How to be a growth hacker | Hacker News Reader

How to be a growth hacker

andrewchen.co

54 pointsakshxy57 comments

"Software is eating everything" even traditional employee roles in organizations. People who can automate will always win, because they can do more in less time.

I remember once when I was consulting, I was on the bench for a few days and the marketing group contacted me to help aggregate and validate multiple lead lists. They had been working on it for days, copy/pasting record after record from multiple excel sheets into one big master sheet. They asked if I could help.

I wrote some algorithms that matched records on several criteria and put them into one big list. It took me a couple hours and I was done. Emailed them later.

The marketing group emailed me back -- ecstatic! I saved them so much time, they sent me all these promotional gifts meant to give to clients and potential customers. A thermos I use to this day full of starbucks bucks that I shared with my friends. I was king for a day.

These kinds of problems exist all over corporate america and now that programmers have automated many of their daily tasks and accelerated them where they haven't, they have more time to help more people within the organizations that employ them. Their new tasks show their immense power to people who normally think software is just something to get in the way of their daily tasks, slowing them down, making life worse. Much software out there is awful to use and built by engineers of the old days who were overworked, underpaid relative to their contribution, and perhaps angry and antagonistic toward coworkers.

There's a new breed out there and we are taking over! :)

This sounds very uplifting, but when I worked at an enormous corporation you've heard about we weren't allowed so much as to change my machine's time&date. Forget about installing anything. And even when I was able to improve anything (I got permission to install Python), there was a huge bureaucracy and permission had to be granted for anything. Just because you had an idea for improvement doesn't help if you have to mail a person on another continent, who must understand what you're doing and grant permission.

It's not uncommon for company critical software to be written by a Russian guy who no longer works there.

As software integrates into everything more deeply are we going to get childish names for every profession?

Marketers are growth hackers, doctors will be health hackers, lawyers will be justice hackers?

Then we can ensure that even when software is as fundamental to our society as law or transportation or materials engineering there will still be a nice sheen of hucksterism and bullshit on top.

Good job software people, keep ensuring that society as a whole will assume that the software people need to always be underneath someone who is actually a professional on the org chart.

Everyone here must be familiar with the "software is eating the world" meme. That means that technical marketers are not growth hackers, they are good marketers who are keeping up to date with what's needed to do their job.

Sanitation ninjas can't be far off. You'll think you're in the clear and drop that wrapper...

Don't forget top-notch geologists will be called "rock" stars.

And the rare geologist astronomer will be called a "rock" "star" I guess...

And soon "star" "trek"

most likely they will be at google designing trucks that drive themselves and pick up their own garbage.

Holy liability Batman! Self driving cars are bad enough, and people get in them voluntarily and they aren't designed to crush-compact what they pick up.

I disagree, I'd rather have a computer driving a trash truck than a tired human being at 4AM.

Depending on where you live and how involved unions are, they already have trash trucks that do not require a human to pick up the garbage. The driver activates a mechanical arm as it picks stuff up.

Unions will be the problem with a lot of the robotic implementations.

I've always had my garbage picked up by at least a two-person team. I would be extremely wary of mechanical arms activated by a sole operator at 4 am, but that might be just my privileged socialism bubbling up again.

Going from one human to zero humans has a large impact on who's responsible for any screw-ups. I'm not sure the insurance will make it worth it to either the manufacturers or the operators anytime soon.

That means that technical marketers are not growth hackers, they are good marketers who are keeping up to date with what's needed to do their job.

But it's more than that. A growth hacker invents hacks as a way to grow - clever, non obvious methods that drive adoption.

Things like the Reddit sockpupperts, the Dropbox two-sided incentive system or the Yammer variation of the Freemium business model are all things where a combination of technical AND commercial knowledge was the thing that drove the companies success.

That isn't technical marketing - it is elements of business model design, integration architecture and startup accounting.

If you think of a better name, excellent - but "technical marketer" undersells what is happening here.

It's called marketing, those are just new techniques. The goals are still the same, the things that work well are just changing a lot.

Remember the distinction a few years ago when marketers using the internet were called Internet Marketers? How many people in marketing don't touch the internet with any of their campaigns now? Now that's just called marketing.

