Hah, always nice to see a healthy beat down. Anyway, for those who aren't familiar with this new buzzword, here is a quote from Andy Johns on a
Forbes article:
I know that "Growth Hacker" sounds like someone who is a pretentious prick and i'm not denying that it isn't Marketing when you look at it from afar. Andrew Chen even defines a growth hacker as the
new VP of Marketing. BUT BUT.. you can't deny that there is a difference between a traditional marketer and a growth hacker just as much as there is a difference between a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer.
For the general population, both are programmers. But there is a difference, specialisation! Similarly, traditional marketers with no coding experience could NOT have pulled off what
airbnb did with craigslist, neither could they have used various APIs of tools and use that data to analyse and figure out what they can do to increase retention rate or even get stale users to come back and try their application again.
One example of using APIs could be the use mixpanel event trackers to track certain event patterns and shoot emails using MailChimp APIs after x days of the users last seen. A beautifully structured automated lifecycle marketing based on user data that can be categorized based on the kind of application. This could sound stupid or maybe even good, but something like this CANNOT be thought of AND implemented by a traditional marketer.
Twitters,
Slacks and Quoras onboarding process is something that I think is highly effective in creating a virality of sorts, which helps in user acquisition for FREE and helps in retention. Onboarding process is another one of Growth Hackers jobs.
Now you could say that you could hire a developer to do all of these things, but that is a wrong thought process for VARIOUS reasons:
1) Not many people have had a good success rate with developers
2) There are two or more people involved in this process, information decay CAN happen and you end up with an extension that you didn't have the specifics you wanted
3) You'd HAVE to DEPEND on the developer to get your shit done and wait for it to be done while he keeps extending the time frame because x and y problems sprung up or maybe because his dogs poop just turned green and he's freaking out about that!
I could go on.. but you get the gist of it.
If you were the CEO of say, Quora.. would you hire a great marketer who has immense experience (no coding exp at all) working at Pepsi, or a growth hacker who did a good job at Twitter, but lacks experience? OFCOURSE it'd be the growth hacker from Twitter, not because he worked at a similar company, but because he would understand how to optimise users better for Quora and work his way around doing so without using many people or resources and get things done much faster.
While the dev team is more focused on building the core of the product, the growth hacker will make small, but USEFUL hacks (within the application or with it) that would acquire, activate, engage and improve the virality quotient.
A marketer with the mindset of an engineer. I thought this discussion would be helpful because i've seen a lot of you guys starting a lot of great products and see if the inclusion of such a person would be beneficial or not. Thats all this is.
Cheers!
