Miracle growers: tech-stars who know how to hook you

Want millions of users? Well, there’s a new type of guru heading for Tech City: all hail the growth hacker
21 January 2014

Try standing in the middle of Old Street roundabout and whispering the words: “I’m a growth hacker.” You might just find yourself surrounded. If there is one thing that London’s start-ups want right now it’s to employ someone with the expertise to expand their user base. What they’re looking for is not a marketing expert who will Twitter-bomb their niche of potential customers but someone who will look carefully at their product and devise anything from tiny tweaks to completely new ideas to get more sign-ups for their service.

Here’s an often-used example: when Twitter started out, many people would sign up and then never log in again. So, when clever people in the business examined how people used the site, they realised that if new users started following five to 10 people immediately, they were far more likely to come back. What happens now when you sign up to Twitter? You have to begin by following five people. Meanwhile, at Dropbox, the free storage offered to anyone who successfully refers a friend is responsible for bringing in a huge bulk of its users.

The big boys have always had people innovating to bring in the crowds but, as Aaron Ginn, head of growth at San Francisco’s StumbleUpon, puts it: “Users are drowning and won’t pay attention to the next best widget, regardless of how good it is. Distribution is now the number one problem that faces every product and every start-up.” There’s a name for the person who can solve that problem, and in Silicon Valley-speak that’s a “growth hacker”. It’s the buzzword that has taken over California and is now making its way to London’s Silicon Roundabout.

“If you think of Amazon, Twitter or Google, in the old days you might have asked, ‘How did these billion-dollar brands become huge? Who were their ad agencies and their marketing directors?’” says Michael Acton Smith, founder of Mind Candy, the company behind Moshi Monsters, based at London’s Tech City. “The answer would be that there were no advertising agencies. They got big because they were incredibly smart at growing their user base. It’s not through the traditional interruptive marketing but because they had an awesome, compelling product and they built into those products very easy ways to share them with other people. That is the key to growth hacking,” he says.

Candace Kuss, who hails from San Francisco but now works for the digital arm of communications agency Hill and Knowlton Strategies in London, has become very familiar with the term “growth hacking” in the US. She led a discussion on the topic at the recent WPP Stream tech conference in Turkey which proved “very popular”, she says. “In small, engineering-led start-ups, marketing people are not held in such high regard as they are in traditional businesses. Engineers are the stars. But now everyone in a start-up should be a growth hacker, because the combined mission is always to grow users,” she says. That’s not easy. According to Acton Smith, “they’re quite a rare breed,” requiring some engineering and product management skills. “Traditionally, a marketing team would be given a product that was finished and ready and then they’d go and build the campaign for it. Growth hackers are closely entwined in the building and the iterations of the product itself and what they do is vital to acquiring lots of users cheaply and very rapidly.”

The conversation online around the topic of growth hacking is reaching top volume, with everyone trying to define it, explain it and find people to do it.

The “growth” part of the name is obvious. The “hacking”, says Kuss, “comes from the software development model that you make something and then keep improving it.” In the same way that tech companies have hackathons — at which coders will take apart and rebuild products to create new innovations — they are now having growthathons in which those hacks are done specifically to increase users. According to Kuss: “Hacking suggests that if it doesn’t work, you can try something else without spending a lot of money or time, and can change on the fly.”

For example, if you tested a theory about asking for fewer personal details in a sign-up process and it had no effect, you could simply scrap that plan and try another, with very few losses.

In the past six months, four books have been published specifically about growth hacking, including media strategist Ryan Holiday’s Growth Hacker Marketing, which became a top seller on Amazon. Subsequently, Growth Hacking — A How To Guide on Becoming A Growth Hacker, self-published by Jose and Joe Casanova, came out. Jose then wrote an article claiming they successfully growth-hacked their own book by using the interest in Holiday’s publication to feed the uptake of their own.

According to Google trend graphs, while the term “marketing” has been in steady decline over the past eight years, growth hacking first began to appear as a search term in late 2011 and interest is now soaring. And although London start-ups are yet to start advertising, hundreds of web companies in San Francisco and New York, including car-sharing service Lyft, entertainment search engine Rukkus, developer community Koding and data visualisation platform Visual.ly, are all currently specifically hiring “growth hackers”. Koding’s ad begins: “You are to help Koding reach one million users. Yes, that’s your assignment. If you accept, read on.”

In November at Mountain View (the home town of Google’s California HQ) the second ever Growth Hackers Conference was held, and last month the first ever mass-participation Growthathon was held in Silicon Valley, where growth hackers could compete for prizes on challenges set by start-ups, with winners measured by counting up whose idea brought in the most new users.

But, asks Kuss: “Is it just Silicon Valley ‘buzzword bingo’ or will it be a term that is more widely used?” Her belief is that it will begin to spread outside the start-up world, and across all branding businesses. “After all, they all want more users,” she says.

Nevertheless, if you’re considering sticking Growth Hacker as your job title on LinkedIn, you might want to think again. “From what I’ve seen, Europeans dislike the term. It represents a required skill-set, but to describe yourself as a ‘growth hacker’ is a bit like calling yourself a social media guru — kind of wanky,” says Kuss.

Acton Smith agrees. “It’s becoming one of those slightly over-used phrases in Silicon Valley. Everyone thinks that they’re a growth hacker but it’s actually a very tough thing to be.” If you truly are one, however, he might just hire you.

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