Ask HN: How does a dev become a growth hacker? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does a dev become a growth hacker?

12 pointsk__14 comments

I saw many courses for getting into programming and this seems reasonable, because it's a rather good defined thing to do.

But growth hacking not so much.

How does a dev get into this topic?

View on HN

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.

> But growth hacking not so much.

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

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".

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... (the author paints this is a good thing but I have to question his motives.)

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

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

lol, I like how it does the same as HN, but is totally built like something a marketeer would make.

Any disclosures required or are you just a happy user?

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

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.

growthackers seems a bit more suspicious to me - feels like a product hunt-esque crowd. I read both with a (large) grain of salt, must admit I haven't been on growthackers for a long time.

/r/juststart is good to read for for practical examples. blackhatworld is good too - I would go to the source of good information (SEO, Affiliate forums - peoeple who actually own products that need growthacking rather than consultants) instead of "thought leadership" forums

No disclosures to make. I wouldn't say I'm a happy user, but I use those sites the same way I use HN.

I think of them as Hacker News for marketing. Inbound.org is run by Hubspot and Sean Ellis runs Growth Hackers.

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

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."

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com