Ask HN: What is growth hacking like as a career?
4 comments
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.
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.
I will largely back all of this. There is a fairly substantial world of difference between those who are excellent at marketing and those who are excellent at engineering and in my experience the two don't overlap currently anywhere near as much as they should.
I have experience doing online marketing for a fairly substantial portfolio for large multi-nationals with budgets that would make your head spin.
However, after coming across guys like Patrick here a while back I noticed a huge hole in what I was doing that was already starting to nag at me and that was a constant dependency on getting my clients developers onside (which is not an easy task for 20 different reasons).
So I started to spend some time learning to code and am currently in the middle of building my first SaaS application of which I plan on providing a lot of very detailed behind the scenes marketing info out about it to help show others that it really isn't as hard or as magical as it is many times made out to be.
I have experience doing online marketing for a fairly substantial portfolio for large multi-nationals with budgets that would make your head spin.
However, after coming across guys like Patrick here a while back I noticed a huge hole in what I was doing that was already starting to nag at me and that was a constant dependency on getting my clients developers onside (which is not an easy task for 20 different reasons).
So I started to spend some time learning to code and am currently in the middle of building my first SaaS application of which I plan on providing a lot of very detailed behind the scenes marketing info out about it to help show others that it really isn't as hard or as magical as it is many times made out to be.
Practical experience outweights credientials by literally infinity, but if your goal is to get hired ( his step 4 ) credentials is more important than skill. Source: I'm a senior dev who's worked ~15 jobs and this was my experience. I will agree that a case study and/or metrics/numbers might outweigh credentials.
My current theory is employer name recognition>culture fit>skill>credientials in the interview process. Maybe an unrelated topic, sorry If I'm off topic.
tl;dr: thanks for the idea of using a case study in an interview... /me steals the idea
My current theory is employer name recognition>culture fit>skill>credientials in the interview process. Maybe an unrelated topic, sorry If I'm off topic.
tl;dr: thanks for the idea of using a case study in an interview... /me steals the idea
This would be a great question to ask on growthhackers.com (started by Sean Ellis - the guy that coined the phrase "growth hacker")
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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.
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.
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.
Your plan sounds fine; Name Recognition matters in our industry, so try to focus on building successes for recognizable clients.
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.
How steep is the learning curve for this particular profession? How hard is it to break into the industry? Anything else I should know?
I was thinking my path could be: 1) take General Assembly's digital marketing class to learn the basics and get some credentials:
https://generalassemb.ly/education/digital-marketing
2) Work on my own projects and get them to grow so they can serve as portfolio pieces. Also to build skills.
3) Maybe work for just shares at a small 1-2 person startup on the side.
4) go FT when I feel confident in my abilities