Let’s demystify growth hacking

Too much has been already written about ‘Growth Hacking’. However, having been into product space for quite some time, I believe growth hacking is probably one of the most confused jargon being used in the business world (mainly product businesses).

Hence, thought of writing down my perspective on growth hacking by demystifying few prevalent ambiguities -

Ambiguity 1 — Growth hacking is a combination of marketing + data + tech (so, one needs to know programming)

I will say it depends on the hack. Some hacks will need a combination of more than one aspect but sometimes a hack can be solely executed by a single function.

I think tech is more or less pervasive now so this shouldn’t even be in the discussion. Tech in growth hacking case generally need not correspond to hardcore programming but to a set of tools that helps you execute the hack quickly.

For example, trying different subject line for e-mails is a growth hack focused solely on content which marketing can alone carry it out creatively to see which one can give them more open rates. What you need for it — probably a creative mind and an e-mail marketing tool (the tech part)

However if e-mail subject line has to be optimized based on results of earlier e-mail campaigns, then data skills is needed to look at earlier results in an objective manner to help you optimize the current campaign

Ambiguity 2 — We can just copy and paste popular growth hacks and it will work for us as well

I think once a hack is in public domain and is widely accepted, then it is no more a growth hack.

For example, if you are a SaaS provider — you would have known of how putting one pricing plan as most popular have resulted in more sign ups for some products.

Should you implement it? Yes.

Will it help in more sign ups? Perhaps not as you would expect, as it is now a widely accepted practice.

However if you can even innovate a bit here be it at UI, content or something else that does the trick for YOU, congrats, you have created a hack for yourself. And you need not split it out until you see the results getting flattened out.

Ambiguity 3 — Growth Hacking is only about new user acquisition/customer acquisition (perhaps a reason why it is part of marketing)

I believe, for any product there are four main metrics that is needed to be improved on a constant basis — User Awareness, User Acquisition, User Engagement and User Retention.

So any activity that can be used to improve any of the four metrics in the least cost or no cost (the ideal situation) can be qualified as a growth hack.

If the above made sense to you, will appreciate if you can share, like or provide feedback on the same :) Let me know if you have any different point of view as well.