Growth Interview Series : #2 Bernard Huang (Growth Hacker at 42 Floors)
Currently, growth hacker at 42Floors. In the past, played online poker professionally in college and bought a restaurant after graduating. Threw the 2nd biggest event at SXSW 2014, Food Crawl at SXSW, getting 23k RSVPs with a budget of $200. Past startups, received a $37 venture capital infusion from the Pinboard Co-prosperity Cloud (which resulted in getting featured on Wired) and investment from Betaspring (startup accelerator). Passionate about growth tactics, shenanigans, inner peace, and eSports.
1. Could you tell me a little bit about your background in Growth/Internet Marketing?
I’ve been working on startups ever since I graduated college in 2010. During college, I played online poker professionally and was able to make enough money to buy a Dickey’s BBQ Pit in Cedar Park, TX with a couple friends of mine. Long story short, that BBQ went out of business in a year and 1 month. Then, I proceeded to teach myself how to code, get funded by a startup accelerator in Providence called Betaspring and built several startups.
2. How you got started with Growth?
I’ve come up with and executed upon tons of ideas. The first thing that you do when you think you’ve come up with an idea is you go and find users. Since I’ve tried to do so many things in the past, I’ve routinely been involved in growing small ideas.
3. What is a routine/day in the life of Bernard Huang?
Wake up, take a bath, do yoga, meditate, go for a run, walk to work, drink coffee, look at analytics of growth experiments . I’m running, eat lunch, work on setting up more growth experiments, go home, and do things you would do at night at home.
4. Why is growth hacking interesting?
I personally enjoy changing the meta and gambling. I believe the high value growth tactics are all new ways of thinking (meta) about the same old problem (growth / distribution / traction) that only work 5% of the time (gambling) but when the experiment does work, yields tons of ROI (positive expectation).
5. What fundamental technical skills would a Growth Hacker need to posses?
A certain degree of coding is required to be a great growth hacker. Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to put together a website by copying and pasting code / scripts. Depending on what types of products or services you want to growth hack, you’ll definitely need to set up a robust analytics system to monitor your experiments. A fundamental non-technical skill that a successful growth hacker needs to possess is the ability to fail often and fast — because most of the things you do are going to flop — better get used to that now.
6. What are some good interview questions when hiring a growth hacker/internet marketer?
What’s the craziest experiment you’ve done and why do you think it was successful?
How do you think about metrics and analytics? What’s your favorite tools to use and why?
If you could be any article of clothing, what would you be and why? just kidding.
7. Do you think internet marketer/growth hacker need to know how to code?
To a degree. Read answer #5.
8. What are the most productive ways to spend time on the internet?
There are no productive ways to spend time on the internet. Ok, productivity depends on your goals — for me, it’s looking at analytics of experiments. I’m running and emailing people for advice / tactics — a lot of the best growth tactics aren’t publicly talked about (that’s why they are the best, because no one knows about them and the customer acquisition channels aren’t saturated yet).
9. What advice to you have for someone who wants to build a career in growth?
Experiment relentlessly. If you think about something you want to try, figure out the simplest way of executing it, and do it as fast as possible. I once wanted to see the effects of social media on a ridiculous service (a towel delivery service that would bring you a freshly laundered towel every day to your doorstep for $2 / day). I started the website “toweladay.com” with the premise that I could get a bunch of people to sign up for toweladay if it seemed like a bunch of people already signed up for toweladay. I seeded the twitter account @toweladay with tons of tweets (https://twitter.com/search?q=toweladay) and the facebook account with fake likes and then got the startup featured on http://betalist.com/ — it worked (got 250+ email signups) — but, I don’t think that the business model was feasible so I didn’t actually build the service.
10. What’s the best way to contact you?
Twitter me: @bernardjhuang
