Growth Marketing 
Brainstorm growth hacking tactics across all stages of the AARRR funnel
Facing a similar challenge?
- Talk to someone who has been there before
- Get unbiased insight from industry veterans
- Work through the issue with a mentor by your side
There’s this misconception that you can only growth hack if you’ve hit product-market fit and you’re ready to scale. But you can use growth hacking methodologies no matter what stage you’re in. Even if you’re at a pre-revenue “product validation” stage.
Growth hacking is all about using an agile process that’s grounded in rapid experimentation and constant learning. It’s the business version of holding a growth mindset, and it’s for that very reason that it works so well.
Referring back to the pirate metrics (AARRR) here are an assortment of popular actionable growth hacking tactics have been used successfully.
Use these as inspiration, not as gospel truth of what works and what does not work.
Acquisition Growth Hacks
- Hire a VA to scrape contact details of your competitors’ customers from review websites and cold email them
- List your startup on every single startup directory and startup competition site (think Producthunt & Betalist)
- Build or join a private link network for backlink exchanges
- Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to find Quora questions that rank high for your target keywords and answer them all
- Hack your email list with exit intent popups employing some sort of scarcity or urgency driven offer or content upgrade
Activation Growth Hacks
- Created a guided onboarding process in your app and use conversion boosting techniques like checklists
- Retargeting inactive users
- Free shipping
- Use gamification to increase stickiness
- Offer free trials or some sort of money back guarantee
Revenue Growth Hacks
- Build cross-selling into your product
- Create partnerships as a product extension
- A/B test your pricing plans (black hat)
- Email marketing promotions
- Retargeting growth loops for upsells
Referral Growth Hacks
- Get customers or users to refer their friends in exchange for some sort of a bonus
- Create viral content
- Run contests and sweepstakes
- Pay influencers
- Build an affiliate program
Retention Growth Hacks
- Send swag to your customers
- Offer customers free consulting leveraging your team’s idle time
- Give high spending customers discounts and bonuses
- Be vocal about your product development, upgrades, and involve your users in your journey.
- Create “VIP Only” Slack and Facebook groups for start clients
- Onboard customers 1:1 in early stages
- Do things that don’t scale
If you’re currently brainstorming growth hacking experiments to run with your team, speaking to a growth mentor might help.
You’ll be able to share your idea backlog with your mentor and get a second perspective. This can help you head off potential mistakes down the road (and also give you some pretty awesome new ideas you might not have thought of!).
MENTORS WE RECOMMEND FOR THIS TOPIC
Johannes Radig
Co-Founder at 
For me, growth hacking does not mean unsustainable or even unethical growth tricks. It means combining qualitative and quantitative data, often a bit of coding and some magic dust to come up with novel solutions to problems, giving you an edge in your growth strategy.
“Book a call with Johannes. In 30 minutes he gave 7 actionable things to do. Overall great conversation and he really is able to analyze your funnel of a few data points. Come prepared and you will be rewarded with golden nuggets!”
Ayhan Isaacs
Founder at GrowthRhino.com
“Johannes was super helpful when it came to SEO and content strategy. He gave me some actionable insights I was able to put in place right away. 🙂 Definitely book a call with him.”
Veronika Cervenakova
Growth Marketer at 
Max Corbeau
Analytics Consultant
I specialize in analytics, that is, collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing data to drive faster and smarter decisions. I also sometimes do some CRO as there is a natural fit with analytics. Been doing this for about 8 years, so I've seen my fair share I think.
“Max completely blew my mind and now I have to reconsider everything I thought I knew about B2B SaaS analytics. We mostly discussed Mixpanel, Google Analytics and Amplitude. How they should be properly setup and some advanced considerations with them.”
Jan Kuzel
Head of Growth at 
“My call with Max was about how to best structure a Google Data Studio dashboard and the dynamics at play. We spoke high-level about conversion attribution models and in passing he mentioned about Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and how using it you can track recurring revenue transactions using UserID and therefore measure LTV across channels. #Mindblown that I didn’t know about this. Silly me, just tracking the first conversion value all this time. As a person, Max is very professional, intelligent, and well-versed in all matters analytics.”
Foti Panagiotakopoulos
Founder at
Morgan knows growth! He unlocked tremendous value for my startup by orienting his tactical advice to the top-of-funnel stages of growth. Morgan had a dizzying number of state-of-the-art hacks for my bootstrapped venture that totally changed our go-to-market launch plan. Book a session with him and thank me later!
reviewed by
Graig Peterson
Founder at StorySquad.education
Mentor Morgan Schofield
A TON of value in only 30 minutes. Cody has great insights across the entire funnel. He’s given us about 3 key ideas for improving our sales funnel, all of which make complete sense. Thanks so much, Cody! Highly recommended for FB ads and overall CRO.
reviewed by
Scott Coates
Head of Marketing at Upright Growth
Mentor Cody Lee