How to be a growth hacker

"Software is eating everything" even traditional employee roles in organizations. People who can automate will always win, because they can do more in less time.<p>I remember once when I was consulting, I was on the bench for a few days and the marketing group contacted me to help aggregate and validate multiple lead lists. They had been working on it for days, copy/pasting record after record from multiple excel sheets into one big master sheet. They asked if I could help.<p>I wrote some algorithms that matched records on several criteria and put them into one big list. It took me a couple hours and I was done. Emailed them later.<p>The marketing group emailed me back -- ecstatic! I saved them so much time, they sent me all these promotional gifts meant to give to clients and potential customers. A thermos I use to this day full of starbucks bucks that I shared with my friends. I was king for a day.<p>These kinds of problems exist all over corporate america and now that programmers have automated many of their daily tasks and accelerated them where they haven't, they have more time to help more people within the organizations that employ them. Their new tasks show their immense power to people who normally think software is just something to get in the way of their daily tasks, slowing them down, making life worse. Much software out there is awful to use and built by engineers of the old days who were overworked, underpaid relative to their contribution, and perhaps angry and antagonistic toward coworkers.<p>There's a new breed out there and we are taking over! :)

As software integrates into everything more deeply are we going to get childish names for every profession?<p>Marketers are growth hackers, doctors will be health hackers, lawyers will be justice hackers?<p>Then we can ensure that even when software is as fundamental to our society as law or transportation or materials engineering there will still be a nice sheen of hucksterism and bullshit on top.<p>Good job software people, keep ensuring that society as a whole will assume that the software people need to always be underneath someone who is actually a professional on the org chart.<p>Everyone here must be familiar with the "software is eating the world" meme. That means that technical marketers are not growth hackers, they are good marketers who are keeping up to date with what's needed to do their job.

While this post is very informative, it has the potential to be quite dangerous. This type of marketing is like gasoline - it can take a small fire and make it huge. You almost want to conclude that 99% of the fire was due to the gasoline, but that isn't the case. Most of the critical work is getting the initial fire. Once it starts burning, you 'earn' the ability to add gasoline and see a big effect.<p>Long story short - don't try to growth hack until your product is ready. Every shining example of engineered marketing begins with a product that already had engaged users.

The last thing the tech world needs is people walking around calling themselves "growth hackers".<p>Actually, the last thing the tech world needs is stuff like this, from the article:<p><i>If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.</i><p>Stop making up "markets" and "niches", then making crappy products to try and be "viral" in these areas, then calling yourself a "growth hacker" or something as ridiculous and valueless.<p>Build something because you love it, not because a "growth hacker" determined that it was a "pre-market fit".

People who were around technology businesses in the 1990s, please illuminate me: wasn't it common for pretentious managers to adopt fancy job titles? (I may have read too much Dilbert.)<p>This is really just marketing with a better knowledge of the technical possibilities. Do we really need a new job title?

Here at GraphMuse (invite engine for Facebook apps), we hadn't heard of a "Growth Engineer" until we really looked into some of the people interested in our product.<p>Turns out that Growth Engineers are actually respected "higher-ups." You said it yourself too. That said, I think few people are familiar with this job title outside of SV.<p>Was it Facebook who started this trend?<p>NOTE: I'd increase the line spacing on your blog, it's a bit tight.

I am a little confused by the wording of this. I usually think of a growth hacker as somebody who helps scale an app, like an Instagram engineer for instance. Is anybody else confused by the naming?

Interesting post, but the title (and subject) is actually " Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing". The 'How' is absent.

The growth hacker has existed since the dawn of time. It is called being a top sales person, and good sales people are worth twice their weight in gold. Someone who can sell and can program is not a growth hacker, but a sales engineer. Think about it...

A lot of the comments, imho, don't seem to understand Andrew Chen's post and are just fixating on some of the terminology. In fairness it would be easier to do so had the reader of this post been a regular reader of his blog. It is more readily understood in that context. I recommend reading his analysis of how AirBnB went about hacking for growth. And there are some excellent posts on growth hacking on Quora.

This is kind of unrelated but has anyone bought this? <a href="http://www.appsumo.com/appsumo-growth-action-video" rel="nofollow">http://www.appsumo.com/appsumo-growth-action-video</a> . I'd prefer not to spend $80 to find out that it's full of cliches.

I think meetup had the post to Craigslist a long time a go. Not sure if the still do it.

If this is something you'd like to do for twitter, and you have javascript, rails, and/or java/scala chops, or you're just a damn good generalist engineer who can pick up anything, send me an email at lzmfAuxjuufs/dpn.

If the "normal coder" on your startup isn't already a "growth hacker" you're doing something wrong. Same goes for the rest of the team.