Growth Hackers - the new "in" thing | Hacker News Reader

Growth Hackers - the new "in" thing

romymisra.com

44 pointsromymisra16 comments

Growth Hacker: "It’s the person that understands metrics,can send out email marketing campaigns and run A/B tests on a fly among other traditional marketing stuff."

It's a marketer, re-marketed.

The word 'hacker' denotes a particular spirit & competence. I'm sure at the highest levels of marketing there are hackers. Skip the double-speak.

Amen to that. I'm one of the those "growth hacker" and I don't see the point of naming ourselves to that term. Web Marketing Manager sounds fine by me.

I see it as someone that doesn't just write up the mailout, but can produce scripts to work out for instance exactly what products you should be promoting to who in an automated way.

It's the automation which is the key perhaps. People bringing some coding skills to these jobs are able to do more in the same time by automating away a lot of the donkey work. This leaves them to focus their energies on more valuable efforts.

Somehow this term manages to debase both the terms hacker and marketer. Marketing people need to keep up with marketing trends which in a tech startup environment means you now need to have technical knowledge to do this. Good marketers have always used metrics where they're available, and to call them 'growth hackers' implies that marketers don't know how to use metrics or that they're marketers who 'kludge stuff together to make it work'.

It debases hackers because what they're doing isn't really hacking per se, what they're doing is their job using tools in the way they were designed to be used (e.g. a/b tests etc.).

To me, this is like the way that words like geek and nerd have been hijacked by hipsters. It seems that someone somewhere thought the term 'hacker' was cool and decided to add growth to imply they're responsible for growth (which in many ways, neither marketers nor hackers are).

After all, hipsters aren't imaginary animals and don't bite the heads off of chickens.

I wonder if there were pamphlets in old Europe decrying what those people on that island were doing to the language.

The term "growth hacker" may be debatable, and the examples used in this blog post don't do it justice, but the spirit is right. People like Andy Johns (user growth at Facebook, then Twitter, then Quora) mix marketing with technical chops and actual product development.

When thinking through and building acquisition and engagement paths, having technical chops helps you connect the dots in ways a traditional marketer would never dream--but there's still a place for both types of people.

Growth hackers are trending because marketing is now measurable.

In past decades, marketing was mostly art and intuition. Now you can measure and optimize every channel.

What’s interesting is not just the current growth hacker trend,but how computer science is intersecting with other fields to create new professions.

Is this really new? It was my understanding that the appearance of the role of a dedicated developer was a fairly recent thing, after the commoditization of the computer, and that early programmers were all domain experts (e.g. scientists) that learned programming later in life.

Exactly - the other point is that a lot of businesses will favour a developer who has some prior domain knowledge over one who just knows how to program.

As I wrote in another thread:

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1) Someone uses X (like game mechanics, industrial & visual design or artificial intelligence) in a new or more generalistic way with great success.

2) A lot of people start using X to get the same results.

3) A "consulting" industry starts to rise around X.

4) Someone gets tired of the overused X and calls it bullshit.

5) Everyone that didn't succeeded with X, probably after some kind of investment inspired by the new "consulting" industry, gets in wagon and calls it bullshit.

6) Some time after the "bullshit" narrative sets in, someone finds out that X can be useful. If he tries to defend it he either does it by carefully arguing "I'm on your side but...", or just change it's name.

This kind periodic behaviour seems to deamplificate until it reach some stable state, generally it's absorbed by academia and gets to be taught in schools. From there it can get some amplifications, and if it does the pattern repeats.

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Pioneers like patio11 popularized this "new field". That would be 1).

New hipstery terms start to rise, so I believe we are now in the transition between phase 2) and 3).

I'm excited to see how far ir goes.

Also known as "the hype cycle", which ironically itself has gone through being popular to being temporarily obscure.

Nothing new here. Basic technical skills are becoming a must for almost any 'knowledge based' job out there. Not everybody will necessarily have to learn to code but if your a marketer and don't know how to setup an A/B test or send out a newsletter your simply a bad, or at least unskilled, marketer.

Interesting article. There is another area not mentioned, DevOps where developer skills and approaches are being adopted in operations. People like John Allspaw of Etsy (previously Flickr) have been improving on how operations is handled by treating configuration as code and automating everything they can.

It is interesting to think through what this could mean to other areas (to me at least). Ie what would it mean to be a Sales Hacker, a Customer Support Hacker or even be a Middle Management Hacker. Possibly some of this will turn out to be meaningless but the success of the DevOps movement suggests to me there could be something to at least some of these ideas. Possibly the 'learn to code' movement will result in more cross overs in other domains, who knows.

While your still running something small it is great to be a developer and also answering some amount of support. Most non standard usage tickets end up being worked out very quickly when you know the code base and can write custom queries to quickly investigate things.

Got to add SEO to that list of things a growth hacker should excel in.

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