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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

"So, why is the title “Growth Hacker” a bunch of BS? Because it’s just a way for marketing averse startups to hire marketers without having to publicly say they’re hiring marketers."

This is false, as you disprove a few paragraphs later:

"The goal of a marketer is to grow a customer base. That’s what these growth hackers are doing, they’re just doing it in a more technically advanced way via data confirmation and split testing."

That is the entire point of using a different term for it. Precise language is a useful tool. A job title that says "we're looking for technically advanced marketers" in a concise way will get you a better signal to noise ratio.

I don't understand why this offends you.

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As a programmer, I'm already too embarrassed at this point to call myself a hacker. If our marketing team starts calling themselves growth hackers, I think the once honorable label will have been irrevocably soiled. If you haven't worked at a big company, this may seem puzzling, but just imagine the job ads, the Business Week covers.

The distribution channels for marketing are constantly changing. The marketers that don't evolve with the trends will be soon out of a job. And for online marketing, learning programming is a must.

I do agree that maybe we need some kind of concise way for referring to these marketers with software development skills, but using "growth hacker" is in the same league as using the words "ninja", "rockstar" and "guru". For me it's nauseating, while telling me something about the spoiled brats I'll end up working with.

What's wrong with "marketing engineer"?

I think "marketing engineer" is a fine and accurate term -- I've even called myself that at times -- but for whatever reason "growth hacker" is what's caught on.

You may as well argue over aluminum vs. aluminium.

I think he's just tired of buzzwords and took it out on the wrong title. Now, if he had a post titled "I'll bitchslap the next person who asks me to build something web 2.0". I would totally read that and upvote it to high heaven.

So lets call it a quantitative marketer then? It describes the role more precisely and it sounds cool.

Sure. The main point I took from the article was a frustration with the way people feel a euphemism is needed for "marketer" (which does seem rather elitist), and that avoids that, and also sounds less trend-following-buzzword-happy than "growth hacker" (which to me always makes we wish I could hack another few inches of height on so that I could dunk a basketball).

I feel like people who want to rename this type of role are either people who haven't worked with marketers very much, or look down on marketers--or both.

Marketing at big companies has involved intense data analysis for many years now. We don't need a new name for that.

It's still a marketer.

So what? So is Patrick McKenzie, people seem to be cool with him.

Patrick proudly promotes himself as an SEO/marketing consultant, not a "growth hacker".

I have apparently spent less time thinking of what I call my consulting practice than other people do, but I usually phrase it as "I make money for software companies" rather than any of the above three, for reasons similar to why I don't say "intermediate Rails coder."

I've been called a growth hacker before. Whatever. Couldn't care less either way. Lawyers get paid for caring about the precise boundaries between similar-sounding words. I'm certainly not a lawyer.

In fact, try applying for jobs to some east coast companies and tell them that you are a great "Hacker".

The word "hacker" may resonate well with the SV culture but outside that you might get a response saying "let us not get that extreme, we just need a good developer"

To me, "growth hacking" evokes more than just marketing.

Let's say my startup hustles like crazy and carves out a deal with a major coffee chain (like Square did with Starbucks IIRC).

Suddenly we have access to a whole lot more users. We grew the user base drastically, yet it wasn't exactly a result of marketing but rather one of strategic dealmaking.

To me, that is the quintessence of growth hacking.

Why not just call it business development? Why do we need the word "hacking" as part of what has been the way businesses grow?

It's better to use ordinary language to describe something ordinary like Starbucks using Square. Sales is a steady job that anyone can do (like programming.) Hustling like crazy and such is made to sound special when it's not particularly crazy at all.

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