Growth hacker? Bite me

http://www.dirktheman.com/rant/growth-hacker-bite-me/

by dirktheman • 14 years ago

34 40 14 years ago

danso4• 14 years ago

This rant seems to mostly be a slam against buzzwords in general (which is a bias I also share)...but I don't agree with his reasoning behind the attack in this case

> So yeah, maybe a ‘traditional marketer’ isn’t able to come up with the (admittingly impressive) solution of HOW to push a listing to Craigslist, but you can’t just go saying that he/she can’t come up with the idea!

I haven't followed the discussions about growth hackers, but I can imagine a person whose skillset covers both marketing and code in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of those two parts.

It's not just the "idea" that matters, but the understanding of how discrete data can be usefully collected, analyzed, and disseminated. Call me skeptical, but I don't think there are many marketers who really understand the admittedly pedantic logistics in this...I don't mean that they need to actually code this, but to understand that there is such a way to parse amorphous tasks and information such that something truly useful can be done.

As an example, how many people out there merely had the idea that people like collecting photos and displaying them in an attractive layout? How many of those built a massive startup company from that idea?

dirktheman6• 14 years ago

Point taken. I agree that there are a whole bunch of marketers who couldn't have come up with this idea because they don't have a basic knowledge of how these things work. Maybe I'm just fortunate enough to know a couple of them who actually do...

danso4• 14 years ago

You come from a limited perspective...you know both coding and marketing and some of the fundamentals (particularly of the former) are so grounded that you can't possibly imagine a layman NOT knowing them. But trust me, many of them don't :)

robbiemitchell• 14 years ago

Yes. And it's not just about _not_ having ideas. Marketers have a billion ideas. Without any technical chops, though, they will drive your devs and designers into the ground with never-ending requests for integrations, trials, landing pages, bug fixes, and more.

A self-sufficient marketer is worth multiples not just in his/her own productivity, but in the gains you get from not driving the rest of your company bonkers.

mindcrime6• 14 years ago

I think you underestimate marketers. Some of those guys & gals are practically statisticians. Have you ever picked up a "marketing research" textbook and skimmed through it? Serious marketers know a LOT about how to "collect, analyze and disseminate" data.

dirktheman6• 14 years ago

Exactly. Here in The Netherlands, marketing historically has been a part of the faculty of economics. It involves a lot more statistics and model data than peope think.

danso4• 14 years ago

I don't disagree here. But I don't think we're talking about the same thing. There are statisticians who are great at analysis...when the data is well formatted and granular. These same statisticians are less attune to how you collect and disseminate that data in different ways (a different "way" could be: how do I automate spam Craigslist subsections at relative intervals related to the frequency of postings in each particular subsections, and, of course, make this spam not look like spam?)

In the science and medicine field, there are obviously many brilliant, technical minds. Yet not all of them can properly code, which limits the domain of their work when it comes to efficiency and scope.

rohansingh• 14 years ago

This is getting cliché. I think at this point I'm now seeing more posts railing against the use of the term "growth hacker", than I am seeing actual uses of the term "growth hacker".

This anti-"growth hacker" sentiment isn't bold or brave anymore. It's repetitive.

Ensorceled• 14 years ago

I was just thinking that. Actual usage of growth hacker seems mostly "tongue in cheek" or "for lack of a better term".

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

Buzz words are annoying, but sometimes they help communicate...

As companies grow, they have to hire "business people" including dedicated marketers. One of HN's and Silicon Valley's problems is figuring out who is a business person who can add value and who is an "idea person" has has traveled to the valley to kill time over the next 3 years before getting a real job.

The solution is the term Growth Hacker which, while annoying actually serves the purpose of filtering the highest production people from a huge amount of potential marketing candidates.

I'm not sure if we will ever see the term Finance Hacker or Accounting Hacker but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some other terms develop.

ArekDymalski• 14 years ago

Internet Marketer would perfect desctiption for someone who's has required knowledge and skills. If it only wasn't already killed by many "internet marketers".

mindcrime6• 14 years ago

Adding new terms to the lexicon can be handy and is, obviously, required on occasion. I'm still a bit skeptical that "growth hacker" really adds any value though, especially since it seems to be somewhat amorphously defined, and it's a label that anyone can anoint themselves with - much like "Social Media Expert" or "SEO Expert."

