Read this before you hire a Growth Hacker
Maybe your business needs a Growth Engineer instead
I started as a growth hacker 4 years ago. I’ve always been very excited about quick prototyping and rapid experimentation. I love the idea that there is a secret growth rocket hidden somewhere and by trying hard enough you might find a way to fire it up and propel the entire company into the stratosphere.
I tried helping many companies, sometimes successful, sometimes not. I started to see a pattern when my growth hacking techniques did not work. I’m writing this article to help you as a founder or as a growth hacker avoid making the same mistake I made a couple of times.
Growth hacking is not a silver bullet
Many founders I talked to think growth hacking is like a magic switch they can flip to turn sales charts into hockey sticks.
It’s not. Anybody who tells you such a switch exists is probably trying to sell you something or has been very lucky.
Of course there are some quick wins that a growth hacker can help you with in order to get more awareness, traffic, leads and users. This might seem like magic from an outside perspective. But really, they’re just ways to get more people to pay attention.
Once you got their attention is when the real magic needs to happen. Does the product solve a real problem for them? Do they feel appreciated and connected? Is the company culture in line with their own values? Do they love your company?
Growing a company in the long term is not about hacking your customer’s mind. It’s about gaining their trust because you deserve it.
To earn this trust you need to make something people love. There is no secret shortcut to success. Clickbaits, pop-ups and spam might show promising results but create more distance in the end. If you want the people who use your product to be your friend, please treat them like one :)
Growth hackers are like rocket fuel for your spaceship. If your ship is going in the right direction it will go faster in the right direction. If it’s not going in the right direction… you get the picture.
Growth hacking doesn’t work if users don’t love the product enough to talk about it spontaneously with others.
If your product doesn’t turn a significant amount of users into ambassadors it’s just not good enough to become a fast-growing startup. We say it hasn’t reached product/market fit. A good indicator for this is the Sean Ellis test: 40% of your users should be ‘very disappointed’ if your product stops existing.
So what do you do if you haven’t reached product/market fit yet? You hire a growth engineer.
A growth engineer tries to make people love the product
Similar to a growth hacker, a growth engineer uses radical experimentation and is data-driven. Basically they both throw spaghetti at the wall, study what sticks and then go back to the kitchen to cook something stickier.
The difference is that a growth hacker will try to get more people to use the product and a growth engineer will try to make the product better.
A growth engineer will gather a group of beta testers around your non-finished product and start running experiments by adding things, removing things, changing things. We might break a lot of stuff along the way but that’s ok, as long as we get new insights about what people really want.
This means that a growth engineer is essentially a growth hacker minus the paid marketing skills plus the development skills. Or a developer with a growth mindset and a lot of empathy.
This doesn’t just apply to the core product, it can also be a new feature of an existing product or a spin-off.
An example of how growth techniques can be applied to build a lead generator can be found in my article: How we built a tool that generates all the leads we need, organically.
To summarise, here is an overview of some of the basic skills every growth hacker or growth engineer should have:
At The Main Ingredient we are more growth engineers than growth hackers, drop us a line if we can help you with something :)
