Jul 1, 2026

Build Faster, Earn More: Introduction to Growth Hacking Part 1

Part of the Build Faster, Earn More series, this Introduction to Growth Hacking guide helps teams with limited resources optimize their marketing to efficiently grow.

In this series we will be discussing growth hacking and how it can help you optimize your marketing efforts. This guide will help you to grow your community and to build new audiences for your games, independent of platform. Here we will give you tools, tactics, and techniques needed to apply growth hacking to your marketing strategies. Whether you have a dedicated marketing team or flying solo, growth hacking provides you with a set of tools and methods that can help you find avenues for growth through community and content optimizations.

What is Growth Hacking?: A framework for continuous, data-driven iteration

Can I Be a Growth Hacker?: Understanding if growth hacking is right for your game

Designing Your Game for UGC: Turning players into content creators

Defining Your Target Audience: Research and audience segmentation

What's next?: A preview of Part 2

What is Growth Hacking?

Originally from the start-up world, where limited resources demand fast and efficient growth, growth hacking is a framework centered on continuous, data-driven iteration and testing new ideas. We can view Growth Hacking as a core loop with three main steps:

Build
The first step is to Build. The best way to grow quickly is to experiment. To do this, make many different kinds of content and see what works best. Mix existing, trending, and behind-the-scenes content. Post consistently, don't wait for perfection. Update your plan weekly, focusing time and budget on posts that meet goals.

Measure
The second step is to Measure. Check your results every week to see how content performed. By keeping score, you'll better understand what content gets more views, click through, or engagement. As you get more comfortable with the basics, you'll unlock efficiency, maximizing your budget as well.

Iterate
The third step is to Iterate. Learn what works, then refine and improve your approach. Whether you are posting a few times per week or everyday, using data to uncover audience insights leads to better content and potentially innovative ideas for your game.

Growth Hacking is a core loop that can be broken down into three steps. You are meant to iterate through this process multiple times.

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Throughout this article, we will be adding tips that help smaller creators leverage Growth Hacking in an accessible way.

Can I Be a Growth Hacker?

Both diligent solo developers and teams with social media support can benefit from growth hacking in the following ways:

Internally define the most engaging parts of your game's core loop or features.

Understand your authentic brand and decide how you want to build your community.

Identify where your audience spends time online

With clarity on these aspects of your game's business, you can apply growth hacking to new and returning audiences. With that, there are games that are more suited to growth hacking than others. Some of the qualities of games that are suited to growth hacking include:

Games that utilize live services - with live services, you will have plenty of updates to share, increasing your content volume.

Games that have emergent gameplay - this style of game creates more opportunities for players to create User Generated Content (UGC).

Games that have existing communities - having an existing community allows you to activate it further through your content strategy.

Growth hacking can apply to marketing initiatives more broadly but we'll focus on social media and community. Platforms that we'll be discussing in this article include Instagram, TikTok, X, Discord and YouTube. We will be featuring case studies from VR games throughout on how to implement growth hacking successfully.

When engaging in growth hacking we are looking to work systematically across three core domains:

Ask yourself these questions, "what should I be posting?" This is where experimentation comes in. To do this you will want to create different forms of content while measuring results on a weekly basis and iterating based on what works. This requires trying a wide range of content types: previously created assets from your team or others, new content that takes inspiration from other games and trends, and behind-the-scenes (BTS) content. Consistency is key; don't let perfection slow you down. Iterate quickly each week and focus budget/energy only on proven methods.

"Where should I be posting?" Identify channels where your audience lives and engages. A developer may find out that some channels are better for reaching a greater share of their audience (YouTube), while some are better for immediate action such as hitting the follow button or clicking through (TikTok), they may also find connection to broader industry leaders on platforms outside of their player base (X, LinkedIn).

"Can my audience participate in content creation?" Activate the community through incentivized user-generated content (UGC). User generated content can dramatically increase the visibility of your title at a much lower cost than a traditional ad campaign, and it displays social proof that someone in the community enjoys your game.

Designing Your Game for UGC

Care must be taken when designing your game so users can go from being passive consumers of content to authentic creators of content for the game. Creating seamless ways for players to demonstrate their skill, or show something funny or meme-worthy will allow your game's reach to grow exponentially by leveraging UGC. Learn more about leveraging UGC to turn your game into a content machine here⁠.

Design your game so people can be creative and generate their own content. This gives you more opportunity to share UGC on your platform.

Emergent gameplay is a characteristic of games that typically do well with growth hacking. Emergent gameplay occurs when complex, unexpected, or creative behaviors and experiences arise from the interaction of simple game mechanics, systems, or rules. This emergent gameplay creates prime opportunities for content creation as oftentimes these gameplay moments occur in ways that were not explicitly designed or anticipated by the game's developers.

Take 30 minutes each day to scan your hashtags and community for UGC. Repost as appropriate to validate community and increase content on your page at no cost.

A great example of a game that has succeeded using growth hacking is Hard Bullet VR. A physics sandbox game, Hard Bullet VR lends itself to many opportunities for creative UGC because players can adapt gameplay into fun social content. Players have the kind of environment where they could create a Rube Goldberg Machine or even create their own version of the classic Rick Roll meme, all within Hard Bullet VR.

Hard Bullet created this UGC series across their socials called "Clip Hazard." View it here.⁠

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Utilize UGC for social media posts to save time and resources when posting to your accounts. Make sure to ask the person who posted first as a best practice.

Defining Your Target Audience

Before sharing or promoting your game, make it a priority to define your target audience. Your audience will define what content is appropriate based on age and affinity.

Some important things to list when defining your target audience are:

🌱 Tips For Small Teams:

Start by asking yourself "who would want to play my game?" Then think about what games that audience already plays. If you do nothing else, use this information to define your audience.

What's next?

Growth hacking is the process by which we create off-platform content experiments across marketing channels and product development to identify the fastest, most efficient way to grow a business. Stay tuned for Part 2 where we discuss more in depth on this topic!

For the latest updates, follow us on X⁠, Facebook⁠, and LinkedIn⁠, subscribe to our monthly VR developer newsletter, and join the conversation in the Meta Developer Forum⁠.

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