Get the industry to stabilize on a clear, consistent, meaningful definition of what a "growth hacker" really is and some criteria for being one and maybe it becomes useful.

I mean, Growth Hacker is a shorter phrase than "marketing specialist who can code, with specialized knowledge in product management, viral growth strategies, and data analysis." But is that really what it means?

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Like "financial engineer", which is now a university degree program.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

If you hire an Accounting Hacker, the IRS would like you to take a seat over there.

lmm2• 14 years ago

My, that's the least readable site I've seen on HN in a while.

dirktheman6• 14 years ago

Font-wise? Layout wise? Although it's a Wordpress frankenstein-job, but I'm always curious about improving the experience!

_ms3y• 14 years ago

I stopped reading when I realized that you call yourself "Dirk the Man" professionally.

johnlensonni• 14 years ago

It's just a big mess. Why is the background brown, but then the background of the text black? Do you find those colours complement each other? Along with the blue, the whole design looks really grimy and dingy.

Why are you telling me the date? I know today's date.

I don't like the battery of social network icons, you may disagree.

I also don't like the swearing. I think it's unprofessional, however also very subjective.

Strange mix of sans and serif fonts, with no apparent reason for which is which. "Growth Hacker? Bite me!" is serif, below that "Why the term 'growth hacking' is just another buzz word" is sans. Below that "A rant by Dirk" which is serif, apart from the single word "rant".

lmm2• 14 years ago

The font doesn't help, but I think the big problem is light-on-dark text inside a light site. I'm trying to read the light text, but my eyes are constantly drawn to the enormous light margins instead.

hnal943• 14 years ago

Also the title of the page is "Code Hacker? Bite Me!" which is confusing.

livestyle• 14 years ago

Fantastic read and one that will ruffle some feathers..kudos.

I find it interesting that in Andrew Chen's famous growth hacker post he doesn't mention the other craigslist "hack"(insert sarcasm) that was even more important to airbnb's growth.

sageikosa2• 14 years ago

Even before the author mentioned this was marketing, I was telling myself "this is marketing".

Perhaps the term "growth hacker" has arisen because "marketing" has gotten a bad rep. In the world of 1990s software development, marketing drove features based on market research, making developers resent the idiosyncratic nature of the user community, and their proxy: the marketing guy (almost as much as the sales guy who would promise something that wasn't even under development).

In the post 2000s world, every developer dreams of internet gold and striking it rich with their idea (and a marketing guy would corrupt that), so a "growth hacker" sounds less "evil" and more like someone a developer could work with, even though they will likely alter the concept of the product to make it "marketable" (ie, "pivot" the project)

mindcrime6• 14 years ago

Perhaps the term "growth hacker" has arisen because "marketing" has gotten a bad rep.

It only has a "bad rap" among people who are fairly clueless about what marketing actually is, and/or people who hasty assessments based on limited data points. So, a hacker worked for a startup where the "marketing guy" was seen as evil, and now "marketing has a bad rap" seems to be the meme here. And that would be silly.

Marketing is damn interesting stuff and it's absolutely crucial to a successful business. And good marketers, like good developers, are talented, skilled and hardworking. And, also like good developers, they're hard to find.

sageikosa2• 14 years ago

I don't disagree. That they may have acquired a bad rep (amongst developers, or perhaps hackers) wasn't a value judgment, just an observation.

I try to separate the individuals holding a position from the position itself. I've met great sales people, marketers, testers and subject matter experts. I've also met bad project managers, directors, software architects, and developers.

I think if there was any reason for general business functions to get a bad rep in the late 1990s, it was probably due to the glut of post-Reagan-era business school graduates, the dearth of traditional large corporate organizations to fill them (by then, military-industrial downsizing was underway and heavy industry was moving offshore), and the boom-time investment craze of the early ".COM" era, leading to the ready availability of job roles which could be absorbed (and were often demanded) by investment capital.

jamiequint• 14 years ago

This article misses the origin of the term 'growth hacker'. There are two primary shifts that got us here:

1. Marketing moving from being an external function to an internal function that is embedded in the product. Thus product design, product development, and product management skills are becoming very important skills to possess as part of a marketing function.

