Why Growth Hackers are Taking Over Startup Marketing

http://technori.com/2012/10/2600-up-and-to-the-right-why-growth-hackers-are-taking-over-startup-marketing/

by melissajoykong • 14 years ago

20 5 14 years ago

arkonaut• 14 years ago

> "90% of tests fail"

This is a valuable point for those looking to get into split testing, growth testing, growth hacking in general. Unless there is this kind of understanding going in, a 90% 'failure' rate (failure to find something that works) can be quite demoralizing.

Additionally, startups that hire or look for a growth hacker should be obsessed with the number and quality of tests, not just the graph magically beginning to go up and to the right. It's easy to think that anyone that gets things 10% right isn't really good at their job - don't fall into this trap with growth hackers. The good ones are testing 10 things a week, so good results will come.

davidtyleryork• 14 years ago

Another day, another "Growth hacker" post that misses the point.

Hacker News, give marketers some credit here. The majority of good startup marketers are already analytically minded. They already run tests every week, though they may not run 10. They already look at the funnel and try to move the needle on AARRR with experiments, A/B Testing, and more. All of this already exists in the marketing world, and you don't need SQL queries to do it.

What "Growth Hacker" is really referring to is someone who works on the Product with the goal of driving growth, not someone who is a marketer with coding chops. The distinction here is pretty important. Working on Product is very different than working on Marketing, even though both have the same goal.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Yes, I thought it funny that given the synonyms that article title is "marketers take over startup marketing" :-)

Young tech talent does not give enough credit for great marketing. That turns out to be a double negative since the marketing folks don't want to call themselves product marketing because it makes them sound 'uncool' and folks who are ignorant of what marketing does give them no respect.

31reasons• 14 years ago

Growth Hacking decision/testing idea can come from anywhere in the startup. Consider GitHub. They decided on giving free account for Open Source projects and paid ones for private projects. This decision was the main cause of their viral growth according to the CEO Tom Preston-Werner. This decision can't be made by a developer or a marketer, unless you are a very small team.

drp4929• 14 years ago

Isn't labeling a marketer as "growth hacker - someone focused on creating scalable growth by manipulating and measuring each aspect of the customer funnel" is same as labeling a programmer as "bug squasher - someone focused on establishing a project with consistently very low open bugs reports by manipulating and measuring each aspect of software quality control" ?

Why Growth Hackers are Taking Over Startup Marketing

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