Growth hacking celebrates shortcuts over substance. Here's why it fails long-term, what the real costs are, and what sustainable growth actually looks like.
Somewhere around 2010, Sean Ellis coined the term "growth hacking" and Silicon Valley collectively lost its mind. The idea was seductive: forget slow, methodical marketing. Forget understanding your customers. Just find the hack, the trick, the exploit that makes numbers go up and to the right.
A decade and change later, the results are in.
Growth hacking gave us LinkedIn scraping your email contacts and spamming everyone you'd ever met, costing them $13 million in a class action settlement. It gave us Amazon designing a cancellation process so deliberately hostile that they literally named it after Homer's epic about the decade-long Trojan War. It gave us Uber building software specifically to deceive law enforcement in cities where its service was illegal.
These may sound like cautionary tales from way out in the margins but they're not. These are, instead, some of the most celebrated growth stories of the modern internet and those tactics are now the subject of regulatory investigations, heavy fines, and an increasingly sceptical public.
I'm not here to launder growth hacking into respectibility. It was always the wrong idea. You shouldn't do it and you should disassociate from anyone doing it.
The growth hacking myth goes something like this... Clever people, unencumbered by the boring constraints of traditional marketing, find wonderful and ingenious shortcuts to explosive growth. Hotmail added "Get your free email at Hotmail" to every outgoing message. Dropbox gave you free storage for referring friends. Airbnb reverse-engineered Craigslist listings etcetera etcetera.
These are the foundational parables, repeated oft in blog post, conference talk, overlong LinkedIn post that's sniffing its own farts and overpriced online course about growth hacking, delivered by somebody who is apparently incredibly successful, but who also is selling courses online instead of doing cocaine on a yacht somewhere.
What nobody mentions is the survivorship bias. For every Dropbox referral programme, there are thousands of failed "growth hacks" that burned money, alienated users, or landed companies in court. The success stories get mythologised and the failures quietly buried. Growth hacking can never fail, it can only be failed.
Andrew Chen, who popularised the concept with his 2012 essay "Growth Hacker is the New VP of Marketing," wrote a somewhat more measured reflection in 2024 acknowledging how much has changed. The mobile growth era that made many of these tactics possible has matured. Consumer novelty has significantly decayed. People aren't interested in trying new apps because their phones and brains are already full. They're tired.
The environment that made growth hacking feel like magic has fundamentally shifted, but the industry keeps grinding away at the same old playbook.
The deeper issue is the mindset that growth hacking promotes. It treats users as obstacles to be overcome rather than people to be served. That's why the framework literally has "hacking" in the name. It is telling you something about the relationship you're building with your audience.
Let's talk about what happens when you make growth hacking an operating philosophy. I am about to list some of the dodgiest tech companies here. Financially successful sure, but also riddled with Silicon Valley libertarians who would love to extract value from customers as if it were a new gold rush and you were "them there hills"
Uber is perhaps the purest expression of growth-at-all-costs culture ever assembled. Under Travis Kalanick, the company's motto was literally "always be hustlin'."
They entered markets without regard for local regulations, built a tool called Greyball to identify and evade law enforcement officers, employed a kill switch codenamed "Ripley" to lock down computers during government raids, and paid academics to produce research supporting their economic model.
They lost their London operating licence in part because of Greyball. Kalanick was forced to resign.
Amazon named its Prime cancellation flow "Iliad" after Homer's epic about the Trojan War. According to the FTC's complaint, cancelling required navigating four pages, making six clicks, and choosing from fifteen options, each designed to dissuade you from leaving. On mobile, it took eight pages and eight clicks minimum.
Internal emails revealed employees describing Prime enrolment as "a bit of a shady world" and unwanted subscriptions as "an unspoken cancer." One email referenced an executive as the "chief dark arts officer."
In 2025, Amazon settled for $2.5 billion, with $1.5 billion going directly to refunds for 35 million consumers. The FTC also established that individual executives can be held personally liable for knowingly implementing dark patterns.
LinkedIn harvested users' email contacts through its "Add Connections" feature and then sent repeated invitation emails to those contacts without clear consent. Did you get those emails? I did! Users described being embarrassed by emails sent on their behalf to professional contacts, damaging their reputations.
The $13 million class action settlement in 2015 might seem modest by today's standards, but it established a precedent: using dark patterns to artificially inflate your user base has legal consequences.
Now we can argue all day about whether it was "worth the cost" for them, and fines work to change behaviour, or if some people are born bad or do they become bad. We can argue about that all day. DM me on LinkedIn. We can argue about it. But yeah, this is the logical endpoint of a philosophy that treats growth as the only metric that matters and users as inputs to be optimised.
