
“Growth Hacking” is BS - Jake232
http://layeredthoughts.com/startups/growth-hacking-is-bsits-all-just-marketing
======
natrius
_"So, why is the title “Growth Hacker” a bunch of BS? Because it’s just a way
for marketing averse startups to hire marketers without having to publicly say
they’re hiring marketers."_

This is false, as you disprove a few paragraphs later:

 _"The goal of a marketer is to grow a customer base. That’s what these growth
hackers are doing, they’re just doing it in a more technically advanced way
via data confirmation and split testing."_

That is the _entire_ point of using a different term for it. Precise language
is a useful tool. A job title that says "we're looking for technically
advanced marketers" in a concise way will get you a better signal to noise
ratio.

I don't understand why this offends you.

~~~
itmag
To me, "growth hacking" evokes more than just marketing.

Let's say my startup hustles like crazy and carves out a deal with a major
coffee chain (like Square did with Starbucks IIRC).

Suddenly we have access to a whole lot more users. We grew the user base
drastically, yet it wasn't exactly a result of marketing but rather one of
strategic dealmaking.

To me, that is the quintessence of growth hacking.

~~~
dataisfun
Why not just call it business development? Why do we need the word "hacking"
as part of what has been the way businesses grow?

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ivankirigin
There is too much talk about titles and too little talk about how to get a
product development process in place that allows for great product design that
also achieves key metrics.

This post doesn't go very far in furthering the discussion. The answers come
not from anti-[job title] posts, but something more positive, like describing
how things get done at Facebook, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Zynga, and other orgs that
are good at shipping product.

I talk to a lot of companies, and it is pretty easy for them to think they
want to focus on growth. The interesting problems appear when (as always)
there is more to do than you have the resources to get done. How as an
organization do you deal with that? Driving towards growth is pretty simple,
but doing it in parallel to building and selling a compelling product is
harder.

By the way, Dropbox had a referral program before I got there. I just helped
turn the dial up a bit, in addition to separate product changes.

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localhost3000
Here's the bit i never understood with this 'growth hacker' meme: if you're
working on or for an early stage startup then _everyone_ is a 'growth hacker',
right? if your people aren't working to grow your product/service/community
then what the hell are they doing?

To the self-proclaimed and aggrandized 'growth hackers' - the OP is right:
You're a marketer who took (and absorbed) a stats class. Stop being so fucking
pretentious. Joining facebook (or whatever) after the inflection point and
claiming responsibility for its growth is like joining apple four years ago
and claiming responsibility for tripling the share price.

~~~
batgaijin
Well, it's on my business card. I guess that's what I'm going to be defending
for the next few years.

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grueful
No. Context is very important here, and it's actually quite apt with regard to
hiring and being hired.

Data-driven marketing (DDM) is a huge thing now because it reliably magnifies
revenue streams. However, the skill set to execute on such strategies is a bit
non-traditional for marketing. If you want to hire someone to help build your
DDM team, you don't necessarily want a business grad or a top salesman. What
you want is an math or engineering transplant, someone with the statistical
and technical skills necessary but who knows or is interested in learning the
business and marketing aspects.

"Growth hacker" moonlights as a buzzword, but it's actually a great way to
spin a job opening to appeal to the audience you need to attract: tech-to-
business transplants. Ergo, it can also be effective self-branding if you're a
tech-to-business transplant looking to make $$$ for helping to create well-
documented X% to XX% revenue improvements.

~~~
nrmehta
Totally agree with you. I think this is about hiring the right type of people.
Honestly, marketing has a bad reputation with many technical people. So if you
tried to hire a CS grad into an online marketing role, it might be tough.
Hence the new title. Whatever works!

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arturnt
I disagree with this article. A "Growth Hacker" is an engineer that applies
himself in the field of marketing. This means coming up with interesting and
innovative ways of lowering the cost of user acquisition. The distinction is
important since Marketing itself is a very loaded term.

Companies like Zynga thrived because they found cheap ways of getting users:
early un-managed FB platform, and app referrals. Same with AirBnB and their
craigslist post automation.

Growth hacking isn't going to make your product better, but more people will
be aware of it.

~~~
THX420
<blockquote>A "Growth Hacker" is an engineer that applies himself in the field
of marketing.</blockquote>

or a marketer who learns how to code?

