
Ask HN: How does a dev become a growth hacker? - k__
I saw many courses for getting into programming and this seems reasonable, because it&#x27;s a rather good defined thing to do.<p>But growth hacking not so much.<p>How does a dev get into this topic?
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seanellis
It's best to learn through practice. If you're working on a web business,
define a growth objective and use your development skills (AKA problem solving
skills) to achieve it. So a good example would be to try to improve new user
activation from 20% to 30% in the next 30 days. We had a similar goal in my
company recently and our VP of engineering generated and implemented an idea
that gave us a 300% improvement in new user activation. It was a new
onboarding flow. Generally you need to run a bunch of tests to find a handful
of things that really make a difference. Other objectives you might want to
consider would be improving customer retention or customer referral or even
building embeddable widgets for 3rd party sites. Developers have an advantage
with growth hacking because they can not only have good ideas, but they can
also execute relatively complex ones. Reading can help, but doing is really
how you learn it.

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dozzie
> But growth hacking not so much.

Because you search with wrong keywords ("growth hacking"). The right one is
"marketing", probably combined with "startup".

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stevekemp
I'm still waiting for "growth hacking" to become synonymous with dark-
patterns.

When I encounter growth-hackers the majority of the time I feel like I've just
been spammed, or tricked somehow.

"Growth Hacking" is the new "SEO".

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jackgolding
I absolutely agree, we have two key examples I think. LinkedIn, the masters of
dark patterns and short sighted, metric driven optimizations over UX and Uber
who do a massive amount of deceptive activity such as
[http://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6074919/the-uber-recruitment-
sc...](http://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6074919/the-uber-recruitment-scandal-isnt-
scandalous) (the author paints this is a good thing but I have to question his
motives.)

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cm2012
All of Brian Balfour's stuff is top notch. Get readin':
[http://www.coelevate.com/growth-machine/](http://www.coelevate.com/growth-
machine/)

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rcavezza
Start treating inbound.org and growthhackers.com like you treat Hacker News.
Everything else will take care of itself.

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partisan
Any disclosures required or are you just a happy user?

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k__
inbound seems a bit suspicious, but the other link seems legit

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cblock811
Inbound is pretty well known. I havent looked at their content in years so I
dont know if it's any good these days but it is legit.

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Jugurtha
Here's a great lecture by Alex Schultz on growth:

[http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/)

On a side note, elocution is also something to notice in that lecture. He
doesn't mumble, he speaks full, clear, sharp, sentences. The ratio
content/time is high.

Reminds me of the anecdote of Niels Bohr complaining to Paul Dirac about not
knowing how to finish a sentence in an article, to which Dirac replied: "I was
taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."

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pryelluw
Stop trying to be a growth hacker and focus on building/marketing a successful
business. You will learn all you need.

