Does Growth Hacking Work? A Look at 9 Companies That Say Yes

It has been nearly three years since Growthathon—a somewhat underground but highly respected Silicon Valley conference where hundreds of startup founders, developers, and marketers learned the ins and outs of growth hacking and growth engineering.

The event, launched with online publications PandoDaily and VentureBeat, is legendary in Silicon Valley marketing circles because it was the first-ever growth hacking focused event to bring together growth-minded people to creatively tackle distribution and acquisition issues. This was back in 2012 when the term “growth hacker” wasn’t yet on the lips of every founder trying to scale a company.

The one constant since those early growth hacking days is change. Quite a few of the companies and individuals that made that event happen have grown, much of it due to the growth engineering they learned at the event. Here is a look at where they are now.

Wello is a San Francisco-based online platform offering live fitness training over two-way video, founded by Leslie Silverglide and Ann Scott-Plante. At the time of the conference, Wello had triumphantly raised $1M in seed funding. In May of last year, Weight Watchers confirmed that it had acquired Wello, describing the investment as “an important component of the company’s strategy to compete in an increasingly digital weight loss market.”

Tilt (formerly known as Crowdtilt) creators James Beshara and Khaled Hussein wanted to offer a simple solution for groups and communities to fundraise securely and effectively leading up to an event. What have they been up to? Raising a new round of funding that values the company at $400 million as they continue to grow internationally.

Apartment List is an apartment search engine that fosters a trustworthy and transparent marketplace for renters and landlords. Founded by John Kobs, Chris Herndon, and Chris Erickson in 2011, the startup came to Growthathon in hopes of expanding its user base and awareness by generating the most postings, sign-ups and visits. Apartment List has raised $29M in five rounds of funding.

FamilyLeaf—founded by Ajay Mehta, Brandon Paton, Henry Liu, and Wesley Zhao—is a social networking platform enabling families to share photos and updates with everyone in one place. The company's goal at the time of the conference was to get users to sign up for FamilyLeaf that would in turn invite at least three family members. Since then, FamilyLeaf was acquired by Origami, which has since been acquired by eFamily.

Sprig CEO and co-founder Gagan Biyani, also the co-founder and president of Udemy (a global marketplace for teaching and learning online), joined Growthathon as a featured mentor and since then has seen massive success with Sprig. Sprig is a popular app featuring healthy, organic meals delivered within 15 minutes. Since its inception in 2013, Sprig has received $56.7M in funding.

Dev Bootcamp is an immersive, 19-week intensive coding bootcamp for software engineers. A huge victory came for Dev Bootcamp last year when it was acquired by test prep company Kaplan, lending it outstanding credibility. The company is now in expansion mode; the program will open the doors of its San Diego campus next month.

Tradecraft co-founder Russel Klusas came to Growthathon as director at the Founder Institute, and has since co-founded, a full-time, immersive apprenticeship program for those looking to work in startups.

ipsy is a subscription beauty sampling business that was founded in 2011 by top YouTube personality Michelle Phan. The growing team brought Simon Tisminezky (who came to Growthathon as the CEO of Speeddate.com) and Jonny Chan on board, and just last month raised $100M to value the company at over $500 million.

Traction, founded in 2014 by Growthathon organizer Ken Zi Wang and Alex Gold, is a marketplace for finding the best marketing specialist for each company's specific needs on an automated and metric driven basis. Traction raised a $5M seed round in late 2014 backed by an impressive roster of investors including New Enterprise Associates, Lightbank, Metamorphic Ventures, and Cota Capital. It was recently mentioned in a Forbes article "Marketplace Startups Eating Entire Industries."

So, does growth hacking companies work? Based on the outstanding progress that the individuals and companies in attendance have made in the few years since the event, the answer is clearly yes. This development is characterized by extremely profitable acquisitions, impressive next level funding, and the birth of several prosperous companies rocking the startup world.