Growth hacker? Bite me
dirktheman.com
dirktheman.com
Do you believe there are short dev projects which make meaningful, compounding improvements in core areas of concern for the business? If so, holy cow, right? That is really, really, REALLY important to how you'd conduct your business ("do them") and how you'd arrange a career as a dev (at the margin, why work on anything else?)
If you don't believe that that set of projects exists or can be reliably identified in advance, then huge levels of disdain would be warranted... if you're very confident that you're right. The evidence is not in your favor.
1. Marketing moving from being an external function to an internal function that is embedded in the product. Thus product design, product development, and product management skills are becoming very important skills to possess as part of a marketing function.
2. As marketing channels shift from being largely immeasurable to measurable at a very detailed level the marketing function demands more understanding of data and statistics.
Hence the term "growth hacker". Someone with product design, product development, and product management skills who also has a solid understanding of data and statistics, then leverages these skills to direct marketing efforts whether internal (product driven) or external (advertising/content driven).
> So yeah, maybe a ‘traditional marketer’ isn’t able to come up with the (admittingly impressive) solution of HOW to push a listing to Craigslist, but you can’t just go saying that he/she can’t come up with the idea!
I haven't followed the discussions about growth hackers, but I can imagine a person whose skillset covers both marketing and code in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of those two parts.
It's not just the "idea" that matters, but the understanding of how discrete data can be usefully collected, analyzed, and disseminated. Call me skeptical, but I don't think there are many marketers who really understand the admittedly pedantic logistics in this...I don't mean that they need to actually code this, but to understand that there is such a way to parse amorphous tasks and information such that something truly useful can be done.
As an example, how many people out there merely had the idea that people like collecting photos and displaying them in an attractive layout? How many of those built a massive startup company from that idea?
Aren't these qualities needed by everyone? So why even have the term "hacker"? Why doesn't Lifehacker just call itself the "Life" blog?
So to answer your question, I don't know when are where we should draw the line when assigning titles. I don't think there are any obvious rules, and in the case of growth hackers, I think there is a specific combination of skills and insight that isn't adequately covered by just marketers or by just coders.
A self-sufficient marketer is worth multiples not just in his/her own productivity, but in the gains you get from not driving the rest of your company bonkers.
I think you underestimate marketers. Some of those guys & gals are practically statisticians. Have you ever picked up a "marketing research" textbook and skimmed through it? Serious marketers know a LOT about how to "collect, analyze and disseminate" data.
In the science and medicine field, there are obviously many brilliant, technical minds. Yet not all of them can properly code, which limits the domain of their work when it comes to efficiency and scope.
Fair point.
As companies grow, they have to hire "business people" including dedicated marketers. One of HN's and Silicon Valley's problems is figuring out who is a business person who can add value and who is an "idea person" has has traveled to the valley to kill time over the next 3 years before getting a real job.
The solution is the term Growth Hacker which, while annoying actually serves the purpose of filtering the highest production people from a huge amount of potential marketing candidates.
I'm not sure if we will ever see the term Finance Hacker or Accounting Hacker but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some other terms develop.
Get the industry to stabilize on a clear, consistent, meaningful definition of what a "growth hacker" really is and some criteria for being one and maybe it becomes useful.
I mean, Growth Hacker is a shorter phrase than "marketing specialist who can code, with specialized knowledge in product management, viral growth strategies, and data analysis." But is that really what it means?
Perhaps the term "growth hacker" has arisen because "marketing" has gotten a bad rep. In the world of 1990s software development, marketing drove features based on market research, making developers resent the idiosyncratic nature of the user community, and their proxy: the marketing guy (almost as much as the sales guy who would promise something that wasn't even under development).
In the post 2000s world, every developer dreams of internet gold and striking it rich with their idea (and a marketing guy would corrupt that), so a "growth hacker" sounds less "evil" and more like someone a developer could work with, even though they will likely alter the concept of the product to make it "marketable" (ie, "pivot" the project)
It only has a "bad rap" among people who are fairly clueless about what marketing actually is, and/or people who hasty assessments based on limited data points. So, a hacker worked for a startup where the "marketing guy" was seen as evil, and now "marketing has a bad rap" seems to be the meme here. And that would be silly.
