Consider co-working spaces like the Impact Hub as natural test beds for growth hacking startups and corporations.  In fact, larger corportions can no longer afford not to invest in growth hacking.

Wikipidia defines Growth Hacking as “a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business. ... Growth hackers are marketers, engineers and product managers that specifically focus on building and engaging the user base of a business.“  

You can see this as the very same process on the engineering and product development side described in “The Lean Startup”, by Eric Reiss, which most of you read when it came out.  He coined the term  “Minimum Viable Product” (“MVP”) and described the MVP process, as you know it.  It was really all about growth hacking on a budget for startups.  Driving down the mistakes with an MVP and increasing the testing until you can smell the traction.  

But shouldn’t growth hacking be for everyone, big and small, old and new?  

CMO’s, CEO’s and CFO’s:  Are you funding growth hacking for your business?  Growth hacking is clearly a great method to find one or more growth formulas that work, and perhaps to constantly accelerate your business.  Afraid to rock that boat?  Think your market is saturated and price is the only driver you can sustain?  Most companies should consider this seriously.  You can’t afford not to finance and hack success for your new products using an MVP approach.  If you can do this all the time, then you may be able to do for your business what growth hackers are doing for many of the best startups. 

Startups use the MVP method to launch and relaunch and relaunch their new products until they hit traction.  Good “Venturepreneurs” know that all that growth hacking must be financed properly. Finding solutions in this manner is generally an iterative process.  Large companies might be well founded to invest in growth hacking (like Facebook does) and to consider it one of the cores of product and marketing R&D. 

To learn more basics about Growth Hacking and some of the thinking behind it, I recommend a quick read of this blog post on the job site, betterteam.com: https://www.betterteam.com/growth-hacking where the editors review their pick for the top 20 growth hacking resources.

You can also learn more about co-working spaces at CoWorker.com.