It's perfectly fine to be interested in the new marketing techniques being developed, especially if you're the HN crowd. That's not what I'm saying.

You aren't understanding marketing if you can't see that "growth hacker" is a branding play. It's good to learn to recognize when marketing techniques are being used to appeal to your demographic if you want to get any skill at using it for yourself.

It's called marketing, those are just new techniques.

Yes, and what Mel did was just programming[1], and calling it hacking was just rebranding by ESR to fit into his idea of what a hacker should be.

I stand by what I'm saying: You don't learn to reverse engineer Craigslist's forms in marketing courses.

[1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

There are no fields where the newest practical techniques are taught in courses. Those are invented in the field and trickle down.

I'm not saying it's not impressive or not being done by the best marketers. Not at all. I thought that was clear. There all talented people in every profession, that's what people do.

I'm saying that it won't be called "growth hacking" in a short time and it will go on the buzzword bingo card and will only be used ironically. And I wish the community who read about these great marketers saw through the pandering and childish "growth hacking" term as a (successful and well done) branding attempt.

It's about obsession and love for growth, whether optimization or acquisition either by growth hackers or technical marketers.

Everything else is secondary.

While this post is very informative, it has the potential to be quite dangerous. This type of marketing is like gasoline - it can take a small fire and make it huge. You almost want to conclude that 99% of the fire was due to the gasoline, but that isn't the case. Most of the critical work is getting the initial fire. Once it starts burning, you 'earn' the ability to add gasoline and see a big effect.

Long story short - don't try to growth hack until your product is ready. Every shining example of engineered marketing begins with a product that already had engaged users.

The last thing the tech world needs is people walking around calling themselves "growth hackers".

Actually, the last thing the tech world needs is stuff like this, from the article:

If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

Stop making up "markets" and "niches", then making crappy products to try and be "viral" in these areas, then calling yourself a "growth hacker" or something as ridiculous and valueless.

Build something because you love it, not because a "growth hacker" determined that it was a "pre-market fit".

This attitude annoys the creative person in me as well, who loves writing software.

But you can't be mad at the business people moving in, optimizing the process because they got into the business because they saw an opportunity to make money.

I'm sure tv writers felt the same way about the first rise of infomercials and televangelists. Hucksterism works and it's good capitalism. And it always annoys the creative people who see themselves as artists or artisans.

You can definitely be mad at them.

If they're stupid and sacrificing the quality of the actual art/software/website/thing, that's not good. It's easy to get mad at this.

And when there's so many of these types of people doing so much damage and causing so much waste, that's really not good. It's very easy to get mad at this.

True, I didn't phrase that well. It's easy to get mad at it but you are mad at capitalism and human nature.

Since I have decided not to take these things on, I find it better to not get mad at them but to remain detached.

I can constantly be angry about the hucksters and not do anything about it or accept it as an inevitable outcome of the systems I live in and not do anything about it. This doesn't mean I don't admire/support those who have decided to attack these problems.

People who were around technology businesses in the 1990s, please illuminate me: wasn't it common for pretentious managers to adopt fancy job titles? (I may have read too much Dilbert.)

This is really just marketing with a better knowledge of the technical possibilities. Do we really need a new job title?

Yup. Back then it was "guru", "evangelist", and "ninja" (perl ninja, etc).

Yes. People do resist change but it happens.

Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.

Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.

Was it Facebook who started this trend?

NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.

Yes it was Facebook who started the trend as early days of the Facebook platform trained many of the best growth hackers in the Valley. 'Dan Yue' at Playdom, 'Joe Greenstein' at Flixster, and 'David King' at (Lil) Green Patch were a few Facebook pioneers. But, it was 'Sean Ellis' (Eventbrite, Dropbox, Xobni, Catchfree) who Originally coined the term.

That's true hardly a few people are familiar with this job title outside SV. I myself being a startup addict from India came across this title one night and couldn't stop dreaming the very moment 'how to be a growth hacker*.

I'd love to contact some of these people as "Growth" is the focus of what I'm working on. Do you know any of these guys you're referencing?

Can I shoot you an email? Mine is tony at graphmuse.com

Sure you can. Shoot me an email on akshay@sugardoctor.in

I am presently working for this company in reinventing their business model for the scaling/ growing up of operation.

