
Real engines of growth have nothing to do with growth hacking - bjenik
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/the-real-engines-of-growth-on-the-internet/
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matthewmacleod
I hate to be all "get off of my lawn," but "growth hacking' isn't really a
distinct thing. It's a combination of marketing, branding, social media
management, engagement analysis etc., which are frequently grouped together as
the responsibility of one individual in the early stages. This is partly
because there's not really enough work to partition these into distinct roles
until your product or service has evolved a little!

Ultimately, it's just buzzword-speak for knowing your market, advertising your
product to them, and analysing the results. All the same features as
traditional marketing, and the things this article highlights as important.

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dasil003
It's all solid advice, but my understanding of "growth hacker" as a term was
that it was coined specifically as a counterpoint to the traditional
organization where marketing is in a box and has no influence on product.
Growth hacking is about influencing the product to help growth, cutting across
organizational boundaries to do exactly what this article is describing.

The only problem, the only reason this article is necessary, is the same as
with all good ideas in the information age, it's been overexposed, co-opted
and cargo-culted to death by charlatans, fools and wannabes.

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blakesterz
His 3 principles of growth and his idea “The most powerfully growing
products,” he says, “do three things at once: they make you look smart to the
people you invite. They give real value to you when the people you invite
join. And they give real value to the people you’ve invited once they sign
up.” are all fine and good and true for things like SnapChat but really
there's a huge number of GREAT things that are used and loved and don't need
to have a billion users to be awesome. And for all those things growth hacking
works.

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RyanZAG
Proper growth hacking is different from what he's talking about, I think.
Proper growth hacking would be presenting a product in a way that makes it
easy for people to share it with others. In my opinion, a good growth hacker
is the one that obsesses over the tag line and works to bring popular social
causes into the product while a bad growth hacker is someone who obsesses over
A/B testing.

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RKoutnik
Reminds me of Kathy Sierra's excellent talk on the topic:

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-
building-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-
minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-
software-product-development/)

The gist of it: Help your users do awesome things, then get out of the way
when they share their awesomeness with others. It seems obvious, but I'm sure
we all can think of five companies off the top of our heads that completely
miss this.

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toomuchtodo
> It seems obvious, but I'm sure we all can think of five companies off the
> top of our heads that completely miss this.

We can also think of companies that embrace this. Tesla immediately comes to
mind; customers as well as college students make Tesla commercials _because
they love the product_.

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drinkzima
The entire thrust this of the article seems to be that growth hacking should
just be building a product people love and share. This in itself is completely
obvious.

Even though growth hacking has become a silly term, all the points Andy Johns
makes about reducing friction is exactly the philosophy that drives faster
growth. The point of marketing or growth hacking or advertising or whatever
you want to call the space is growing faster and acquiring more users _with
the product you have_.

We can still stop using the term growth hacking though.

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solve
Terrible title, some great content. Skip the "growth hacking" section and the
rest is good.

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BTC_BruceWillis
Seriously. I was expecting this article to be completely awful, but skimming
it over - it actually seems to be worth a real read.

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jedicoffee
Yea, I really feel that these principles are also valuable when you join. Take
Snapchat or Vine, the popular social aspects (invites) cause the product to be
successful based on growth hacking.

