On: Founder Ethics

[tptacek]

As I understand it, "growth hacking" simply refers to the practice of treating your company's marketing as a software project; of systemizing it, making it measurable and repeatable.

[patio11 → tptacek]

This is one of the reasons I am not in love with that word. For better or worse, for at least some people it is strongly associated with "naughtiness" in the sense talked about here: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

At least some growth hacking tactics are examples of taking someone else's system and convincing it to do things that its makers had not envisioned. The paradigmatic example was Airbnb building a deep Craigslist integration via a process which does not wholly fail to resemble security research. http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an...

[gohrt → patio11]

"Security research" as a euphemism for "unauthorized use of a computer system"? Nice.

[tptacek → gohrt]

That is exactly correct.

[wpietri → tptacek]

In the same way in which a "social media consultant" is just helping people with a new medium.

On the one hand: that's what the good ones do. But on the other, there's definitely some dubious bullshit that gets excused under the shiny new name.