And yeah the guys I'm referencing, neither I know any of them nor they know me.

I am a little confused by the wording of this. I usually think of a growth hacker as somebody who helps scale an app, like an Instagram engineer for instance. Is anybody else confused by the naming?

Good question. In the last few years, the term has been overloaded to talk about a new engineering-like approach to marketing and user acquisition. But the confusion is understandable. I personally think it's kind of cheesy but whatever works for people :)

Often confusion and anxiety is the best way to get early traction :)

Interesting post, but the title (and subject) is actually " Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing". The 'How' is absent.

Ah, the thing about marketing is that successfully calling yourself the new VP Marketing is most of the battle for being the new VP Marketing.

The growth hacker has existed since the dawn of time. It is called being a top sales person, and good sales people are worth twice their weight in gold. Someone who can sell and can program is not a growth hacker, but a sales engineer. Think about it...

Sales and marketing aren't the same. This is not sales. A growth hacker is a marketing engineer, and I don't think that role has been prevalent until recently. Counterexamples are welcome.

Yes, it has been around for a long time. Deal is that these people decide to build a business for themselves and not others. Counterexample? Dan Kennedy is a good and recent one (recent as in still alive). His partner, Bill Glazer, is also a good example.

No, growth hacking is something new. Or rather: "growth hacking" is a term people are using to describe a genuinely new phenomenon. You can trace this phenomenon back maybe 10-12 years, but there is something interesting happening -- interesting enough that people feel the need to coin a term to describe it.

Andrew's example is a good one. AirBnb grew in part by piggy-backing off a pre-existing platform (Craigslist) in a way that required skills in copyediting, marketing, engineering, design, and psychology.

YouTube did similarly via MySpace. PayPay did similarly via email. Lots of people, like Slide, Zynga, RockYou, and even LivingSocial did similarly via Facebook.

There's something new happening here, and it's not coming from "top sales people" or even "top marketers." It's coming from engineers who have decided to approach marketing, customer acquisition, and distribution as an engineering problem.

It's more than quantitative marketing or direct sales. The best growth hackers have a STEM background. This thing, whatever it is, is "growth hacking."

It's absolutely not new.

Read a biography of P.T. Barnum, if nothing else.

It's like the old cliche that every generation thinks they're the ones that discovered sex.

Finding the right channel that will scale a startup is an experiment and a process.

If you knew what was going to scale your product, you would of done it by now.

Growth hackers do whatever it takes to find growth and that might require a range of skills for user awareness, acquisition, retention, engagement and resurrection.

It's not entirely new, no, but it's new like the iPhone was new. None of the component ideas in the iPhone were 100% new, but it wasn't possible to build one at a consumer price-point until certain preconditions, both technological and economic, were met.

I'd claim this: marketing more than most disciplines lives or dies by the state of communication technology. The best marketers in any generation know how to use that technology to their advantage.

But communication technology is radically different today than it was even 20 years ago, let alone 120 years ago when PT Barnum was alive. For one, it's more digital and more technological. It's also changing at an accelerating pace. 10 years ago neither Facebook nor YouTube existed. 6 years ago Twitter didn't. Tumblr, 5. Pinterest, 2. Instagram, 1.

Or, think of it this way (as a marketer might): the rate at which new marketing channels are being created is accelerating. We're talking channels that can potentially reach 1MM, 10MM, 100MM people sprouting afresh every year. That's not the world PT Barnum lived in.

Why is is so crazy to think that this new environment results in a new breed of marketer, more at home in bits and bytes than in creating hoaxes which spread through poorly fact-checked newspapers and traditional marketing "stunts?" And that therefore engineers -- the same people who are creating these new channels -- are perhaps best adapted to this new environment?

It's also presumptuous to think that growth hackers -- and I'd include myself in that lot -- aren't familiar with PT Barnum, David Ogilvy, Jack Trout, or other famous marketers.

In a thread extolling the virtues of Reddit's early sockpuppets and AirBnB's Craiglist games, it's a bit much to try to claim "growth hackers" are superior to old-tymey hoaxes, whatever their facility with bits'n'bytes.

