Growth hacking and sustainable growth seem like an odd couple of marketing strategies, but they are not; they are the two elements that make a long-term marketing strategy.

Growth hacking gives you quick wins and insights, breathing life into your business.

Let me be clear: I'm NOT referring to hypergrowth, which is growth at all costs, regardless of revenue. 

When combined, you end up identifying high-impact opportunities, testing them, extracting useful learnings, and applying them to grow your business. 

The Growth Hacking Mindset

• Focus on rapid testing and data rather than large upfront campaigns.

• Leverage tools and tactics from non-traditional marketing avenues.

• Obsess about market testing and metrics vs. theoretical MBA frameworks

Sustainable growth strategies set you up for long-term success. It creates the predictability needed to go from a scrappy startup to a business.

The Sustainable Growth Mindset

• Nurture and grow your marketing foundation to reach new audiences.

• Measure long-term metrics such as LTV against short-term metrics like ROAS.

• Long-term planning to create predictability through consistency 

Here are some quick rules for how we balanced the two for startups like Dollar Shave Club to get them a quick start and for turnarounds for brands like The Art of Shaving and Lego.

My 3 rules of sustainable growth hacking, plus a bonus.

Rule #1: Plan and measure.

There is nothing hacky about growth hacking. It takes careful planning and benchmarking.
Know your CAC, ROAS, and leading indicators like the back of your hand. 

The biggest danger during growth hacking is hitting a trend and mistaking it for behavior. That is the easiest way to hack yourself off a cliff.

That is where your leading indicators come into play. Leading indicators are simply small metrics and KPIs that signal future outcomes. For example, in e-commerce and B2B lead generation, if your reach is slipping but your conversion rate is high, it may be time to expand to an adjacent audience and not spend your way out of the problem.

Rule #2: Growth hacks in sprints, not as an always-on strategy.
Growth hacking in sprints lets you evaluate what is working, what can be learned from what didn’t work, and most importantly, take what worked and turn it into a sustainable strategy.

This is why companies can grow and hack themselves out of business. Growth hacks may win the game, but a sustainable strategy wins the season. I like to do six-week sprints, four weeks to aggressively market, one week to evaluate the sprint, and one week to adapt any sustainable strategies into your playbook and decide next actions. 

Rule #3: Follow the 3, 2, and 1 framework.

3) Have three channels at all times during a growth hacking sprint.

2) Two channels would be safe, one a long-term safe strategy such as email or SMS, and one should be performance-driven such as Paid Social.

1) It should be an aggressive experiment like dynamic creative personalization (DCO) or AI-driven personalization.

This framework allows you to keep building momentum on tried-and-true strategies while isolating the growth channel for clear evaluation.

Bonus Rule #4 It is about the journey, not the channel.

When doing a growth hacking sprint, ensure you have a well-defined journey or funnel with set KPIs at each point for your ICPs. This allows you to see how all channels interact to get a broader picture of what works as a single tactic but drags the entire strategy down and, conversely, what may look like a dud as a single tactic but have a great and positive halo effect.