5 ms·

A Developer’s Guide to Growth Hacking

129 points by GarethX 12y ago

curiously 12y ago
I'm going to be honest. I did not really get a good value out of this article. It's written in sections but is extremely dry and generic. I'm not sure what makes it so, but just the language here seems like somebody wrote it for the sake of writing because they had to. Read through the article but didn't walk away from any new insights or new angle. A good article in my opinion needs tension and a climax towards the problem and then a resolution, much like a good story or music. This might sound harsh but I just wanted to add some constructive feedback. The title certainly was catchy but found it more of a clickbait.
lukasm 12y ago
Whenever you hear anyone talk about 'growth hacks,' just mentally translate it in your mind into 'bullshit'.” PG
- pbreit 12y ago
  It's possible this sentence hinges on "hacks" vs "hacking". I'd be surprised if PG had a problem with hacking for growth. In fact I think he would embrace such a thing mightily.
  - austenallred 12y ago
    It's not really "hacking" - it's just marketing. Occasionally you may beat use a trick to beat a system, but mostly it's a bullshit buzzword that marketers came up with. Unfortunately, it works really, really well. I wrote a (free) book[1] on user acquisition, following the pattern of a lot of the programming tutorials that helped me learn to program. I originally called it "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition." The title got tons of traffic and interest - up to 100 tweets a day, many from people I'm convinced never read it. When I changed it to "User Acquisition for Developers," the traffic dropped significantly, so I changed it back. But I don't think I can live with myself, so when I have time I'm going to take the word "hack" back out of it. Bullshit buzzwords sell. And for every critic in the comments section, this post has a bunch of upvotes. That's almost a marketing truism - a few people will be annoyed, but it's really easy to drive the masses. [1] http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/ http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/
    - gk1 12y ago
      I've been resisting the urge to use "growth hacker" as a title, so I still go by "user acquisition consultant." Every now and then I get asked if I can help a company with "growth hacking," and more often than not it's an early warning signal that the company thinks they can sneak their way to success without putting in real work.
- mceoin 12y ago
  This article is fair though. It takes the buzz out of the phrase and essentially states that there is no hack, only a deliberate focus on process and a continuous cycle of experimentation and review.
codexon 12y ago
Seems like this could be summarized into 1 sentence. Think of ideas, prioritize them, and test them. This is too broad to be considered growth hacking. Real growth hacks are things like AirBnB spamming Craigslist, Reddit creating the illusion of users with fake ones, and Rap Genius giving out tweets for backlinks.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kamilszybalski 12y ago
Listen, in essence, growth hacking is this. Instead of building a product and then marketing it, you understand that the product is the marketing; let that settle in. Your growth marketer should be involved from ideation phases right up to executing the whole GTM. You can't build a product and then say, "Here, now go hack some growth". All that brings is epic magnitudes of failure. Growth hacking isn't finding a magical lever like airbnb, reddit, etc, you can't make non-viral product go viral, that's just forceful and any virality that is forceful and not innately built into the core functionality of the product just will never achieve sustainable growth, period. It's like all the nut jobs that talk about the k-factor and all that crap, it's complete bullshit.
- curiously 12y ago
  I agree but I'd also add the question: is viral growth a right move for your product? what if the people your free users refer to are more free users? what if you all the viral attention just end up bringing hoard of freeloaders instead of customers? You are not facebook, you are not dropbox, you need customers to survive and you know have an army of seathing, angry, picky, freeloaders now ready to blog and spread negative word on the first chance they see something they are receiving for absolute free? Free has no value. Free isn't a competitive edge. So does viral growth that just magnifies that aspect really make sense?
  - ulisesrmzroche 12y ago
    Free has value and competitive edge. Especially when the costs involve educating your market. The problem in your scenario is not that the word spread, but that the word that spread wasn't any good.
    - curiously 12y ago
      I disagree. Free is not something you can compete on sustainable manner. Eventually you will need to start making cash. It's quite a bold gamble betting that educating your market will eventually lead into customers. Imagine if one guy looking for a free tool tells 10 other people about the free tool. you are going to end up with 11 people now using your tool. if it costs you to upkeep the tool for each customer, you've now mangified it by 10 fold. you start hoping that one of these customers one day will become a customer but are they really? you've sold them something free, it costs nothing therefore there's no reason to pay for it, ever.
random_rr 12y ago
So I noticed you often lead sentences with "so."
- wbsun 12y ago
  So what's the problem :)
maroonblazer 12y ago
The talk sets up a straw man at about 1:30 with the Ellis quote saying, paraphrasing: "Most marketing departments are doing it blind, not looking at the data and not running experiments." Perhaps that's the case for most tech start-ups, where there is no one with a marketing background involved, but it's not the case for any moderately mature business that I've come across (in nearly 20 years of marketing) including 2-5 person shops just getting off the ground. Quite the opposite I find most marketers to be data-obsessed and will diligently test and track permutation after permutation of tactic to tease out what works and what doesn't.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
valisystem 12y ago
> "It’s really about science." Where all samples are unique and uncontrolled, no matter what you do, any consistent results are basically meaningless. Once you've got samples size big enough to be statistically relevant, well, your growth problem is probably already solved.

