The many mistakes of growth hacking
The term growth hacker is attributed to Sean Ellis, entrepreneur and manager of companies such as LogMeIn, Dropbox and others, in a 2010 article entitled “Find a growth hacker for your startup”, which describes a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”
Since then, the term has been applied to a wide range of techniques, ranging from email marketing to recommendation algorithms and virality, creating a supposed professional category and even consulting services on the subject, as if it were some kind of new religion that all companies must embrace and practice, as though growth hacking were an unquestionable truth.
In reality, of course, there is an obvious problem with growth hacking: in the vast majority of cases, making growth the unconditional objective of a company is a delusion. Sure, all companies want to grow. But when growth is the sole objective and is sought by all possible means, important mistakes are made and conceptual illogicalities are incurred, which may even run contrary to one of the defining characteristics of growth hacking: sustainability.
An example: I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2003. It’s a service I use to distribute a good part of my writing. By now, the company should know my habits, my way of using the product…
