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Comment by colbyh | Hacker News Reader

I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.

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When I first heard about growth hacking back in the day, as distinct from typical marketing, it was defined as engineering the product itself to propagate to new users. The “classic” example at the time was building social features into programs - Eg, spotify’s social integration.

Thing is, to the best of my knowledge, it (a) never really grew to anything beyond social integration, and (b) was soon expanded in scope to just mean “all marketing by people who wish they were in Silicon Valley,” and subsequently to “all marketing.”

But it had a real definition behind it at some point.

I agree. Growth hacking was putting features into the product so that use of the product would inherently serve as influencer marketing and social signaling by its very nature. Think 'ask your friends for goods' from early Farmville that was required to play at a high level, the first action when joining LinkedIn being to invite your other professional contacts to LinkedIn, even way back to the "free email with Hotmail" signature watermarks so everyone receiving your email learned about Hotmail. This was considered novel because it provided a mechanism for truly rapid growth for companies with plenty of active users but very little or no incremental revenue to justify the advertising spend to acquire them. The idea was how to do marketing without paying for advertising, and what did we do to every problem in the 2000's: hack it!

Now its just any new or novel marketing idea from anywhere if the returns are superior to traditional marketing, which is fine, but what is the term now for products with growth features built in?

Marketing is a dirty word to technoligsts. It implies the product needs manipulation to gain adoption... growth hacking strategies have been used by direct response marketers for over 100 years... while it originally was about piggybacking off an existing network of users and merged into data driven lean startupy tactics and eventually spread to all types of marketing...its intent was always the same...to give a new cool word to technologists so they dont have to feel dirty about doing marketing...

The truth is, everything that touches a prospect or customer is marketing. Treating your employees well is marketing. Your product is marketing. You are marketing...everything that impacts a decision to buy, even indirectly, is marketing...

It never was a dirty word...but as a marketer, I consider growth hacking to be a dirty word nowadays :(

Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg. user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction.

It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.

Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge. Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a growth hack.

This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.

Ok, we've put marketing tactics in the title above.

"Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker" was seen as more cool than "marketer".

I know dozens of growth hackers and their skills are simply different to traditional digital marketers. It is far more experimental, technical and cross functional. And it will continue to evolve into its own space in the future.

People who think growth hacking = marketing are just as clueless as those who think influencer marketing = Instagram. It's far more involved than that.

any concrete example on what they differ?

They are generally less physically attractive. I was shocked the first time I visited a traditional advertising/marketing company's office.

Edit. Growth hackers are the less physically attractive :) I was shock how beautiful the advertising/marketing people were - there wasn't one average looking person (male or female) in the place apart from me.

Honestly cannot figure out who “they” are in your comment. Who looks better in your opinion, traditional marketers or growth hackers? Were you shocked by how good they looked or how bad they looked?

Every time I start to assume you meant one of them, I get nervous wondering if your shock was pointed the other way. Lol.

Sorry, my statement was a bit ambiguous so I have updated it.

In other words, this is marketing applied to itself.

meta-marketing.

I think it was intended to very very high return marketing that was inherent to the use of the product itself, as distinct from traditional marketing where the product was the thing being marketed (selling auto parts) and not the thing doing the marketing (advertising in your free email signatures).

I don't think this is a widely agreed definition, I think its just the definition the author provided in the context of that book because it fits the framework the author wants to consult with companies to implement. :-)

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