I would caution against making conclusions solely on Google Trends. Less people may be googling growth hacking because more and more people are becoming familar with it.<p>However that doesnt mean the <i>demand</i> for growth hackers is declining. People may already know what it is but the need for growth hacking may still be increasing. Or it might have different names that people call it by now.
This post sidesteps the main issue: growth hacking becomes irrelevant because most involved parties are now aware of the breadth and depth of fraud involved. Fake users, paid download farms, automated registrations. VCs learned the lesson.
<i>Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.</i> - Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid<p>... via <a href="http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup</a>
I was not familiar with this term until now. You can read very far into this article without realizing that the topic is not some technique to gain a few inches in height.<p>> There are now several growth hacking bootcamps and large conferences.
Growth hacking is <i>hard</i>. We had to learn a few tricks to grow our Hacker News alternative (<a href="https://laarc.io" rel="nofollow">https://laarc.io</a>)<p>Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the word out?<p>The most reliable way to grow is to have an audience (or access to one). But they have to be interested in what you're showing, else you're little better than a spammer.<p>Looking over the traffic for the last month (<a href="https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav</a>) the spikes were from comments posted to lobse.rs:<p><a href="https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_v1rpuv" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...</a><p><a href="https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_wivai7" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...</a><p>This won't keep working, but it might have been enough. The site seems to be spreading through word of mouth now, and about 400 people show up each day.<p>Communities are also a strange thing to grow. Grow too fast, and you'll spoil it. Ditto if you grow from the wrong source of people.<p>Fundamentally, you have to have a product that users love so much that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. But press coverage – or at least social media coverage – seems to matter a lot. You probably need both.<p>We've been using <a href="https://playbook.samaltman.com/" rel="nofollow">https://playbook.samaltman.com/</a> as a mantra, and it's been effective so far. But it's only been a month. We'd like to try Michael's advice next: <a href="http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting-press-for-your-startup" rel="nofollow">http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting-press-for-your-sta...</a>