Marketing is damn interesting stuff and it's absolutely crucial to a successful business. And good marketers, like good developers, are talented, skilled and hardworking. And, also like good developers, they're hard to find.
I try to separate the individuals holding a position from the position itself. I've met great sales people, marketers, testers and subject matter experts. I've also met bad project managers, directors, software architects, and developers.
I think if there was any reason for general business functions to get a bad rep in the late 1990s, it was probably due to the glut of post-Reagan-era business school graduates, the dearth of traditional large corporate organizations to fill them (by then, military-industrial downsizing was underway and heavy industry was moving offshore), and the boom-time investment craze of the early ".COM" era, leading to the ready availability of job roles which could be absorbed (and were often demanded) by investment capital.
Yeah, that's reasonable. A lot of things definitely changed in the 80's and bled over into the 90's. The era of "right-sizing" and "re-engineering" and the proliferation of TLA's and buzzwords, and the breaking of that traditional company/employee bond, definitely could have (did?) lead to some perception changes of "business people."
That said, I think there's always been (and maybe always will be, as much as I wish it were othewise) a gulf between the technology world and the business world. It's like the people on each "side" don't really understand each other, don't really want to understand each other, and each underestimates the value of the other. sigh
Also, your accusations against growth hackers are titled based rather than what they do or learning about what growth hackers do. If growth hackers choose to identify themselves with each other in a new way, I don't think there is an issue. Let them be. Remember, front-end engineering wasn't considered much of a position 5 years ago. Same with UX, UI, data scientist, etc. How about SEO specialist or direct-marketers.... Can they self-idenitfy a new sub-division of marketing?
Adam Smith was right, people specialize as an industry expands to offer greater value in a niche. Growth has become essential to startups. Growth teams are becoming standard at scaling startups. Thus, growth hackers appeared.
It is fine to express a distaste for a growth hacker by what he or she does, seems silly to dislike them for their title. That is like saying "I hate chocolate because of they call it "chocolate""
I must say degrading the work Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen have done by comparing them to meaningless consultants from the dot-com era is disgusting. Andrew Chen is one of the most brilliant viral engineers on this planet. Sean Ellis has rocketed several companies to success and just acquired a KISS company. I don't respect ad hominem attacks, neither should you.
I would say exactly the opposite. I expect the average HN reader has tremendous respect for what "growth hackers" DO. But I also think that a lot of the kickback against the term is the perception (justified or not) that it's an unnecessary, vacuous term that (ironically) is "just marketing". Or, IOW, a fluffy title that some people have adopted to make themselves sound more interesting.
If these folks were routinely being called Marketing Strategists or something, I doubt there would be all this discussion about it.
1. Focuses on the hybrid nature of the work. In a small team you can't have two departments doing what one smart guy can do, and
2. Helps purely technical people overcome bias that marketing work is the dark side, show that it's also cool.
It's like a micro restatement of the "Copper and Tin" section of http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html. Maybe not the greatest phrase of all time, but this article seems like a bit of a personal overreaction.
This anti-"growth hacker" sentiment isn't bold or brave anymore. It's repetitive.
I find it interesting that in Andrew Chen's famous growth hacker post he doesn't mention the other craigslist "hack"(insert sarcasm) that was even more important to airbnb's growth.
Site appears to have bitten the dust
Why are you telling me the date? I know today's date.
I don't like the battery of social network icons, you may disagree.
I also don't like the swearing. I think it's unprofessional, however also very subjective.
Strange mix of sans and serif fonts, with no apparent reason for which is which. "Growth Hacker? Bite me!" is serif, below that "Why the term 'growth hacking' is just another buzz word" is sans. Below that "A rant by Dirk" which is serif, apart from the single word "rant".