I'm not saying such approaches don't have their place, but you can't on the one hand look down on similar tricks in the past and then on the other claim that performing them in new channels somehow make them better.

Also, PT Barnum was much more than hoaxes. Seriously, read up a bit.

I didn't claim they're superior. I asked: "Why is it so crazy to think that [growth hackers] are perhaps best adapted to this new environment?" Are fish superior to dogs because they can stay underwater their whole lives?

I also never said PT Barnum was nothing more than hoaxes. Nor am I sure how other people's commentary on Reddit and AirBnB's respective growth strategies does anything but reinforce my point, viz., we live in a world where huge marketing channels are being created every year and (for now) engineers rather than traditional marketers are best suited for taking advantage of them.

Was it traditional marketers who planned and executed those strategies? Even if they had planned it, could they have executed it?

At this point I'm not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding me, but I've been as explicit as I know how. I'll have to leave it at that.

As for reading recommendations, I own both his autobiography and "The Art of Money Getting." Is there something else you'd recommend?

If you've read those books, do you not see that he was taking advantage of the way the world was changing in his time? That he was being quite creative in finding new opportunities to reach people?

That's the entire point here. That taking advantage of new opportunities in marketing is absolutely nothing new. It's what has always been done.

Since we're going down the road where you question my sincerity (seriously, does that ever work?), I'll also point out that you selectively quoted yourself. The second half of the sentence, which is still right there in your original post after all, very clearly has a tone that Mr. Bits'n'Bytes Growth Hacker is superior to the oldster Hoaxer who spread through "poorly fact-checked newspapers".

Come now, you have enough facility with language that you must know quite well what you were doing there.

"Very clearly."

Well, ok. I don't think that: I've known growth hackers who have done incredibly shady, unethical, and borderline illegal things. The Reddit and AirBnB examples are probably a ~4 on a 1-10 scale of stunts growth hackers pull.

I'm not sure what you're hoping to get by continuing, but I'm ready to stop. Later!

A lot of the comments, imho, don't seem to understand Andrew Chen's post and are just fixating on some of the terminology. In fairness it would be easier to do so had the reader of this post been a regular reader of his blog. It is more readily understood in that context. I recommend reading his analysis of how AirBnB went about hacking for growth. And there are some excellent posts on growth hacking on Quora.

This is kind of unrelated but has anyone bought this? http://www.appsumo.com/appsumo-growth-action-video . I'd prefer not to spend $80 to find out that it's full of cliches.

I think meetup had the post to Craigslist a long time a go. Not sure if the still do it.

If this is something you'd like to do for twitter, and you have javascript, rails, and/or java/scala chops, or you're just a damn good generalist engineer who can pick up anything, send me an email at lzmfAuxjuufs/dpn.

Just to confirm, you're looking for marketers with basic programming chops?

We've historically had waaay more engineers than marketers on twitter's growth team. We look at growth less as marketing and more about optimizing (through ux, design, experiment, machine-learning, analytics, etc) all of our possible distribution channels with respect to a set of core metrics.

We lean towards teaching good generalist programmers how to do "growth," which actually doesn't feel much like marketing in day-to-day practice.

I am yet to graduate as an engineer but I am damm good as a leader and passionate about growth hacking this is what defines me.

I am learning rails, javascript these days and will be glad to get associated.

That was my first ever submission to the Hacker News. Sorry i didn't get, what is that email??

Take each letter he wrote and subtract one.

Thank you :) It wasn't that difficult

Didn't twitter hire a group of business experts to try and find a way to make some money with the platform? What happened?

Also, why would someone who can program and market (like me) even want to work for twitter? Why not use my skills to make me (and not you) money?

These are not questions to be taken as an attack, but a real and hoest inquiry.

If the "normal coder" on your startup isn't already a "growth hacker" you're doing something wrong. Same goes for the rest of the team.

Specialization and division of labor are valuable practices, to an extent.

Problem: the term itself is already not specialized. While there's no doubt a few people in the Valley actually know what it's about - for a startup, anybody knowing how to do one or two of the things below can call himself a "growth hacker":

- UX - A/B Tests - BD - PR - "Virality" - Facebook APIs ...

This is gonna be just like the SEO people of the past, but 10x worse.

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