What 300 years of growth hacking can teach us

Growth hacking is what happens when timeless first principles join forces with technology, operations, creativity, and revenue. The goal is to create a scalability engine that essentially runs on autopilot.

That’s what you do. Here’s what you get:

If you move forward with a clear strategic vision:
A steady, sustainable, and robust path to scalability.

If you’re not smart about what you’re doing:
Shitstorm.

What’s amazing about growth hacking is that the concept is timeless. It’s a practice with roots back to the industrial revolution.

That means, in building your growth engine, you have hundreds of years of experience to draw from. Here are some of my favorite lessons:

Lesson 1: Dive into growing markets as early as possible. Own it.

In 1739, Eliza Lucas Pinckney realized that a growing textile industry was creating a need for new types of dyes, so she developed a high-quality blue indigo.

Because her dye was the first and best solution in this growing market, sales took off and dramatically impacted the United States economy. Its development produced one-third of the total value of colonial South Carolina’s exports before the Revolutionary War. As a 16 year old entrepreneur, Pinckney growth hacked the distribution of her high-value product. In 1989, she became the first woman inducted into South Carolina’s Business Hall of Fame.

This concept goes back to the metaphorical big fish in a small pond analogy. When you’re among the first and you bring something awesome to the table, you’ll be a shark like Pinckney.

Markets can be technology ecosystems, places, or networks of buyers and sellers. The market that Eliza Lucas Pinckney entered was a growing textile industry.

Lesson 2: Seek out strategic amplification points

At the height of the dot-com boom, online transactions were taking off through marketplaces like eBay. This ecosystem spurred the development of PayPal in the early 2000s.

Over time, PayPal became one of eBay’s official payment systems. But this wasn’t always the case.

As PayPal noticed their growth among eBay sellers, they worked out a deal with eBay to include the PayPal logo on the listings that accepted PayPal. The logo sat side by side with other preferred forms of payment like Visa and MasterCard logos.

This partnership took off because eBay was an established, but growing market for online auctions. The growth of this marketplace inspired a need for a safe and streamlined payment system.

More and more sellers started accepting PayPal as the role payment option, forcing users to create accounts. PayPal was so invaluable to eBay’s marketplace that eBay bought it for $1.5 Billion.

Lesson 3: Quit forcing people to jump through hoops

“Reduce friction” is the core lesson.

Growth hacking is more than just bringing people to your website.

You need to offer prescriptive guardrails or guideposts. If users are confused, frustrated, or faced with a time-consuming sign-on process, they’ll churn faster than you can say your name backwards.

After all, you’ve seen for yourself how easy it is to order off Instacart or Doordash.

Make the sign-up process as easy as possible. Embrace the heavy lifting, so people have a clear path to jumping in.

Lesson 4: Lean on partner ecosystems enhance distribution

In 1946, Estee Lauder founded the Estee Lauder company to sell high-quality skin care products that her uncle developed. Her customer base included hotels and beauty salons, but she quickly realized that she could reach a larger consumer base through channels where makeup lovers were already shopping—department stores.

Her sales genius led to her own counter at NYC’s Saks Fifth Avenue in 1948 and Neiman Marcus in 1950.

The key is to identify your marketing vision. Leverage technology to make it easy, seamless, and bigger.

Lesson 5: Don’t be afraid... to get a little guerilla

If you fixate on perfection, you’re never going to start. Establish your vision. Then work backwards to piece together your first iteration.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘minimum viable product.’ For growth hacking, the concept is similar in that it’s possible to get started with a ‘minimum viable engine.’

These are processes that you can automate as your initiatives start to scale, but when you’re first starting out, guerilla is your best option.

I went through a similar process when I built a growth engine to scale Investopedia’s audience by tens of millions of readers. When I started, I had a $200 marketing spend, zero engineering resources, Excel, basic reporting, a notebook for feverish brainstorming, and a telephone to call my boss, our company president, for a pep talk. Ten years after this system’s earliest iteration, it is now an enduring operational framework. I went from throwing darts in the dark to scaling a few hundred dollars into ROI, which became a foundation for a line of business.

The trick is to start with your vision and work backwards. Be a connector, iterate, strive for improvement, and be relentlessly patient. Believe in your goal, give setbacks the finger, and don’t wuss out.

Final Thoughts: Focus on sustainable growth, not quick wins

Don’t get caught up on the term “growth hacker” or even a specific definition for it. Turn your attention to the fundamentals.

You need to know your ‘why’ before deploying the ‘how.’

That means building the right systems, engines, and analytic frameworks to support your goals. Unless you’re focusing on the interconnectedness of these operations, your efforts may fall flat. Build an engine, not a series of disjointed campaigns.