
How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team - willix
http://www.growthsensei.com/blog/2013/2/5/how-to-build-kick-ass-growth-team
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alanctgardner2
LOTS 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 out, the focus on academic
credentials is ridiculous. I suppose if you create an insular team where
everyone can pat each other on the back for having a 4.0 GPA, that's fine. But
there are tons of good technical people without any credentials, or who didn't
give a toss about school. Not only are you not willing to hire them, you've
created a culture where even if you do find someone amazing without
credentials, that person will be a second class citizen.

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mattbarrie
The point was to hire the very best you can, which I think is something
everyone can agree with.

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alanctgardner2
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

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neya
I 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 titles like CEO, CTO for a <insert a dotcom
domain with a wordpress blog with a free theme installed here>. Being an
entrepreneur/hacker is one thing and abusing the terms is totally another!

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willix
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

~~~
shanelja
I don't know if it's just me or if I've had a long day, but I can't really
understand posts of this kind anymore when they are effectively just buzz
words/phrases strung loosely together.

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RyanZAG
That's the point, he is actively making it difficult for you to understand
him. By dropping in words with complex backgrounds, he hopes you (you
generally, not you in particular) do not have enough knowledge in those
domains to understand how those terms do/do not fit together. This leaves you
in a position of having to accept his point as there might be truth in what he
is saying - you aren't knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between the
correct and incorrect usage of the terms.

Generally, someone who understands the concepts will not use terms strung
together like that unless forced. "machine-learning based classifier" with
"company funnels" seems a bit suspect in this case, and probably needs a blog
post to explain fully, not a simple one line rebuttal as above.

So yeah, it's not just you.

~~~
neya
Very well explained, Ryan. Agreed!

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jonnathanson
You 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.

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brown9-2
So 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?

~~~
arethuza
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 :-)

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emilis_info
I am sorry to put it this way in this forum, but the "bullshit" and
"buzzwords" warning lights on my panel have just lit up.

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hannes2000
"So I have a team of 12 Growth Hackers / Data Scientists / Product Managers-
Growth / Whatever the f __* you call it - I call them growth ninjas"

Is this satire?

~~~
mattbarrie
I think if you called the team marketing you would struggle to hire people
with the right skill sets into it.

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sergiosgc
The 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?

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fallenhitokiri
> 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.

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josh2600
I can appreciate the content of this article. I believe the author is correct
about a number of things. I wonder though, if the author understands just how
much his bizarre use of capitalization undermines his point.

If you are trying to apply accents to specific words, you'd be much better off
with an underline or the even subtler italization. The random caps and
questionable word choice throw me off. Why, for example, does the author refer
to his engineers as ninjas and what does that have to do with their
qualifications? I thought we were done hiring rock stars and samurai and that
we could return to the days where professionalism was important.

In short, I appreciate the message, but despise the delivery. If you can
afford to hire PHDs, ninjas and other such elite folks, you can afford to hire
someone to edit your writing, and you should.

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speeder
It is interesting the focus on academic achievements.

Yet I think, that yes, it means they might be hardworking people, but does not
guarantee much else.

Sometimes you find great people that are not even graduated, and I am not
talking about "Bill Gates fake dropout", but people that never set a foot in
college in first place.

Some people started their trade very early, sometimes in childhood, and when
they reach 20, they are already masters of it.

Of course, these are rare, so if you want to risk less, hiring only the best
of their classes is fine.

~~~
onemorepassword
I don't agree with the logic behind it in this context.

a) Working hard in a commercial environment is something different from
studying hard. Many successful academics are motivated by acquiring knowledge,
but find it very hard to motivate themselves to produce stuff, especially
marketable end-products.

b) Laziness is not a major obstacle for a good hacker. Since there is a
limited amount of time per day one can truly focus, laziness can be a great
aid in picking your battles and avoid wasting energy.

~~~
speeder
Interesting.

Yes, hard to argue with that.

What I would say is that a top class might at least know how it is to work
hard...

Maybe.

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rdouble
The brave new world where there are no jobs for PhDs so they have to work for
the marketing spam department.

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saosebastiao
After reading this article, it has become clear to me that I would never want
to work for this guy.

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janlukacs
You lost me at buzzword strategy growth buzzword overhypedbuzzword hacker.

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mustefaj
You had me at Big Mac. Maybe.

It seems like such arbitrary conditions you set in order ...wait a minute, I
just noticed the website is "growthsensei.com", that's like Guru level 88?

Aaand that's all my time for the day.

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rfergie
Question for willix: How is growth hacking for freelancer.com different to
good marketing for freelancer.com?

~~~
mattbarrie
Growth is marketing- it's just done with a different set of people than you
would do a decade or more ago. Instead of people with MBAs or marketing
backgrounds you do it with computer scientists and statisticians, and you base
your actions on science; lots of testing and data.

~~~
rfergie
That is the point I need clarification on.

For a site like freelancer.com (large number of users, entirely online,
lifetime value very important) testing and data work very well.

So since marketing is growth, isn't this the approach that would be used by a
good marketing department?

Obviously a bad marketing department would do things differently, but a good
one would find the activities that gave the steepest growth curve

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edhooper
Sharing what you look for in a growth hacker and what questions to ask is very
useful as many people claim they are great at "growth hacking".

My biggest insight from this is that growth hackers need to be mathematical
and not marketing gurus.

Great article! Keep em coming

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snake_plissken
Yes, 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...

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juanbyrge
We 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.

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murtali
interestingly 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.

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zomgbbq
I'm really hoping this whole article is satire.