~~~
richardw
It's possible you might end up with an equivalently effective person, but I
think it'd be easier to transition from coder->marketer. I suspect that the
knowledge required _to be useful_ is about 70-30, or maybe 85-15, heavily on
the coder side.

To pick up some marketing ideas that will start moving the needle on your
startup, read a small book. You'd probably already know enough to start
iterating on 3 or more techniques.

To get a marketer to pick up the most basic coding skills, start with flow
control and variables. It could be a month before you're useful, in one
language only. Then understand HTML, SQL, the server-side language, maybe
jQuery, plus maybe security so you don't start adding lots of useful but
dangerous code. Understand performance, so you don't kill the server with a
loop in customer-facing code. Not just be able to click a "add new test"
button, but integrate ABingo without hassling the rest of the team (if that's
the best tool for the job). The point is: whatever it takes. You need to know
enough technical concepts to be fast and loose with whatever will move the
needle best. You're making few marketing decisions, but many technical ones.

So: fully agreed with your other comment. Marketers will be well-served by
getting into some of the code, because it'll enable them greatly. But if I
were hiring a marketer->coder, I'd be a lot more wary.

Up until today, I've disliked the growth hacker "thing". But these posts have
clarified it for me. I'm generally irritated at the non-bschool vibe around
here, but on this issue I'll lean heavily on the coder side.

~~~
bretpiatt
All the details of programming are complicated and you can justify it with
your expert knowledge as fact. Perhaps marketing is just as complicated but
seems simple since you just see the output / results and do not have the
expert knowledge to realize the detail that went into it?

~~~
richardw
I certainly don't think world-class marketing is simple at all. You get
brilliant people in all roles, and I'm in awe of the best in the business. But
most startups don't need killer deep-knowledge marketers who could design a
marketing strategy for Coke but have learned to program a bit. Most startups
need someone well-versed in technology who knows enough about marketing to
move the needle on growth.

------
jfarmer
Rather than pooh-poohing this new word or dismissing it by claiming that
people use it so they can avoid calling themselves marketers, ask yourself:
"Why do people find this distinction useful?"

That would make for a much better article, IMO.

Here's a thread where I attempt to justify the term:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309570>

~~~
ramanujan
Absolutely. The term has a definite meaning. It refers to a software engineer
with enough market awareness, copywriting savvy, and statistical ability to
run a campaign full stack. There aren't that many people with this skillset,
but they are valuable. By contrast, the typical person listing "marketing" on
LinkedIn is just not that technical.

A good growth hacker can conceptualize and code the AirBnB/Craiglist
integration; most of the people listing marketing on LinkedIn can't do that,
skilled as they may be in other respects.

~~~
russtrpkovski
Sounds like you are referring to a generalist.

------
ashray
I think you might have come off as more credible had you said that 'Growth
Hacker' is a BS title. That is just a title and anyone can really have that. I
have a site with 25 million page views per month, I've been running it for
years all by myself, am I a growth hacker ? No. Did I do some growth hacking ?
Yes. I used some innovative methods to garner and maintain traffic; methods
that traditional marketing folks wouldnt't probably use.

Growth hacking might be a buzzword. But to me, it means coming up with a
unique and viral way of attracting users to your product. There is a lot of
unchartered new territory in marketing - social media being a big one.
(turntable.fm had an interesting user acquisition route, I'd call that growth
hacking)

Personally, I'm excited to see the new and innovative ways in which marketers
will leverage these new technologies to reduce the cost and increase the speed
of user acquisition.

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programminggeek
Maybe instead of arguing of meaningless titles for these roles, we should get
back to building things, finding users, making money, and all that jazz.

------
jacques_chester
_An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which
have, under old names, become odious to the public._

\-- Tallyrand

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wonnage
Personally I've decided to accept that buzzwords and titles will proliferate,
and that this is impossible to prevent. Isn't the whole not-caring-about-
titles thing part of startup culture? As long as you can do your job, I don't
care if your business card says growth hacker or marketzilla or SEOgasaurous.
You might face greater scrutiny if your resume says "Rails Ninja" on it, but
in the end it's about whether you can program, and whether a Rails Ninja is a
good culture fit when everyone else is a Javascript Pirate.

Doing due diligence (i.e, a proper interview) for a hire means figuring out
the truth behind the bullshit. If you don't actually have enough knowledge to
differentiate between a bullshit $TITLE and a good candidate who happens to
call themselves $TITLE, then you don't have enough information to make a good
hire anyway.

