If the "normal coder" on your startup isn't already a "growth hacker" you're doing something wrong. Same goes for the rest of the team.
Specialization and division of labor are valuable practices, to an extent.
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How to be a growth hacker
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Re: How to be a growth hacker
#32A lot of the comments, imho, don't seem to understand Andrew Chen's post and are just fixating on some of the terminology. In fairness it would be easier to do so had the reader of this post been a regular reader of his blog. It is more readily understood in that context. I recommend reading his analysis of how AirBnB went about hacking for growth. And there are some excellent posts on growth hacking on Quora.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#33If the "normal coder" on your startup isn't already a "growth hacker" you're doing something wrong. Same goes for the rest of the team.
Specialization and division of labor are valuable practices, to an extent.
Problem: the term itself is already not specialized. While there's no doubt a few people in the Valley actually know what it's about - for a startup, anybody knowing how to do one or two of the things below can call himself a "growth hacker":
- UX - A/B Tests - BD - PR - "Virality" - Facebook APIs ...
This is gonna be just like the SEO people of the past, but 10x worse.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#34As software integrates into everything more deeply are we going to get childish names for every profession? Marketers are growth hackers, doctors will be health hackers, lawyers will be justice hackers? Then we can ensure that even when software is as fundamental to our society as law or transportation or materials engineering there will still be a nice sheen of hucksterism and bullshit on top. Good job software peop…
Sanitation ninjas can't be far off. You'll think you're in the clear and drop that wrapper...
most likely they will be at google designing trucks that drive themselves and pick up their own garbage.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#35As software integrates into everything more deeply are we going to get childish names for every profession? Marketers are growth hackers, doctors will be health hackers, lawyers will be justice hackers? Then we can ensure that even when software is as fundamental to our society as law or transportation or materials engineering there will still be a nice sheen of hucksterism and bullshit on top. Good job software peop…
That means that technical marketers are not growth hackers, they are good marketers who are keeping up to date with what's needed to do their job.
But it's more than that. A growth hacker invents hacks as a way to grow - clever, non obvious methods that drive adoption.
Things like the Reddit sockpupperts, the Dropbox two-sided incentive system or the Yammer variation of the Freemium business model are all things where a combination of technical AND commercial knowledge was the thing that drove the companies success.
That isn't technical marketing - it is elements of business model design, integration architecture and startup accounting.
If you think of a better name, excellent - but "technical marketer" undersells what is happening here.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#36Re: How to be a growth hacker
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales and marketing aren't the same. This is not sales. A growth hacker is a marketing engineer, and I don't think that role has been prevalent until recently. Counterexamples are welcome.
Yes, it has been around for a long time. Deal is that these people decide to build a business for themselves and not others. Counterexample? Dan Kennedy is a good and recent one (recent as in still alive). His partner, Bill Glazer, is also a good example.
No, growth hacking is something new. Or rather: "growth hacking" is a term people are using to describe a genuinely new phenomenon. You can trace this phenomenon back maybe 10-12 years, but there is something interesting happening -- interesting enough that people feel the need to coin a term to describe it.
Andrew's example is a good one. AirBnb grew in part by piggy-backing off a pre-existing platform (Craigslist) in a way that required skills in copyediting, marketing, engineering, design, and psychology.
YouTube did similarly via MySpace. PayPay did similarly via email. Lots of people, like Slide, Zynga, RockYou, and even LivingSocial did similarly via Facebook.
There's something new happening here, and it's not coming from "top sales people" or even "top marketers." It's coming from engineers who have decided to approach marketing, customer acquisition, and distribution as an engineering problem.
It's more than quantitative marketing or direct sales. The best growth hackers have a STEM background. This thing, whatever it is, is "growth hacking."
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sanitation ninjas can't be far off. You'll think you're in the clear and drop that wrapper...
most likely they will be at google designing trucks that drive themselves and pick up their own garbage.
Holy liability Batman! Self driving cars are bad enough, and people get in them voluntarily and they aren't designed to crush-compact what they pick up.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it has been around for a long time. Deal is that these people decide to build a business for themselves and not others. Counterexample? Dan Kennedy is a good and recent one (recent as in still alive). His partner, Bill Glazer, is also a good example.
No, growth hacking is something new. Or rather: "growth hacking" is a term people are using to describe a genuinely new phenomenon. You can trace this phenomenon back maybe 10-12 years, but there is something interesting happening -- interesting enough that people feel the need to coin a term to describe it. Andrew's example is a good one. AirBnb grew in part by piggy-backing off a pre-existing platform (Craigslist)…
It's absolutely not new.
Read a biography of P.T. Barnum, if nothing else.
It's like the old cliche that every generation thinks they're the ones that discovered sex.
Re: How to be a growth hacker
#40I am a little confused by the wording of this. I usually think of a growth hacker as somebody who helps scale an app, like an Instagram engineer for instance. Is anybody else confused by the naming?
Good question. In the last few years, the term has been overloaded to talk about a new engineering-like approach to marketing and user acquisition. But the confusion is understandable. I personally think it's kind of cheesy but whatever works for people :)