what is growth hacking? understanding growth hacking basics and best practices. growth hacking is a set of cross-disciplinary skills with 1 goal and 1 goal only: to grow a startup or a business. this means the only focus of a growth hacker is growth, growth and growth. the ultimate goal is to find a predictable, repeatable and scalable growth process. therefore, growth hacking is a process. and this is this process that many companies used to find new growth hacks. what people often forget when reading about successful growth hacking examples like uber, airbnb or facebook, it's that it took a long learning process before finding an effective growth hack. the growth hacking process can be applied either when you are building a startup from scratch or when your business is more advanced. first, it’s important as a startup to choose which metrics or kpis (key performance indicators) to focus on. each startup needs to have its own metrics. startups are defined by their search for growth and choosing the right kpis is key for your startup. in order to bring growth, a growth hacker has many channels he can use: seo, sem, social media (smo, smm), content marketing, pr, email marketing, online/offline event organizations, video marketing, aso, referral marketing (viral growth), ui/ux, gamification, business development/strategic alliances, sales… having an effective sales and marketing strategy in place is what can make your startup go from failure to success. growth hacking is nothing without analytics. without data analysis, growth hacking would be ineffective. you need to be able to track what you’re doing. every action you take needs to be trackable, if you can’t, then you cannot see results and you cannot improve your strategy. having a data-driven mindset is crucial. you don't just want to focus on acquisition, but also on your conversion rate optimization (cro), your retention, etc. users’ feedback is extremely important. during a/b testing, you need to get feedbacks from users. sometimes it can be annoying to get feedbacks, especially when it’s negative but it is crucial to improve your product and make it more user-centric. negative feedback is the most important actually. you need to take care of unhappy users/customers, they are the best ones. why? 96% of unhappy users leave your product without telling you why, which means you most likely won’t know what was wrong. the 4% telling you why, explain you and allow you to improve your product, which means they can become evangelists if they really like your product’s improvements. if they complain, it is usually because they need your product the most and they just want it to be perfect.