Listen, in essence, growth hacking is this. Instead of building a product and then marketing it, you understand that the product is the marketing; let that settle in. Your growth marketer should be involved from ideation phases right up to executing the whole GTM. You can't build a product and then say, "Here, now go hack some growth". All that brings is epic magnitudes of failure.
Growth hacking isn't finding a magical lever like airbnb, reddit, etc, you can't make non-viral product go viral, that's just forceful and any virality that is forceful and not innately built into the core functionality of the product just will never achieve sustainable growth, period. It's like all the nut jobs that talk about the k-factor and all that crap, it's complete bullshit.
Trying to define "growth hacking" is a pointless endeavor at this point. Whatever you think it _used_ to mean, it's become nothing more than an empty marketing buzzword that means a thousand things to a thousand people.
When you use a word like that, you're communicating nothing and giving people a reason to stop taking you seriously.
Whether you mean "growth marketing," "conversion optimization," "a/b testing," "a clever tactic," ... just say that.
The use of a different term is essentially a dog whistle saying "marketing of certain kinds of things" or "marketing by certain kinds of people" but the actual activity described fits completely within the relatively simple and well understood definition of marketing.
i agree completely with your first sentence. Having distribution is just as important as the core use case of the product. In the beginning, it may actually be more important.
One of the most fascinating things about the recent explosion of the Magic service, was how Hacker News (and Product Hunt) essentially acted as a growth hack for a product that was developed in a weekend. Given that the people behind Magic were in the YC batch and probably had access to strong upvoting on Hacker News, that seems like a really good example of a growth hack (where the product is the marketing).
I agree but I'd also add the question: is viral growth a right move for your product? what if the people your free users refer to are more free users? what if you all the viral attention just end up bringing hoard of freeloaders instead of customers? You are not facebook, you are not dropbox, you need customers to survive and you know have an army of seathing, angry, picky, freeloaders now ready to blog and spread negative word on the first chance they see something they are receiving for absolute free?
Free has no value. Free isn't a competitive edge. So does viral growth that just magnifies that aspect really make sense?
I disagree. Free is not something you can compete on sustainable manner. Eventually you will need to start making cash. It's quite a bold gamble betting that educating your market will eventually lead into customers.
Imagine if one guy looking for a free tool tells 10 other people about the free tool. you are going to end up with 11 people now using your tool. if it costs you to upkeep the tool for each customer, you've now mangified it by 10 fold. you start hoping that one of these customers one day will become a customer but are they really? you've sold them something free, it costs nothing therefore there's no reason to pay for it, ever.
It's not a bold gamble, educating your market is definitely taking into account as a cost of capital, from consumer electronics to, food, to tech startups. And it's definitely not about hope, there is a clear marketing strategy to get people to buy again. Just google free trials and samples, even supermarkets have been doing this forever, it's not a new concept.
This is because it is ALWAYS more expensive to get a new customer than keep an older one.
In software, the cost to onboard a new user is or should be insignificant. If you don't have this working for you, go back and try again.
If you build a small base of customers that absolutely love what you do, that's far more sustainable than building something that a lot of like what you do. Growth is more sustainable when you've built a product that can scale because it actually addressed a problem that is passionately shared by others. Think about the major successes that exist today...how did they start...then you'll have your answer.
It's possible this sentence hinges on "hacks" vs "hacking". I'd be surprised if PG had a problem with hacking for growth. In fact I think he would embrace such a thing mightily.
It's not really "hacking" - it's just marketing. Occasionally you may beat use a trick to beat a system, but mostly it's a bullshit buzzword that marketers came up with.
Unfortunately, it works really, really well.
I wrote a (free) book[1] on user acquisition, following the pattern of a lot of the programming tutorials that helped me learn to program. I originally called it "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition." The title got tons of traffic and interest - up to 100 tweets a day, many from people I'm convinced never read it. When I changed it to "User Acquisition for Developers," the traffic dropped significantly, so I changed it back. But I don't think I can live with myself, so when I have time I'm going to take the word "hack" back out of it.
Bullshit buzzwords sell. And for every critic in the comments section, this post has a bunch of upvotes. That's almost a marketing truism - a few people will be annoyed, but it's really easy to drive the masses.
I've been resisting the urge to use "growth hacker" as a title, so I still go by "user acquisition consultant." Every now and then I get asked if I can help a company with "growth hacking," and more often than not it's an early warning signal that the company thinks they can sneak their way to success without putting in real work.
This article is fair though. It takes the buzz out of the phrase and essentially states that there is no hack, only a deliberate focus on process and a continuous cycle of experimentation and review.
Seems like this could be summarized into 1 sentence. Think of ideas, prioritize them, and test them. This is too broad to be considered growth hacking.
Real growth hacks are things like AirBnB spamming Craigslist, Reddit creating the illusion of users with fake ones, and Rap Genius giving out tweets for backlinks.
The talk sets up a straw man at about 1:30 with the Ellis quote saying, paraphrasing: "Most marketing departments are doing it blind, not looking at the data and not running experiments." Perhaps that's the case for most tech start-ups, where there is no one with a marketing background involved, but it's not the case for any moderately mature business that I've come across (in nearly 20 years of marketing) including 2-5 person shops just getting off the ground. Quite the opposite I find most marketers to be data-obsessed and will diligently test and track permutation after permutation of tactic to tease out what works and what doesn't.
I'm going to be honest. I did not really get a good value out of this article. It's written in sections but is extremely dry and generic. I'm not sure what makes it so, but just the language here seems like somebody wrote it for the sake of writing because they had to.
Read through the article but didn't walk away from any new insights or new angle. A good article in my opinion needs tension and a climax towards the problem and then a resolution, much like a good story or music.
This might sound harsh but I just wanted to add some constructive feedback. The title certainly was catchy but found it more of a clickbait.
Growth hacking isn't finding a magical lever like airbnb, reddit, etc, you can't make non-viral product go viral, that's just forceful and any virality that is forceful and not innately built into the core functionality of the product just will never achieve sustainable growth, period. It's like all the nut jobs that talk about the k-factor and all that crap, it's complete bullshit.