Growth hacking is fundamentally an acquisition-first strategy. Get more users. Get them faster. Worry about everything else later. Only... "everything else" includes the things that make a business sustainable.
Customer acquisition costs have risen by roughly 60% over the past five years. In some sectors, particularly SaaS and fintech, the numbers are even more dramatic. According to research from SimplicityDX, ecommerce customer acquisition costs have increased by 222% since 2013. At the same time, acquiring a new customer costs anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one.
Growth hacking rarely addresses retention because retention isn't exciting. There's not really a hack for "consistently deliver value to people over time.".
But the data is unambiguous: increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25 to 95%, according to research by Bain & Company. Companies have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer versus 5-20% for a new prospect. Existing customers spend 67% more and generate roughly 65% of a company's revenue.
Yet 44% of businesses still prioritise acquisition over retention. Only 18% prioritise retention. The growth hacking mindset is a significant contributor to this imbalance, because it celebrates dramatic acquisition spikes over boring but profitable work of keeping people around.
Intercom's Des Traynor wrote one of the better critiques of this mentality back in 2020, arguing that growth is too important to hack. Real growth, he argued, "comes from describing your product in the language your customers use, from owning your signup flows, from genuinely teaching people how to solve their problems."
None of that is a hack. All of it is hard, honest work.
Growth hacking and dark patterns are bedfellows. They share the same DNA. The belief that it's acceptable to manipulate people into doing things they wouldn't choose to do if given a clear, honest option.
The FTC has been progressively escalating its enforcement against manipulative design. In 2022, it published a staff report documenting dozens of deceptive practices including roach motels, pre-checked boxes, confirmshaming, and buried disclosures. It followed that with a policy statement warning that "trick-or-trap" subscription interfaces could constitute illegal deception. In October 2024, the FTC finalised its Click-to-Cancel rule, mandating that consumers must be able to cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up.
The EU's proposed Digital Fairness Act aims to harmonise dark pattern prohibitions across GDPR, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act. The UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gives the Competition and Markets Authority power to fine companies up to 10% of global turnover for deceptive practices.
This matters for growth hacking because so many of its celebrated tactics are, when you strip away the jargon, dark patterns with marketing. A "viral loop" that forces users to share to access features is a form of coercion. An onboarding flow that pre-selects every possible notification is a pre-ticked box violation. A cancellation process deliberately designed to be harder than signup is a roach motel.
The fact that these practices were invented by "growth teams" doesn't make them any less manipulative. An Uber is a taxi and an AirBNB is a landlord. You are not a magical third thing.
If growth hacking is the wrong model, what's the right one?
The answer is, I am afraid, disappointingly unglamorous. You build something valuable, you communicate it clearly, and you treat the people who use it with respect.
This sounds like a platitude, but it has specific, practical implications.
Invest in retention. The research is consistent... Retention-focused companies grow 2.5 times faster than those prioritising acquisition. That means onboarding that helps people succeed, customer support that treats problems as valuable signals rather than costs to minimise, and product improvements driven by what existing users need.
Measure what matters. Growth hacking optimises for vanity metrics: signups, page views, initial conversions. These are inputs, not outcomes. Lifetime value, retention rate, recommendation rate, and repeat purchase rate tell you whether you're building a sustainable business.
A SaaS company with 10,000 signups and 90% churn isn't aggressively growing. It's aggressively leaking.
Respect user autonomy. When you remove dark patterns from your signup flows, your consent mechanisms, and your cancellation processes, something counterintuitive happens: the people who stay are there because they genuinely want to be. Their engagement is real. Their data is meaningful. Their likelihood of recommending you to someone else is dramatically higher than someone who was tricked into signing up.
Build trust as a competitive advantage. Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt is instructive here. When iOS users were given a genuinely neutral choice about whether apps could track them, over 90% said no. That destroyed a whole category of growth hacking tactics overnight.
But the companies that had already built their strategies on trust and first-party relationships barely flinched. They'd done the hard work of creating genuine value and loyal customers already.
Think in years, not weeks or campaigns. The compounding effect of sustainable growth is extraordinary. A business that retains 95% of its customers and grows at 10% annually will dramatically outperform one that grows at 40% but churns 30%.
The growth hacker doesn't want to hear this, because to a con artist, it sounds boring. But boring is what works.
Alright, stay with me on this because we're about to go on something of a journey together.
Growth hacking didn't stay confined to Silicon Valley engineering teams. It metastasised into something far worse. An influencer ecosystem built on selling the mythology of the grind to people who can least afford to buy it. The grift they peddle is a 1:1 copy of how growth hacking markets itself. It's all vanity and aspiration, but you're the one paying to chase the dream.
