Hacker Playbooks / Hackers / Sean Ellis Do not scale a nice-to-have. Measure must-have. Then run a cadence of experiments against a North Star. Growth is a process you can install, not a personality.
If fewer than ~40% would be very disappointed to lose you, spend on the product, not on acquisition.
Model Growth team
Engine Experiments
Stance PMF first Products
Dropbox (growth) Referral and must-have energy as folklore GrowthHackers.com The scene named after the phrase Hacking Growth The textbook version Across the five stages
How they actually operate. 01
A segment that already feels the pain as a fire, not a mild inconvenience. Growth hacking without that segment is just spending.
01 Interview until the pain is in their language.02 Avoid markets where the alternative is 'nothing, and that is fine'.03 Use early adopter intensity as a filter.04 Write the must-have hypothesis before the growth backlog.02
The product has to complete a job that people would miss. Features for 'growth' that do not serve the job are leaks.
01 Define the core action that equals value.02 Build onboarding that reaches that action fast.03 Resist channels that would dump tourists on a weak core.04 Put experimentation discipline in before the headcount.03
A high-intent list and a survey culture. You are not collecting emails. You are collecting people who would be upset if you vanished.
01 Qualify the waitlist.02 Talk to users weekly. Notes beat dashboards at this stage.03 Prepare the must-have survey for people who used it twice.04 Draft the North Star so launch week has a real scoreboard.04
Launch is an experiment with a date. Referral mechanics, a clear CTA, and instrumentation — not a party.
01 Instrument the path from click to core action.02 If you use referrals, make the reward native to the product.03 Staff the comments. Qualitative is a launch metric.04 Do not buy scale the same week you are still finding the sentence.05
A backlog of bets, a cadence, a Star. Kill losers. The original 'growth hacker' is a process owner, not a trick pony.
01 Run the disappointment survey on a schedule.02 Protect the North Star from vanity metrics.03 Industrialize what works (Dropbox-style referrals) only after PMF.04 Write the playbook so it is not trapped in one person's head.