
A Developer’s Guide to Growth Hacking - GarethX
http://blog.fogcreek.com/a-developers-guide-to-growth-hacking-tech-talk/
======
kamilszybalski
Listen, in essence, growth hacking is this. Instead of building a product and
then marketing it, you understand that the product is the marketing; let that
settle in. Your growth marketer should be involved from ideation phases right
up to executing the whole GTM. You can't build a product and then say, "Here,
now go hack some growth". All that brings is epic magnitudes of failure.

Growth hacking isn't finding a magical lever like airbnb, reddit, etc, you
can't make non-viral product go viral, that's just forceful and any virality
that is forceful and not innately built into the core functionality of the
product just will never achieve sustainable growth, period. It's like all the
nut jobs that talk about the k-factor and all that crap, it's complete
bullshit.

~~~
curiously
I agree but I'd also add the question: is viral growth a right move for your
product? what if the people your free users refer to are more free users? what
if you all the viral attention just end up bringing hoard of freeloaders
instead of customers? You are not facebook, you are not dropbox, you need
customers to survive and you know have an army of seathing, angry, picky,
freeloaders now ready to blog and spread negative word on the first chance
they see something they are receiving for absolute free?

Free has no value. Free isn't a competitive edge. So does viral growth that
just magnifies that aspect really make sense?

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
Free has value and competitive edge. Especially when the costs involve
educating your market.

The problem in your scenario is not that the word spread, but that the word
that spread wasn't any good.

~~~
curiously
I disagree. Free is not something you can compete on sustainable manner.
Eventually you will need to start making cash. It's quite a bold gamble
betting that educating your market will eventually lead into customers.

Imagine if one guy looking for a free tool tells 10 other people about the
free tool. you are going to end up with 11 people now using your tool. if it
costs you to upkeep the tool for each customer, you've now mangified it by 10
fold. you start hoping that one of these customers one day will become a
customer but are they really? you've sold them something free, it costs
nothing therefore there's no reason to pay for it, ever.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
It's not a bold gamble, educating your market is definitely taking into
account as a cost of capital, from consumer electronics to, food, to tech
startups. And it's definitely not about hope, there is a clear marketing
strategy to get people to buy again. Just google free trials and samples, even
supermarkets have been doing this forever, it's not a new concept.

This is because it is ALWAYS more expensive to get a new customer than keep an
older one.

In software, the cost to onboard a new user is or should be insignificant. If
you don't have this working for you, go back and try again.

------
lukasm
Whenever you hear anyone talk about 'growth hacks,' just mentally translate it
in your mind into 'bullshit'.” PG

~~~
pbreit
It's possible this sentence hinges on "hacks" vs "hacking". I'd be surprised
if PG had a problem with hacking for growth. In fact I think he would embrace
such a thing mightily.

~~~
austenallred
It's not really "hacking" \- it's just marketing. Occasionally you may beat
use a trick to beat a system, but mostly it's a bullshit buzzword that
marketers came up with.

Unfortunately, it works really, really well.

I wrote a (free) book[1] on user acquisition, following the pattern of a lot
of the programming tutorials that helped me learn to program. I originally
called it "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition." The title got tons of
traffic and interest - up to 100 tweets a day, many from people I'm convinced
never read it. When I changed it to "User Acquisition for Developers," the
traffic dropped significantly, so I changed it back. But I don't think I can
live with myself, so when I have time I'm going to take the word "hack" back
out of it.

Bullshit buzzwords sell. And for every critic in the comments section, this
post has a bunch of upvotes. That's almost a marketing truism - a few people
will be annoyed, but it's really easy to drive the masses.

[1] [http://austenallred.com/user-
acquisition/book/](http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/)

~~~
gk1
I've been resisting the urge to use "growth hacker" as a title, so I still go
by "user acquisition consultant." Every now and then I get asked if I can help
a company with "growth hacking," and more often than not it's an early warning
signal that the company thinks they can sneak their way to success without
putting in real work.

------
valisystem
> "It’s really about science."

Where all samples are unique and uncontrolled, no matter what you do, any
consistent results are basically meaningless.

Once you've got samples size big enough to be statistically relevant, well,
your growth problem is probably already solved.

------
codexon
Seems like this could be summarized into 1 sentence. Think of ideas,
prioritize them, and test them. This is too broad to be considered growth
hacking.

Real growth hacks are things like AirBnB spamming Craigslist, Reddit creating
the illusion of users with fake ones, and Rap Genius giving out tweets for
backlinks.

------
maroonblazer
The talk sets up a straw man at about 1:30 with the Ellis quote saying,
paraphrasing: "Most marketing departments are doing it blind, not looking at
the data and not running experiments." Perhaps that's the case for most tech
start-ups, where there is no one with a marketing background involved, but
it's not the case for any moderately mature business that I've come across (in
nearly 20 years of marketing) including 2-5 person shops just getting off the
ground. Quite the opposite I find most marketers to be data-obsessed and will
diligently test and track permutation after permutation of tactic to tease out
what works and what doesn't.

------
random_rr
So I noticed you often lead sentences with "so."

~~~
wbsun
So what's the problem :)

------
curiously
I'm going to be honest. I did not really get a good value out of this article.
It's written in sections but is extremely dry and generic. I'm not sure what
makes it so, but just the language here seems like somebody wrote it for the
sake of writing because they had to.

Read through the article but didn't walk away from any new insights or new
angle. A good article in my opinion needs tension and a climax towards the
problem and then a resolution, much like a good story or music.

This might sound harsh but I just wanted to add some constructive feedback.
The title certainly was catchy but found it more of a clickbait.

