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Get PocketRadical expansion must be in Aditya Agarwal’s genes. When he started as an engineer at Facebook, the company had fewer than 15 people. Within 6 years, he had risen to Director of Product Engineering, leading 2,000 employees to reach 700 million users.
That’s interesting. The old way of marketing, which still exists in many forms, is to spend money talking about the product. But technology has changed things. Not only has it changed how traditional marketing is done, it’s enabled an entirely different type of marketing: growth hacking.
A lot of community professionals are turned off by the term “growth hacking,” but Polyvore CEO Jess Lee believes we’ve got it wrong. Growth hacking is not really about finding sneaky ways around problems or finding short-term solutions.
7 years ago, when Facebook and Twitter were just getting started, the primary magic trick to high growth rates involved creating a product that connected people to people and people to content.
Andreessen Horowitz-backed music lyrics and annotations Rap Genius was the latest to stray over to the darker side of so-called “growth hacking,” with its spammy SEO tactics disguised as an affiliate program. Called out, exposed and now punished by Google, the site’s traffic has tanked.
It’s a spectacular feat. Right in front of our eyes, a group of marketers helped build billions of dollars of brand equity on products like Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, StumbleUpon, Zynga, Dropbox, Reddit and LinkedIn.
There’s an article making the rounds in tech circles titled “Growth Hacking is Bull” written by Muhammad Saleem. I’d like to make the case that the article is wrong. I’d strongly encourage you to read it.
Editor’s note: Justin Caldbeck is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and invests primarily in the Internet and mobile sectors with a focus on social media, e-commerce and enterprise software. Follow him on Twitter @caldbeckj.
There is a lot of buzz around the new term "Growth Hacking", and many companies I know or have met recently are looking for a "Growth Hacker".
Startups are a special breed of companies when it comes to marketing. If a big corporation is pushing a new product, you might expect them to take out TV ads, online ads, maybe hire a PR agency and set up big distribution partnerships.
Editor’s note: Dan Kaplan helps startups tell their stories. He’s done marketing for Twilio, Asana, and Salesforce and blogs about marketing, growth, and storytelling at Threadling. Imagine you’re a 17-year-old girl at a well-to-do high school in Los Angeles and you just discovered Snapchat.