

Why Growth Hackers are Taking Over Startup Marketing - melissajoykong
http://technori.com/2012/10/2600-up-and-to-the-right-why-growth-hackers-are-taking-over-startup-marketing/

======
davidtyleryork
Another day, another "Growth hacker" post that misses the point.

Hacker News, give marketers some credit here. The majority of good startup
marketers are already analytically minded. They already run tests every week,
though they may not run 10. They already look at the funnel and try to move
the needle on AARRR with experiments, A/B Testing, and more. All of this
already exists in the marketing world, and you don't need SQL queries to do
it.

What "Growth Hacker" is really referring to is someone who works on the
Product with the goal of driving growth, not someone who is a marketer with
coding chops. The distinction here is pretty important. Working on Product is
very different than working on Marketing, even though both have the same goal.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes, I thought it funny that given the synonyms that article title is
"marketers take over startup marketing" :-)

Young tech talent does not give enough credit for great marketing. That turns
out to be a double negative since the marketing folks don't want to call
themselves product marketing because it makes them sound 'uncool' and folks
who are ignorant of what marketing does give them no respect.

------
drp4929
Isn't labeling a marketer as "growth hacker - someone focused on creating
scalable growth by manipulating and measuring each aspect of the customer
funnel" is same as labeling a programmer as "bug squasher - someone focused on
establishing a project with consistently very low open bugs reports by
manipulating and measuring each aspect of software quality control" ?

------
arkonaut
> "90% of tests fail"

This is a valuable point for those looking to get into split testing, growth
testing, growth hacking in general. Unless there is this kind of understanding
going in, a 90% 'failure' rate (failure to find something that works) can be
quite demoralizing.

Additionally, startups that hire or look for a growth hacker should be
obsessed with the number and quality of tests, not just the graph magically
beginning to go up and to the right. It's easy to think that anyone that gets
things 10% right isn't really good at their job - don't fall into this trap
with growth hackers. The good ones are testing 10 things a week, so good
results will come.

------
31reasons
Growth Hacking decision/testing idea can come from anywhere in the startup.
Consider GitHub. They decided on giving free account for Open Source projects
and paid ones for private projects. This decision was the main cause of their
viral growth according to the CEO Tom Preston-Werner. This decision can't be
made by a developer or a marketer, unless you are a very small team.