You know the aesthetic I am referring to. Some weird Patrick Bateman style bloke with a great jawline and rockin abs films himself at 4am, standing in a cold plunge pool, telling you that the reason you haven't made your first million is that you're just not working hard enough. He posts a carousel on LinkedIn about how he skipped his best friends wedding because "winners don't take days off." He sells a course for $5,000 that makes some really broad-strokes claims about 'leadership' and then upsells you into a $50,000 "mastermind" where the real secrets live.
The secrets, inevitably, are about how to sell courses and masterminds. Fuck. It was a multi level marketing scheme. Another one. It's scams all the way down folks.
Scroll through enough of this content and a pattern emerges that goes waaaay beyond bad business advice. The language is indistinguishable from manosphere content except with the serial numbers filed off.
Deny yourself pleasure. Eliminate weakness. Cut off anyone who doesn't serve your mission. Embrace suffering. Dominate. From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel, I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. You know... Adeptus Mechanicus shit.
The only difference is that instead of "alpha male" they say "high-value entrepreneur" and instead of "sigma grindset" they say "monk mode."
The underlying fetishisation of self-denial and control is identical. It's submission and domination dynamics but repackaged in a LinkedIn-friendly carousel, and the people consuming it don't seem to notice they're being sold lifestyle kink content as business strategy.
These are men posting about skipping friends' weddings for a decade because "winners don't take days off." Filming themselves eating the same meal every day because "discipline is freedom." (I do this but it's not Soylent it's neurodivergence). Bragging about sleeping four hours a night (also do this - wish I didn't) like it's an achievement rather than a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
This is antisocial. It's the deliberate annihilation of every human connection and experience that exists outside of revenue generation. It's a lifestyle manifesto that treats friendship, leisure, and community as enemies of success rather than the things that make success worth having. It's the fantasy of becoming capitalsim's warrior-priest class.
And it targets young men with the precision of a guided missile.
The hustle bro influencer space is overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly aggressive, and overwhelmingly built on a version of masculinity that equates vulnerability with weakness, rest with laziness, and human connection with distraction. It preys on the same anxieties that the rest of the manosphere exploits: the feeling that you're not enough, that you're falling behind, that the world is passing you by.
The prescription is always the same. More. Harder. Faster. Feel nothing.
The implicit promise is that if you suffer enough, the emptiness will stop. It doesn't. Several of these influencers have admitted on camera that they've built enormous businesses and feel absolutely nothing. They then went straight back to posting that motivational content the next day, because the content is the product and the product is the grift and the grift must never stop.
This matters because the hustle bro philosophy is just growth hacking applied to the self. The same logic that says "trick users into clicking Accept All" gets repackaged as "sacrifice everything for the metric." The same contempt for human autonomy that designs a four-page cancellation flow gets turned inward as "your feelings are irrelevant, only output matters."
The whole thing is a closed loop of extraction: extract value from users, extract labour from employees, extract meaning from your own life. Call it a strategy.
The numbers tell a grim story. In 2025, 77% of professionals report burnout in their current jobs. 55% of employees report burnout specifically related to hustle culture. The World Health Organisation reported 745,000 deaths in a single year from stroke and heart disease linked to overworking.
Research from the Journal of Occupational Health found that the risk of burnout doubles when employees move from a 40-hour to a 60-hour work week. Working over 55 hours weekly increases stroke risk by 35% and actually reduces productivity to near zero.
And yet the hustle bros keep selling. The business guru space is, in Mark Corrigan's immortal phrase, essentially "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs" for the LinkedIn age. It's people who've made money selling advice about making money, creating an infinite regression of courses about courses, masterminds about masterminds, and content about content.
The product is the aspiration itself. The customer is anyone desperate or naive enough to believe that the reason they're struggling is insufficient hustle rather than, say, structural economic conditions, inadequate support systems, or the simple mathematical reality that most businesses fail regardless of how early their founder wakes up.
Gen Z, to their enormous credit, appear to be calling time on this.
Nearly 75% of Gen Z employees now prioritise work-life balance over salary. 64% value mental health over financial growth. The "soft life" movement has emerged as a direct counterpoint to hustle culture, and 72% of Americans now define success through happiness and fulfilment rather than professional achievement.
The four-day workweek, once dismissed as a fantasy, is now offered by 22% of employers, with over 90% of companies that tested it reporting maintained or increased productivity.
The grind is a grift. It's a coping mechanism dressed up as a philosophy, sold by people who profit from your exhaustion.
Real businesses aren't built by lonely men in high towers, skipping weddings to chase another sheet of cold calls and dead leads. They're built by real people who have something worth coming home to.
If hustle bro culture is the influencer strain of this disease, "growth mindset" is the corporate one. The same pathology in a different suit.
