Uncorrected proof · not for sale · 01 / Title

Morgan Brown

Notes on compounding

Growth & product executive. Co-author of Hacking Growth. Everything he knows about product growth, to inspire and drive your business.

First edition · MMXXVI

02 / Chapter I

The Operator

Every business leader, product owner, or entrepreneur has the same challenge: unlocking growth. Morgan Brown has spent his career helping companies and products do just that—leading growth and product at Opendoor, at Shopify, and at Meta, where he worked on growth for Instagram.1 Before that: founding COO of GrowthHackers, COO at Qualaroo, head of growth at TrueVault. Here is what he knows.

From acquisition to retention, revenue to referrals, he delivers talks to audiences and teams around the world about how to grow:2 not a bag of tricks but a system—rigorous, cross-functional, patient. The thesis hasn’t changed since 2017. The companies keep proving it.

Figure 1. Output of a growth system over time, log scale. A line chart on a logarithmic scale. A dashed grey line labelled “a hack, decaying” spikes early and fades. A vermillion line labelled “the system, compounding” rises steadily and is still rising at the edge of the chart. 10× 100× 1,000× YEAR 1 YEAR 4 YEAR 8 a hack, decaying the system, compounding
Fig. 1 — Output over time, log scale. Hacks decay; systems compound. The axes are unnumbered on purpose.
03 / Plate I

The Book

Plate I. Hacking Growth, with Sean Ellis. Crown Business, 2017. Reproduced here in type only.
2017 NOW 750k+
copies in print, cumulative

Get the book

“Doing for market-share growth what The Lean Startup did for product development.”

From the jacket — Hacking Growth, 2017
04 / Praise

Praise

Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to this urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology for finding and optimizing new strategies to increase their market share and quickly.”

Eric Ries — bestselling author of The Lean Startup

“…growth-hacking pioneers Ellis and Brown show how to break down those traditional barriers and marry powerful data analysis, technical know-how, and marketing savvy to quickly devise and test ways to fuel breakout growth.”

Nir Eyal — bestselling author of Hooked

Hacking Growth will teach you how to think like a marketer of tomorrow.”

Josh Elman — partner, Greylock Partners
05 / Appendix A

Selected Work

  1. Growth & Product Opendoor 2020— · current
  2. Director of Product, Growth Shopify 2018–2020
  3. Product Management, Growth Meta / Instagram 2017–2018
  4. Founding COO GrowthHackers 2014–2017
  5. COO Qualaroo 2013–2014
  6. Head of Growth TrueVault 2013
06 / Chapter II

Present Tense

07 / Correspondence

Letters

Growth strategies, straight to your inbox: occasional letters with his best tips on how to grow your business, for free.