After reading this article, it has become clear to me that I would never want to work for this guy.
How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#32The text is from a marketeer, and it shows. I hit buzzword bingo in a couple of paragraphs. They're not hackers, they're not ninjas. They are marketeers of the big data generation. Nothing new here, move along. On a side note: average age of 23??? What's with this concept that people in their 40s, 50s or 60s can't be as/more driven than youngsters?
> average age of 23??? What's with this concept that people in their 40s, 50s or 60s can't be as/more driven than youngsters?
Most of the time I have seen the "we only hire young, hungry people" statement, it translated to: we hire (on paper) qualified people who are still cheap and don't have enough experience to say no to the silliest requests we have. After hiring we just give them enoug work to have their first burn out with 30 and then we hire new people.
Most of the time someone in his 40s to 60s has more experience which means better connections to potential alternative employers and costs more money.
Please see this as a general statement, I don't know if this is the case with this company.
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#33You make some decent points, but your "Data Analytics" questions are pretty basic. Stats 101 level stuff. I mean, sure, you might want to open with one or two of these questions, just to test someone for bullshit. But if someone's applying to be a data scientist and can't tell you what a 95% CI means, or what Type 1 and Type 2 errors are, or describe the concept of expected value, their resumes probably shouldn't have passed your filter in the first place.
Second, I take issue with the "marketers are mathematical Neanderthals" line. This is a broad stereotype that does nobody any favors. As much as everyone likes to take swings at MBA types every so often, graduate-level marketers need to be highly proficient in statistics to be competent at their work. Few of them can code, I'm sure, so in as much as that's the case, they're probably not of tremendous value to an early-stage growth team. But a classical marketing training most certainly includes strategy, stats, data analytics, etc. It's not just advertising.
Now, if you're talking about "marketers" in the sense of Communications majors who've never so much as passed Calc B, I'd see your point. But those sorts of people fall into an entirely different category.
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#34So you want 23 year olds who graduated valedictorians of their universities, have PhDs, are accomplished quantum physicists, capable of answering complex computer science interview questions, familiar with statistics, and can explain the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis? Why set your bar so low?
[deleted]
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#35LOTS OF CAPS!!!! I HIRED 4 PEOPLE WHO WERE TOP OF THEIR CLASS! Seriously? This seems like him trying to retroactively explain why he has a good team. Even if his company and his team do their jobs excellently, that doesn't mean he can explain why, or even necessarily create a new team with the same level of success. Frankly, there are a lot of random factors in success. More specifically, as other people have pointed…
The point was to hire the very best you can, which I think is something everyone can agree with.
That's a useless platitude. The point of the article is to define what exactly "best" is. Everyone always wants to make the best choice, but they hardly know what that is. In this case, the author says "best" is top of class, a sentiment with which I vehemently disagree
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#36We have some growth hackers at our company lol. They're basically the slacker engineers that work on salesforce integrations all day long to help sales ppl.
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#37So you want 23 year olds who graduated valedictorians of their universities, have PhDs, are accomplished quantum physicists, capable of answering complex computer science interview questions, familiar with statistics, and can explain the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis? Why set your bar so low?
That confused me as well (even though I do have a university medal) - then I realised that PHD = Passionate - Hungry - Driven, not Doctor of Philosophy :-)
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#38interestingly all the types of people you name- data scientists, quantum physicist, blah blah - are all the same types of people who crunched numbers for the big banks only a few years back until making moves into tech.
im totally for data crunching and analytics but there's a human side of the business that gets overlooked when a team is so heavily decked like this.
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#39Yes, because acquiring one person with a PhD for your team is easy. Difficulty in adding 3 more is probably like finding the resistance of resistors in parallel...
Re: How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team
#40I don't get it - Why do people abuse the term 'hacker' so much? If it's so much hip being one, then, why not try to be a real hacker instead?? Why do people simply call themselves a 'growth hacker' when all they do is simply send a bunch of marketing emails to Techcrunches and Mashables and some PR agencies?? Similarly, it was the term entrepreneur before, for example, I have a huge list of dudes on my Facebook with…
Neya - my growth team does more than just sending marketing emails. We are very data-driven and product strategy is also part of our team responsibility. We use machine-learning based classifier for many part of our company funnels
I don't understand the hostility in this thread.
Willix - For those of us that aren't aware of freelancer, can you provide some numbers on the kind of growth this team has been able to achieve? Also, it will help to know some top performing growth tactics for you guys...examples as specific as the airbnb one would be great!