Microsoft is the case study. Under Satya Nadella, the company has built its entire culture around Carol Dweck's mindset theory. The idea that people with a "growth mindset" believe their abilities can be developed through effort, while those with a "fixed mindset" believe their abilities are innate.
On paper, this sounds harmless.
In practice, as Ed Zitron documented in devastating detail through over a hundred pages of internal Microsoft documents and conversations with current and former employees, it's become something closer to a corporate religion. Complete with prophet (Nadella), holy book (his 2017 bestseller Hit Refresh, which employees were instructed to discuss with customers and partners), confessions (twice-yearly "Connects" where employees must write essays demonstrating their growth mindset), and a priestly class of managers who can declare you insufficiently devout.
The scientific foundations are shaky at best.
Attempts to replicate Dweck's findings have consistently failed when Dweck herself isn't involved in the study. A University of Edinburgh study of 624 children found no support for the idea that fixed beliefs about ability are harmful or that mindset plays any significant role in cognitive development.
A meta-analysis published in the Psychological Bulletin concluded that the apparent effects of growth mindset interventions are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias. Researchers with financial incentives to report positive results, such as those who'd written books on the topic or earned speaker fees, were more than two and a half times more likely to find significant effects.
None of this stopped Microsoft from making it the centrepiece of employee evaluation. I once worked at a place that suddenly started talking about "a growth mindset" when employee burnout was soaring and satisfaction was falling. That was a huge red flag at the time. I would burn out myself in that same environment months later.
Anyway, back to Microsoft. Workers must demonstrate their growth mindset in performance reviews, but there are no numerical ratings or objective measures. Being told you "didn't display a growth mindset" after a meeting, with no explanation of what that means, is apparently common. Employees have reported that raising legitimate engineering concerns, such as poor code quality or broken tooling, gets met with instructions to "apply growth mindset" rather than, say, fixing the tooling.
The structure is familiar if you've been paying attention.
Like the hustle bro who reframes exhaustion as discipline, the growth mindset reframes systemic failure as individual inadequacy. Missed a deadline because your team is understaffed? That's not a resourcing problem. That's your fixed mindset showing. Product is shipping bugs because the codebase is a mess? You need to see feedback as an opportunity to grow.
The system is never wrong. You are always the thing that needs fixing.
This is the same logic that drives growth hacking. Growth hacking says the user is the problem to be solved. Hustle culture says the individual is the problem to be solved. Corporate growth mindset says the employee is the problem to be solved.
In all three cases, the system that created the conditions for failure is never examined. The pressure is always directed downward, onto the people with the least power to change anything.
The final indignity? Microsoft now encourages employees to draft their growth mindset performance reviews using Copilot, its generative AI. Managers are instructed to use Copilot to summarise those reviews when making promotion and reward decisions.
Performance at one of the world's largest companies is being evaluated through a chain of pseudoscience filtered through hallucination-prone AI, and everyone involved is expected to treat this as normal.
A high-level engineer with decades at the company was fired for "low performance" because he couldn't demonstrate sufficient impact in his Connects, despite spending hours educating other employees and likely saving the company millions. The system isn't se up to reward value. It rewards compliance with the system., and the system has created authoritarian structures which binds employees and does not protect them and protects leadership but does not bind them.
This is where the growth hacking philosophy ends up when it puts on a lanyard and gets a desk. Not a cold plunge pool at 4am, but an open-plan office where your career depends on writing the right essay about how you've internalised the right pseudoscience, and a machine gets to decide whether you've performed your devotion convincingly enough.
The word "hack" implies a shortcut, a workaround, a way of getting what you want without doing the proper work. In software, a hack is an inelegant solution that technically works but creates technical debt. In business, it's the same: a short-term fix that creates a long-term liability.
Real growth isn't usually fast or dramatic. It comes from understanding what people actually need, building something that serves those needs well, and communicating clearly about what you offer and what you don't.
It comes from treating conversion rate optimisation as an exercise in user empathy, from recognising that every person who visits your website is a human being making a decision, and that your job is to help them make a good one, not to trick them into a profitable one.
The growth hacking era is ending. Regulators are closing the loopholes. Users are getting wiser. The economics have shifted. And the businesses that built on manipulation are discovering that the bill eventually comes due.
Another web is possible. One where businesses grow by creating value, not extracting it. Where the path to sustainable success runs through genuine service rather than clever exploitation.
It's slower. It's harder. And it works.
If you're ready to move beyond growth hacking to sustainable, ethical optimisation, get in touch. We help businesses build growth strategies that respect users and deliver long-term results. Explore our CRO consultancy services or find out how our experimentation programmes build compounding growth without the manipulation.
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