neighborhood 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 likely to work finest.
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 ways that meet them there as an alternative of attempting to pull them to a brand new channel. For a younger shopper viewers, FOMO ways or gamification could resonate. For an enterprise purchaser, content material hacking, partnerships, or retargeting could be safer bets.
3. Prioritise by affect and ease
After getting a listing of concepts, rating them shortly on potential affect and ease of implementation. Begin with one or two high-impact, low-effort experiments. Don’t run 5 new ways 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 accomplice, 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 selecting 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 methods to allow it, let’s check out the big-name firms which have executed 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 buddies you refer, the extra free house you get. This progress hacking technique has helped Dropbox to grow to be a multi-billion greenback firm with greater than 700 million customers.
Airbnb
Progress hacking put one other large, Airbnb, on the map. The founders of Airbnb initially used Craigslist, a platform with thousands and thousands of customers, to market to folks trying to find 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 unique launch, Pinterest had acquired solely 3,000 customers. To scale progress, the founders began the “Pin It Ahead” marketing campaign during 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 speedy take-off, and now the platform has over 570 million month-to-month lively customers.
Hotmail
Each outgoing e-mail included a tiny footer — “P.S. I like you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” That straightforward, zero-cost message reached thousands and thousands by customers’ personal networks and drove explosive signups, making Hotmail one of many earliest viral e-mail companies.
LinkedIn embedded progress into its product by prompting customers to ask their e-mail contacts and by making profiles public-by-default, so profiles ranked in Google search. These loops powered its bounce to 100M+ customers with out heavy promoting spend.
PayPal
Earlier than it was mainstream, PayPal paid folks to hitch and refer buddies ($10 per referral). This direct incentive seeded its consumer base and drove viral adoption on eBay, the place it grew to become the default cost technique.
Robinhood
Robinhood constructed a waitlist system for its commission-free buying and selling app. Customers may transfer up the queue by inviting buddies, 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 consumer 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 patrons, which introduced in additional distributors to G2 and once more resulting in extra critiques from their clients and so forth. It’s a main instance of product-driven content material progress.
What it means to be a profitable progress hacker
how Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Hotmail, Ahrefs, G2, and Clay grew is inspiring however behind each tactic is an individual (or crew) 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 undertaking engineer, an entrepreneur, or a marketer, anybody who focuses solely on methods to develop a enterprise. What issues most is the best way they suppose. Each determination a progress hacker makes is knowledgeable by one query: Will this drive progress? Budgets, campaigns, and even conversions come second to the primary goal: sustainable progress.
The job of a progress hacker is to brainstorm progressive progress methods. In addition to, progress hackers’ obligations embody 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 singular skillset that may be damaged down into three ranges: basic, generalistic, and specialist.
- Elementary progress hacking abilities suggest an understanding of the basic work varieties, fashions, and progress hacking mindset. For instance, understanding methods 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 confer with the skilled abilities required in each activity you’ll do as a progress hacker. For instance, understanding the basics of buyer psychology, information monitoring and evaluation, and visible design are normal progress hacking abilities.
- Specialist progress hacking abilities confer with the abilities required particularly inside your organization. Specialist abilities differ from group to group. The frequent examples are understanding of referral advertising and channel advertising.
- 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 crew.
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?
Understanding the mindset, frameworks, and techniques behind progress hacking is one factor. Truly operating dozens of assessments, monitoring outcomes, and scaling the winners requires a strong toolkit. The appropriate instruments make it easier to transfer sooner, see what’s working, and double down with out burning out your crew.
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 speedy experiments you want a simple technique to check variations. Instruments corresponding to Optimizely, VWO, and LaunchDarkly and different CRO software program helps you to split-test touchdown pages, options, and messaging with out heavy developer work. This hurries up your testing cycle dramatically.
Advertising and marketing automation and e-mail
Automating outreach and nurturing saves time and retains prospects transferring by your funnel. HubSpot, Buyer.io, Mailchimp, and Klaviyo are well-liked well-liked choices for sending segmented, behavior-triggered emails and drip campaigns.
search engine marketing and content material instruments
If content material hacking is a part of your technique, search engine marketing instruments like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo make it easier to discover high-impact matters, monitor key phrase efficiency, and monitor opponents’ backlinks to drive natural site visitors.
Collaboration and backlog administration
Progress groups are cross-functional, so retaining concepts and assessments organized is vital. Challenge administration instruments like Notion, Airtable, and Trello make it simple to keep up an experiment backlog, Iscore your concepts, and monitor outcomes throughout advertising, product, and engineering.
Now, you don’t want each instrument on this record. The secret is to select the handful that suit your metrics, technique, and stage of progress.
For those who’re unsure the place to begin, platforms like G2 allow you to shortly evaluate the highest advertising, analytics, and experimentation instruments in every class based mostly on actual consumer critiques, so that you spend much less time in search of instruments and extra time operating progress experiments.
Hack your technique 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 totally different as a result of each viewers, funnel, and second is totally different.
The distinctive benefit you may have over the massive case research is proximity: you’re nearer to your customers, your information, and your experiments than an enormous advertising crew at a longtime model. That intimacy makes it simpler to note small alternatives and check daring concepts shortly. For those who construct a behavior of framing each advertising, 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 possibly be the following instance folks cite after they discuss progress hacking executed proper.
Wish to take the following step? Take a look at 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 data.