There’re two types of people in this world; People that know and perform tricks from others and people that explore new things which will become the tricks of the future. Say what? Give me a minute to explain myself.
Most people like magicians, they perform tricks and leave you behind wondering how they pulled it off. Chances are that you will never find how they fooled you, which can be quite brain-bending for some of us.
On the other hand, magicians are pretty lazy. They perform the same tricks over and over again and aren’t forced to adjust their performance towards their audience. As long as their tricks stay a secret, they can continue performing the same show until they retire. Of course they are entertaining, but in the end they only cost money to keep you busy paying attention.
Why I’m comparing magicians to growth hackers you think? As a growth hacker myself I often get sad when people expect that I can solely grow their product or service overnight. Unfortunately this isn’t the cookie crumbles.
The funny thing is that a lot of people always expect that growth hacking is equal to magic. That we, as growth hackers, have this secret list with silver bullets, benchmarks and a default toolkit to grow your startup. Again, we don’t. Sorry ;)
So let’s start with the bad news first; we don’t have default tricks nor can we perform any magic on command. The good news? We are no Magicians. We are Growth Hackers. It’s our main job to explore and try new tactics related to your type of business, to look at the current available data and search for interesting insights within your analytics.
Of course we own our fair share of article bookmarks, have preferred tools to use and a framework to keep track of our experiments and tests. In contrast with a magician our tricks of the trade need to be adaptive. Our profession won’t survive the practice of a routine act. Growth hacking is all about improving our game on a daily basis based on results from the past. Being good at your job today, won’t mean growth hacks that work today will grant the same results tomorrow.
Growth hackers don’t perform tricks, magicians do. Growth hackers will deep dive in your business and keep searching in order to find something they can work with. We will run experiment after experiment with the data as our lifeblood. Magicians will fail once their trick flops, growth hackers can’t fail; we simply need more time to experiment while we’re secretly learning in the mean time.
Don’t hire for the tricks, hire for the mindset and curiosity to learn and succeed in the long term. It’s either the one night stand or the long term relationship, you can’t have both (without cheating).
Don’t hire magicians, hire growth hackers.
The magician knows what it takes to blow your mind, but the growth hacker knows what it takes to make it rain…
