Real engines of growth have nothing to do with growth hacking

I hate to be all "get off of my lawn," but "growth hacking' isn't really a distinct thing. It's a combination of marketing, branding, social media management, engagement analysis etc., which are frequently grouped together as the responsibility of one individual in the early stages. This is partly because there's not really enough work to partition these into distinct roles until your product or service has evolved a little!

Ultimately, it's just buzzword-speak for knowing your market, advertising your product to them, and analysing the results. All the same features as traditional marketing, and the things this article highlights as important.

It's all solid advice, but my understanding of "growth hacker" as a term was that it was coined specifically as a counterpoint to the traditional organization where marketing is in a box and has no influence on product. Growth hacking is about influencing the product to help growth, cutting across organizational boundaries to do exactly what this article is describing.

The only problem, the only reason this article is necessary, is the same as with all good ideas in the information age, it's been overexposed, co-opted and cargo-culted to death by charlatans, fools and wannabes.

His 3 principles of growth and his idea “The most powerfully growing products,” he says, “do three things at once: they make you look smart to the people you invite. They give real value to you when the people you invite join. And they give real value to the people you’ve invited once they sign up.” are all fine and good and true for things like SnapChat but really there's a huge number of GREAT things that are used and loved and don't need to have a billion users to be awesome. And for all those things growth hacking works.

Proper growth hacking is different from what he's talking about, I think. Proper growth hacking would be presenting a product in a way that makes it easy for people to share it with others. In my opinion, a good growth hacker is the one that obsesses over the tag line and works to bring popular social causes into the product while a bad growth hacker is someone who obsesses over A/B testing.

Reminds me of Kathy Sierra's excellent talk on the topic:

http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-...

The gist of it: Help your users do awesome things, then get out of the way when they share their awesomeness with others. It seems obvious, but I'm sure we all can think of five companies off the top of our heads that completely miss this.

The entire thrust this of the article seems to be that growth hacking should just be building a product people love and share. This in itself is completely obvious.

Even though growth hacking has become a silly term, all the points Andy Johns makes about reducing friction is exactly the philosophy that drives faster growth. The point of marketing or growth hacking or advertising or whatever you want to call the space is growing faster and acquiring more users with the product you have.

We can still stop using the term growth hacking though.

Terrible title, some great content. Skip the "growth hacking" section and the rest is good.

Yea, I really feel that these principles are also valuable when you join. Take Snapchat or Vine, the popular social aspects (invites) cause the product to be successful based on growth hacking.