129 points by GarethX 12y ago

I'm going to be honest. I did not really get a good value out of this article. It's written in sections but is extremely dry and generic. I'm not sure what makes it so, but just the language here seems like somebody wrote it for the sake of writing because they had to. Read through the article but didn't walk away from any new insights or new angle. A good article in my opinion needs tension and a climax towards the problem and then a resolution, much like a good story or music. This might sound harsh but I just wanted to add some constructive feedback. The title certainly was catchy but found it more of a clickbait.

lukasm 12y ago

Whenever you hear anyone talk about 'growth hacks,' just mentally translate it in your mind into 'bullshit'.” PG

pbreit 12y ago
It's possible this sentence hinges on "hacks" vs "hacking". I'd be surprised if PG had a problem with hacking for growth. In fact I think he would embrace such a thing mightily.
- austenallred 12y ago
  It's not really "hacking" - it's just marketing. Occasionally you may beat use a trick to beat a system, but mostly it's a bullshit buzzword that marketers came up with. Unfortunately, it works really, really well. I wrote a (free) book[1] on user acquisition, following the pattern of a lot of the programming tutorials that helped me learn to program. I originally called it "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition." The title got tons of traffic and interest - up to 100 tweets a day, many from people I'm convinced never read it. When I changed it to "User Acquisition for Developers," the traffic dropped significantly, so I changed it back. But I don't think I can live with myself, so when I have time I'm going to take the word "hack" back out of it. Bullshit buzzwords sell. And for every critic in the comments section, this post has a bunch of upvotes. That's almost a marketing truism - a few people will be annoyed, but it's really easy to drive the masses. [1] http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/ http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/
  - gk1 12y ago
    I've been resisting the urge to use "growth hacker" as a title, so I still go by "user acquisition consultant." Every now and then I get asked if I can help a company with "growth hacking," and more often than not it's an early warning signal that the company thinks they can sneak their way to success without putting in real work.
mceoin 12y ago
This article is fair though. It takes the buzz out of the phrase and essentially states that there is no hack, only a deliberate focus on process and a continuous cycle of experimentation and review.

codexon 12y ago

Seems like this could be summarized into 1 sentence. Think of ideas, prioritize them, and test them. This is too broad to be considered growth hacking. Real growth hacks are things like AirBnB spamming Craigslist, Reddit creating the illusion of users with fake ones, and Rap Genius giving out tweets for backlinks.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kamilszybalski 12y ago

Listen, in essence, growth hacking is this. Instead of building a product and then marketing it, you understand that the product is the marketing; let that settle in. Your growth marketer should be involved from ideation phases right up to executing the whole GTM. You can't build a product and then say, "Here, now go hack some growth". All that brings is epic magnitudes of failure. Growth hacking isn't finding a magical lever like airbnb, reddit, etc, you can't make non-viral product go viral, that's just forceful and any virality that is forceful and not innately built into the core functionality of the product just will never achieve sustainable growth, period. It's like all the nut jobs that talk about the k-factor and all that crap, it's complete bullshit.

curiously 12y ago
I agree but I'd also add the question: is viral growth a right move for your product? what if the people your free users refer to are more free users? what if you all the viral attention just end up bringing hoard of freeloaders instead of customers? You are not facebook, you are not dropbox, you need customers to survive and you know have an army of seathing, angry, picky, freeloaders now ready to blog and spread negative word on the first chance they see something they are receiving for absolute free? Free has no value. Free isn't a competitive edge. So does viral growth that just magnifies that aspect really make sense?
- ulisesrmzroche 12y ago
  Free has value and competitive edge. Especially when the costs involve educating your market. The problem in your scenario is not that the word spread, but that the word that spread wasn't any good.
  - curiously 12y ago
    I disagree. Free is not something you can compete on sustainable manner. Eventually you will need to start making cash. It's quite a bold gamble betting that educating your market will eventually lead into customers. Imagine if one guy looking for a free tool tells 10 other people about the free tool. you are going to end up with 11 people now using your tool. if it costs you to upkeep the tool for each customer, you've now mangified it by 10 fold. you start hoping that one of these customers one day will become a customer but are they really? you've sold them something free, it costs nothing therefore there's no reason to pay for it, ever.

random_rr 12y ago

So I noticed you often lead sentences with "so."

wbsun 12y ago
So what's the problem :)

maroonblazer 12y ago

The talk sets up a straw man at about 1:30 with the Ellis quote saying, paraphrasing: "Most marketing departments are doing it blind, not looking at the data and not running experiments." Perhaps that's the case for most tech start-ups, where there is no one with a marketing background involved, but it's not the case for any moderately mature business that I've come across (in nearly 20 years of marketing) including 2-5 person shops just getting off the ground. Quite the opposite I find most marketers to be data-obsessed and will diligently test and track permutation after permutation of tactic to tease out what works and what doesn't.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

valisystem 12y ago

> "It’s really about science." Where all samples are unique and uncontrolled, no matter what you do, any consistent results are basically meaningless. Once you've got samples size big enough to be statistically relevant, well, your growth problem is probably already solved.