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Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#161

Post by shostack »

kristineberth wrote: post #117
shostack wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there. The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers…

The problem with finding great marketing people is that there's no barrier to entry into the profession. Anyone can (and does) say that they're a 'marketing expert,' a 'growth hacker' or a 'marketing guru' [gag]. To be great at it, yes, people need to have technical ability. But they also need a sort of sixth-sense intuition (visual sensibility, language skills, an understanding of psychology) that can't be taught or…

Most solid digital marketers I know are entirely self-taught because when they were getting started there was no real digital marketing industry. "Digital" was just the new channel people had to try out.

And yes, I agree it takes a great marketer to spot others. It would be a like a designer interviewing someone for a coding position. They might say lots of technical jargon type stuff and you'll have no idea what is made up, what is buzzwords, and what are signals that say a person is good at what they do.

I wonder if companies would pay for a marketing consultant to help them hire.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#162

Post by shostack »

thibauts wrote: post #126
shostack wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there. The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers…

As a programmer I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of coding skills are useful to marketers. Could you give me examples of use cases and useful tools / languages ?

The other response pretty much nailed it.

Basic working knowledge of how code works on the web, and how data flows from Point A to Point B is a bare minimum in my mind.

Then you're often dealing with a data warehouse, BI tools and the modeling hell that comes with it, etc.

Beyond that, there is using code to improve performance directly. Speeding up page load times directly impacts SEO these days with Google. Knowing where and how tracking breaks (ad blockers, cross-device cookies dropping, messed up UTM params, cross-domain tracking setup, cross-channel attribution, etc.) and the million "gotchas" that come with any analytics platform is also quite technical.

Then outside of the tracking there's things like media and ad buying. There's some crazy work that goes into bid algorithms used by all the big search and display platforms.

The other poster's point about getting it into all the nooks and crannies of your marketing channels is spot on. Involving marketing and adding tracking to every single new feature is a requirement for product development. Linking all marketing systems under one roof and determining a SSoT is critical, but often Sisyphean, task.

In terms of a basic tools/languages list, I'd say...

- HTML, JS, CSS - Whatever stack you're working on...so common ones probably have some PHP or RoR - Google Analytics and/or Omniture, or some other solid analytics platform, as well as their respective APIs for dealing with events and other goodies - Other pieces in the marketing stack such as data warehouses (Redshift, etc.), email platforms, CRMs, bid management platforms, ad servers, tag management systems, CMS's, etc. These all need to be linked together in an ideal world.

Feel free to ping me if you have any other questions. Contact info is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#163

Post by ameister14 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
ameister14 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't used to be. Growth Hacking used to mean Marketing+Coding+Statistics Now it just means marketing.

But good marketing pretty much always leveraged statistics. Growth hacking seems to be simply marketing applied to marketing itself - a rebranding to include the word "hacking", because word "hacking" is hot, and all the cool kids these days like it.

While good marketing leverages statistics, usually the marketing personnel themselves do not understand statistics. They'd turn to the engineers to design a landing page for them and to the data analysts to do the statistical modeling for them. They won't think of writing a script to work for them or build a program to handle their reporting.

In my understanding, a growth hacker should basically be able to do all that themselves in addition to having the more traditional marketing skills.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#164

Post by zepolen »

zepolen wrote: post #137
rsweeney21 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to product market fit, the founders need to be selling. Once you have product market fit, you need people who already know how to sell your type of product into your target market. That was a mistake that we made. We started by hiring smart people and trying to let them figure out how to sell. I strongly recommend NOT doing that. In startupland, time is your greatest enemy and you don't have time for people to…

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#165

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#166

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#167

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#168

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#169

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your top growth strategy that helped grow your startup?

#170

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #164
zepolen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]
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