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.
Why would you say it's scummy? Growth hackers is a group of marketers that are passionate about sharing and discussing great content on ethical drivers of sustainable growth like this deck. Based on the discussion on GH, everyone in the community loved the deck and agreed with the premise that product is the ultimate growth hack. It wasn't even submitted from a community regular. Unlike your last three submissions to HN that were all self promotional for Pusher, where you are marketing manager.
I am largely to blame for the recent tirade against “growth hacking.” I’ve let the term be bastardized and redefined a lot since my original blog post on it back in 2010 http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-ha... . I wrote that blog post primarily for startups that had achieved product/market fit. The idea was not to replace marketing, but to create a category of marketing activities that have a direct attributable impact on growth. Startups are always on the brink of death. They don’t have the luxury to focus on things like awareness building or to prepare 50 page slide decks on the demographics of the customer. I wrote that a startup’s first marketing hire should have “growth as their true north.” They shouldn’t be outsourcing and managing vendors, the person should be a hands-on “builder” and optimizer of growth programs. In order to help make the concept stick, I put a name to it. On that day the term “growth hacker” was born.
Since my original post in 2010, I’ve been happy with certain evolutions of the term. One is that I think large companies should have a group that is exclusively focused on managing the activities that are directly attributable to growth. Companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had these groups for a long time. Bigger companies have the luxury of specialization so they can have research departments, PR departments and I think “growth” should be a focused discipline within larger organizations. Part of this group’s objective should be to create a culture of growth across the entire organization and help each department evaluate and measure activities that have a direct impact on growth.
“Growth hacking” may or may not be the right word, but it’s the one I used and it stuck.
Much as SEO is a categorization of marketing activities that improve a websites search ranking, you can think of growth hacking as a broader categorization of marketing activities that directly and measurably impact growth. In my original post, I suggested that the role should be easier to hire than a VP Marketing, since the scope of focus is actually smaller. I also suggested that some of the best growth people I’ve met have engineering backgrounds. It wasn’t until Andrew Chen’s post “Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing” that people really began to focus in on engineering skills as a prerequisite for being an effective growth hacker. He also falsely positioned it as a replacement for VP Marketing. I both disagree that it is the new VP Marketing and I disagree that engineering is a prerequisite. A VP Marketing needs to have a broader understanding of all of the disciplines within the marketing function. Some growth hackers will be good for this and some won’t.
Lastly, you could easily argue that SEO as a concept doesn’t need to exist because marketing already exists. But SEO is a subset of marketing activities. Growth hacking (to me anyway) is a subset of marketing activities too. The most powerful online marketing tactics often involve exploiting the unique advantages of the internet, which generally require some engineering skills. It’s easier to run these experiments if you don’t need to beg an engineering department for help. So engineering skills are definitely an advantage, but results trump skills.
Apologize to all that the conversation will likely to shift to a “defense of growth hacking” for a while. But eventually we’ll be back to the sharing of effective ways to grow the user bases for products that customers love.
This is my comment from the end of the article: I respect Chamath a lot for all his growth accomplishments. But in an article that says “he has cracked the code for making startups grow” he is quoted as saying “all this growth hacking stuff is a bunch of bullshit.” To me the idea of “cracking the code for making startups grow” is bullshit.
Every company is different. There is no code. Ultimately growth is a function of the right mix of a product that meets important user needs and tenacious creative data driven execution that leverages principles of growth and often exploits psychological triggers. And as our last four growth studies on GrowthHackers.com show (Square, Snapchat, Uber and Belly), sustainable growth also piles on a ton of good old fashion word of mouth. There is no single code for driving growth.
My time growing Dropbox combined a lot of relentless execution and skills, but I readily acknowledge that I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work on a product with the potential of Dropbox. Same goes for LogMeIn, Eventbrite, Lookout, Webs... I didn't crack a code. I need to keep learning every day.
Growth hacking is the science of trying to bring all this stuff together. I have a hard time believing only 6 people in the world are capable of figuring it out.
Good point. Still the critical point of the article is that obsessing on getting rich is more likely to lead to failure. Staying loose and having fun is more conducive to creatively solving customer needs. Solve customer needs and you'll probably make a lot of money. Focus on getting rich and you probably won't make any money.
I actually model allowable acquisition cost on expected first year average revenue per user (less any marginal service costs like bandwidth or storage). The key variables are % of users that have a transaction and the average transaction size. If you have a monthly recurring fee, then you also have to consider churn. I'd recommend a conservative estimate of an average of six months of revenue in the first year for each paying customer on a monthy recurring fee. Annual fee is obviously the entire transaction size. Hope this makes sense.
Sean Ellis (startup-marketing.com, led early marketing at both Dropbox and Xobni)