2. As marketing channels shift from being largely immeasurable to measurable at a very detailed level the marketing function demands more understanding of data and statistics.

Hence the term "growth hacker". Someone with product design, product development, and product management skills who also has a solid understanding of data and statistics, then leverages these skills to direct marketing efforts whether internal (product driven) or external (advertising/content driven).

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Agree with all of this except there is no evidence that the A/B testing world as a whole knows anything correct about statistics, in the sense of being able to profit from more sophisticated bets than "this idea seems not too bad". If players bet real money on the probabilities they claimed, they would be bankrupt. Contrast against the auto insurance companies and such who get this stuff right.

hack_edu• 14 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Site appears to have bitten the dust

aginn• 14 years ago

most growth hackers or growth pros are product managers or product editors,so the post starts with the wrong premise.

Also, your accusations against growth hackers are titled based rather than what they do or learning about what growth hackers do. If growth hackers choose to identify themselves with each other in a new way, I don't think there is an issue. Let them be. Remember, front-end engineering wasn't considered much of a position 5 years ago. Same with UX, UI, data scientist, etc. How about SEO specialist or direct-marketers.... Can they self-idenitfy a new sub-division of marketing?

Adam Smith was right, people specialize as an industry expands to offer greater value in a niche. Growth has become essential to startups. Growth teams are becoming standard at scaling startups. Thus, growth hackers appeared.

It is fine to express a distaste for a growth hacker by what he or she does, seems silly to dislike them for their title. That is like saying "I hate chocolate because of they call it "chocolate""

I must say degrading the work Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen have done by comparing them to meaningless consultants from the dot-com era is disgusting. Andrew Chen is one of the most brilliant viral engineers on this planet. Sean Ellis has rocketed several companies to success and just acquired a KISS company. I don't respect ad hominem attacks, neither should you.

mindcrime6• 14 years ago

It is fine to express a distaste for a growth hacker by what he or she does, seems silly to dislike them for their title.

I would say exactly the opposite. I expect the average HN reader has tremendous respect for what "growth hackers" DO. But I also think that a lot of the kickback against the term is the perception (justified or not) that it's an unnecessary, vacuous term that (ironically) is "just marketing". Or, IOW, a fluffy title that some people have adopted to make themselves sound more interesting.

If these folks were routinely being called Marketing Strategists or something, I doubt there would be all this discussion about it.

dirktheman6• 14 years ago

I have a huge respect for both Ellis and Chen, and stated that on several occasions in the blog post. The same goes for what 'growth hackers' do, in fact, I could call myself one since I do both marketing and coding! I just don't like the term growth hacker, as this is just another buzz word for something that just isn't new. I wholeheartedly agree on the ad hominem attacks, they are low. This piece wasn't meant as one, and I apologize if it came across that way.

patio11• 14 years ago

A rose by any other name...

Do you believe there are short dev projects which make meaningful, compounding improvements in core areas of concern for the business? If so, holy cow, right? That is really, really, REALLY important to how you'd conduct your business ("do them") and how you'd arrange a career as a dev (at the margin, why work on anything else?)

If you don't believe that that set of projects exists or can be reliably identified in advance, then huge levels of disdain would be warranted... if you're very confident that you're right. The evidence is not in your favor.

calgaryeng• 14 years ago

Isn't this largely similar to another post that was up here about a week ago?

paulsutter• 14 years ago

The term "growth hacker":

1. Focuses on the hybrid nature of the work. In a small team you can't have two departments doing what one smart guy can do, and

2. Helps purely technical people overcome bias that marketing work is the dark side, show that it's also cool.

It's like a micro restatement of the "Copper and Tin" section of http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html. Maybe not the greatest phrase of all time, but this article seems like a bit of a personal overreaction.

awwstn2• 14 years ago

Writing a bitter rant on your personal website and posting it on HN yourself = "growth hacking"

Growth hacker? Bite me

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