Hell, the titles are helpful sometimes. Candidates non-ironically self-
identifying as a trendy title can help you filter out idiots. They're doing
you a favor.

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olalonde
This post is at risk of becoming a "reverse" self-fulfilling prophecy by
exposing more people to the buzzword. I have personally never seen it in the
wild (except once through HN, when the term was first introduced).

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sbochins
I think most marketers are supposed to have some technical experience if you
are looking for a job in SV. I notice people saying being a growth hacker is
like being a marketer but more technical. Most marketing job positions require
at least a little "front end" developer knowledge. In short calling someone a
growth hacker is annoying because it is trying to obfuscate an easy to
understand job title and is unnecessarily buzzwordy.

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j45
Confused. Growth hacking is BS, but growth hacking is marketing, and marketing
is legit?

You summed it up nicely.. growth hacking is marketing using technical skills.
I think that summary is very attractive to technically minded people, and
makes it unique compared to traditional one way marketing.

If growth hacking is introducing marketing to a technical crowd and enable
them to grow customers in a tech centric industry (startup), why the
frustration? Is there some underlying issue with non-tech marketers not being
able to connect with results in tech startups as well?

Having a foot in the technical and business world for the last decade has
shown me that techs tend to learn more about business than vice versa. Capable
people are everywhere though, maybe we need Growth Hacking 101 for marketers?

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lambtron
I always thought "growth hacking" meant a hacker that has strong knowledge of
"hacking" tactics (a/b testing, optimizing on boarding funnel, etc) as well as
a keen business sense (markets, distribution, etc) to grow the startup's user
base.

Anyone?

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THX420
You're right sir.

And this helps answer another popular theme of 2012: should people learn to
code? YES.

This is a great example of what other professionals (non-coders) can do if
they learn new tools, if they learn how to work with code.

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sicxu
So, growth hacker is a marketer. Fine. But not all marketers are growth
hackers. My understanding is that, growth hacking is a specialty in marketing
which focus on consumer web marketing. It is also a very technical and hands
on position. As a growth hacker, you not only need to have a marketing plan,
but also need to implement or help implement the marketing plan. There is
nothing wrong for giving a name to a sub-category of marketing profession.

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danielharan
This would be a lot more credible if lean startup and cloud deployment weren't
described as "talking to your customers early and often" and "hosting as a
service".

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BrainScraps
I think I've read the term "growth hacking" too many times between the post
and the comments and now it sounds like something a bad oncologist does.

I should go to bed.

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mattmuns
I believe one of the nuances of the "growth hacker" title (cheeky title
concerns aside) is the implication that user acquisition and product dev need
to be interlaced. Consumer web is too competitive today to build a product and
bolt on user acquisition. A role that sits on both the growth team and the
product team is essential. Thus the birth of the growth hacker.

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corkill
While the term used is irrelevant.

I would say there is a big difference between the typical marketer and someone
that's able to execute something like the airbnb/craigslist integration (and
by execute I don't mean code every line).

Or someone that's able to take a product from 0 to 500k users.

I do agree though in terms of online, not knowing about any of this stuff
makes you a much less effective "marketer".

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gamebit07
I partly agree to it. The web is full of buzz words meaning nothing. Growth
Hacker, however refers to a combo of marketer +coder. I get totally pissed off
at terms like _python rockstars_ , _javascript pirates_ _rails ninjas_.
Seriously WhyTF do we need such pompous terms? An experienced programmer goes
well.

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parkeremmott
I somewhat get the argument that using the word "hacker" in relation to a
marketing function somehow defiles the coveted word. But it does describe a
role that is distinct from other marketing roles, so it deserves a different
title. Call it what you will, but the semantics don't bother me.

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pjmo
Everyone in digital media trying to have you click an ad is practically a
"growth hacker"

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aymeric
A bit off topic: how do I go about finding a freelance marketer? People I find
on odesk seem to be of the spammy kind. Any advices?

~~~
phodo
You might want to try some of the business schools that are future looking and
might have strong eng / entrepreneurship programs and often cross pollinate
these students in their admissions or classrooms. Students are often willing
to help out to gain their own experience, especially those desiring career
changes from eng to business. for example: MIT, Stanford, etc.

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oxwrist
It's different in a way that growth hacking looks at retention and marketing
doesnt.

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nshepperd
So using the term "growth hacking" rather than "marketing" is marketing?

