Growth Hacking Methods, Fails & Learnings

I think you are asking the wrong question. "Growth hacking is super individual and specific to the product/service/industry" that is the hard true about growth hacking. If you ask about unexpected hacks you have high chance to get lost in tactics. I strongly recommend you to start by the the strategy and then go down to tactics. Make some growth audit Step 1: Analytics audit : Check if google analytics (GA) is properly setup. Check your overall on-boarding funnels (based on GA). Goals: - Check if you need to focus on awareness, activation or retention. - Identify current acquisition channel. Step 2: Analysis of customers / prospect: Interviews with your sales & customer success team to see what is their views on ideal customer profile. Review current users breakdown per price plan vs industry and company size. Read users reviews on G2 & capterra. Goals : - Understand customers' use-cases. - Define ideal customers profile. - Compute addressable market and check the alignment with the pricing strategy (model/market fit). Step 3: Competitors' review: Check competitors traffic sources from similar web (and other tools if you have access to ahrefs or semrush). Check competitors' footprint on social media Check competitors pricing and positioning. Goals: - Identify new channels to leverage. - Assess potential to hijack some of the competitor traffic.

I think you are totally right in saying "growth hacking is super individual and specific". I think that in general growth hacking is unique because it is in a sense a "hack" or something that works but typically should not. I think the McDonalds example you gave is perfect. I think there is tons of crazy growth hacks you could try and most might fail and some might even be embarrassing which is why a lot of people shy away from them. The first that comes to mind is Snapchat CEO handing out QR code flyers in the mall and people would often would turn him down and say no. But even getting a couple users could help immensely which people often don't understand. You could also go around and post flyers and stickers in areas that you are allowed to put them up in. You should also go where your target audience hangs out online / offline and talk to them. The sky is the limit, it just depends how creative and how out of your comfort zone you are willing to get. I even heard the Pinterest CEO would change iPhones in the apple store to backgrounds of his app lol. I hope this helps and good luck with your launch!