"Growth hacking isn't the best term, but it describes a new process for acquiring and engaging users combining traditional marketing and analytical skills with product development skills. This concept of "growth hacking" is a recognition that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars."

Josh admits that no person or company can actually "hack" growth, and any attempts at artificially creating growth patterns (such as spamming friends on Facebook or Twitter, or hacking App Store download charts) may result in spiky numbers, but rarely adds retained users.

Says Josh, "it's kind of like eating empty calories. Instead, you have to search through your data from your more active and passionate users and discover the deep core patterns that encouraged those users to become active. And then you have to build sustainable features that help attract users on a continuous basis such as good viral flows or great SEO landing pages, and then an experience that helps users quickly understand and become active within your product."

Source: Josh Elman via Medium

Josh Elman is a partner at Greylock, investing in entrepreneurs building social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and connected devices.