The Growth Hacker Movement Is Poisonous

I really want this to be true. I will say that as someone with a corporate job outside the actual startup community, I really miss the days of &quot;Make something people want&quot;, and &quot;Ramen profitable&quot; (does anyone even <i>remember</i> ramen profitability anymore?). It really does seem that the community has sold itself out to a process aimed at driving multiround funding toward an acquisition event and that it&#x27;s lost sight of the fun of making actual products.<p>But my fear is that, no, &quot;growth hacking&quot; really is the path to success in this world; and that all the ramen was just something that amounts to a marketing gimick to get the bubble off the ground...

&lt;title&gt;<i>n</i> is really bad&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;<p>&lt;body&gt;we actually think <i>n</i> is good, but we feel it is getting devalued now it is popular&lt;p&gt;discuss&lt;&#x2F;body&gt;

Startups now a days are just a cheap(ish) way to conduct R&amp;D for big corps.<p>Just invest a little money around town with your big-corp buddies and then bid for the best products that come out of it. All other startup losers can continue eating their ramen until they age out of the &quot;system&quot; (ie grow up and get a family) and go to work for said Big Corp, Inc. until &quot;retirement&quot; (the day before you die).<p>But yeah, I&#x27;m being cynical too.

I disagree. Growth hacking is not tactics, it&#x27;s a different way to think about marketing and it completely doesn&#x27;t take away the focus on building a remarkable product. The book Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer begins with the importance of PMF and marketing getting embedded in Product Development.<p>I do agree however that the &#x27;101 tactics to growthack&#x27; are mostly B.S. and take away from the way to think about it.

I think Growth Hacker debases the work hacker more than anything else...

I think the most important thing to remember is that the goal of growth hacking is to get growth and get more users. The 652 Actionable Growth Hacks You Can Do Today! type articles lose sight of that and end up with the goal of growth hacking to growth hack.

viddy, socialCam, BranchOut, DoAlbums all used FB open graph when you could report on content consumption which created fast viral loops (Viral coefficient &gt;1 ), even todays best growth hacking is going to find it hard to produce such results, basically retention is key.... if you have retention on small scale only then do growth hacking!

Exactly what I&#x27;ve been saying for the past few months. It&#x27;s just another fad.

Speaking of not creating value, repetitive advice blogging is poisonous.

happy to elaborate and discuss

When your self-hype-double-speak stops paying the tabs for the checks your work can&#x27;t cash, change the name, it&#x27;s all the same... a sucker a minute, so you better sugar up another stick. Follow the money behind a dream. Suck it dry. Rinse, repeat.