I recently bought this book "Growth Hacking - A How To Guide On Becoming A Growth Hacker" By Jose Casanova and Joe Casanova. I am on chapter 5 and it reads like the same blogpost repeated over and over. Unlike the MVP/ Lean Start-up phenomenon/movement which has scholarly work done to validate the idea and a distinct methodology , growth hacking blogs seem just buzzword centric babble.
Growth hacking is nothing new. It's just marketing folks re-branding themselves. It's the exact same product marketed under a new name with a new brand image and targeted at the tech audience.<p>It seems to have worked. Every startup now wants to hire a "growth hacker" instead of a CMO. And developers now ascribe more value to marketing than before.
Effective marketing often relies on either finding new mediums to reach an audience or presenting the message in a a new way. Oh, and it's easier to make marketing more effective when you can measure, test, improve, and iterate.<p>I don't really care whether growth hacking represents a new discipline or methodology, but it's easy to claim the superiority of your discipline when you include two common paths to success as part of the definition. Calling yourself a "growth hacker" seems a lot like calling yourself a "football winner" rather than a "football player."
What I find sad about this "growth hacking" phenomenon is how the focus is on a single specific tactic, as if that is the key to all growth-related problems.<p>On top of that, growth hacking is used a vehicle for self-promotion, as if one person is responsible for success. It's honestly a team effort, and to pretend like it's one person is a shame.<p>Lastly, isn't "growth" for the sake of growth a vanity metric? Personally, I'd want someone who knows how to retain users and prevent churn over someone who spams his way to millions of users. Just my thoughts.
Growth Hacking is essentially thinking of the role of a marketer as someone who is a chef instead of a waiter, which marketers have been traditionally.<p>Good marketing is generally baked into the product/service itself. In the traditional model, a company would make something and then think about marketing. While the marketer might have ideas to make the product better, generally all they can do is create a better presentation for what is already made.<p>The concept of growth hacking isn't anything new, as many companies have included marketing in the product creation. The only change is that analytics are becoming better and the cost of tweaking a product or service once it's in the market is decreasing.
I think it's the same as SEO. There are legitimate SEO practices and then there are scammy trendy sounding ones. The legitimate techniques typically involve a lot of systematic testing and hard work. The scammy ones throw buzz words around and have little to back them up.
Before Growth Hacking, marketing people did PR, Partnership, Trade Shows, Ad Campaigns, etc. Yukk.<p>To me, Growth Hacking is a measurable engineering exercise. Data-driven and scalable - way better than marketing days of old.