

Ask HN: What is growth hacking like as a career? - biznerd

I find this very interesting.<p>How steep is the learning curve for this particular profession? How hard is it to break into the industry? Anything else I should know?<p>I was thinking my path could be:
1) take General Assembly&#x27;s digital marketing class to learn the basics and get some credentials:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;generalassemb.ly&#x2F;education&#x2F;digital-marketing<p>2) Work on my own projects and get them to grow so they can serve as portfolio pieces. Also to build skills.<p>3) Maybe work for just shares at a small 1-2 person startup on the side.<p>4) go FT when I feel confident in my abilities
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patio11
I don't particularly love the branding of growth hacker but let's take it as
given that it usefully describes a set of skills.

Practical experience outweighs "credentials" by literally infinity. Portfolio
pieces are extremely helpful. People who are incapable of doing any useful
work _abound_ in this and related fields, and employers suck at hiring, so
case studies and testimonials are virtually the only sorting mechanisms with
any value.

A bright engineer can learn to be dangerous with marketing in between 2 weeks
and 6 months depending on the engineer and circumstances. (Some of the overlap
of those two fields is commonly called growth hacking, but that isn't
coextensive with the field. I am, personally, skeptical of the value-add of
growth hackers who cannot, in fact, ship software when required to. My
skepticism is not shared by at least some influential people who write about
growth hacking frequently.)

If you can reproducibly print money on command with your skills, be they
marketing/engineering or growth hacking, you should probably never work for
free (working for "just shares" is working for free) and will probably find
your specialty in absolutely stratospheric demand at the moment. Chargeout
rates in the 5 figures per week are totally reasonable in the current
environment.

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biznerd
I'm not an engineer/programmer. Is that okay?

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patio11
That's not an impediment if you can actually generate results. Candidly, it
has not been my experience that many non-programmer growth hackers actually
produce meaningful results.

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ASquare
This would be a great question to ask on growthhackers.com (started by Sean
Ellis - the guy that coined the phrase "growth hacker") . There's a lot of
misconceptions and preconceived notions about what growth hacking and/or a
growth hacker actually is - and is something that continues to be a subject of
a lot of (healthy) debate.

The growthhackers.com community has some genuine growth hackers on it and I
think will be best positioned to give you a really well informed response on
what it is to a growth hacker and have it as a career.

Hope that helps.

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mc_hammer
My guess is it's like being a chief advertising manager with less pay.

Your plan sounds fine; Name Recognition matters in our industry, so try to
focus on building successes for recognizable clients.

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tim333
I've got a friend who does what he calls growth hacking which in his case is
mostly running Google Adwords. He does pretty well with it.

