Growth hacking means hunting for unusually efficient, repeatable routes to growth: experiments over budgets, mechanics over media buys. The word covers everything from clever format tricks to the banned schemes that end accounts, so every pitch using it deserves one question: what exactly is the mechanism?
The tricks that keep working share a property: they give the platform MORE of what it wants, faster, instead of faking it.
Format arbitrage is the classic: platforms overpay reach on formats they're pushing (Shorts and reels in their day), and early movers collect the subsidy. Everything adversarial decays as detection catches up, and the tool graveyard is the industry's own record of how those bets end.
Run experiments with measures: one variable, one week, judged in analytics. Steal mechanics from adjacent niches before your own copies them. And put purchases in the same frame: a starting count is a growth experiment with a known cost and a chartable result, which is more than most hacks can say.
The clean end is just competent marketing. The banned end violates platform rules (not laws, usually) and risks the account. Know which end a tactic lives on before running it.
Boringly: short vertical video on every platform, posted consistently with strong hooks. Surface-level tricks change monthly; the format subsidy has held for years.
Either the platform patches the mechanic, or everyone adopts it and the edge averages away. Both happen fast, which is why systems beat secrets.
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.