Yes, growth hacking is real and it's happening right now. It requires a marketer, a mathematician and a psychologist. The math of reaching the numbers and the science of converting them into business-leads is easy to master by a modern digital marketer.

The modern digital marketplace is free from the limitations of geography. This brings the entire globe within the preview of your sales & marketing team. It's possible for you to reach millions of prospects in a few seconds and thousands of them could be buying your product. Minutes have no meaning in the universe that's in our mind. You must have experienced this in your real life too.

The strategy for growth hacking is to use the power of algorithm to attain the tipping point on a smaller budget. It begins with a clear understanding of the industry landscape in which your business operates.

You must first know how to see numbers where they are not apparent. There are numbers involved when you are targeting consumers. These are not just the number of people who are searching for your product, but also the number of advertisers vying for their attention. If you could fish out keywords that reach your customer, yet are not heavily contested then you can make a fortune out of it. This is where AI is useful.

Once you have done the math of numbers, then you know what to use the AI algorithm for. What I have explained above is one such scenario. Note that these keywords might have nothing to do with what you are selling, but they still reach the same target group that buys your product.

Now imagine if you could create a game engine that constantly seeks out such scenarios, where you spend pennies to gain millions of dollars, and applies them to digital marketing with the speed of technology. You could achieve exponential growth in your business.

However, this is not growth hacking, yet.

Growth hacking is when you could design your digital product in such a way that it excites or responds to naturally occurring triggers to encourage the use of the product. It reinforces the elementary psychology concepts of association and amplifies them many-fold with the use of technology. This is already being done by various products in the market.

What I have attempted to explain above is clearly an oversimplification. You might want to read more on the topic. This is one of the most interesting things to read about these days.