Taming Growth Hacking
Everybody falls in love with growth hacking at first sight. It is irresistibly sexy, wild, and luminous. Then, they want to tame it into a repeatable process that manufactures growth.
This led to the proliferation of growth hacking frameworks that prescribe procedures with a linear and reductionist mindset. I dislike them all for a few reasons.
First, these frameworks solve the wrong problem. They imply bringing efficiency to growth hacking. But there is no inefficient growth hack in nature. By definition, growth hacks are simple, cheap, and exponential. The real problem with growth hacking is the cold start problem. It is paralyzingly complex to start hacking growth.
Second, these frameworks transform growth hacking into something else. With a “let’s do the next step of our procedure” mentality, they kill the essence of creativity, intelligence, and the outcome-driven mindset.
The third reason is that these procedures are often implemented as workshops. This is understandable because most organizations do not have the growth hacking mindset and culture in their normal lives, so they need an artificial set-up for hacking growth. This often leads to crowded workshops, no one shall be left behind, a big post-it massacre, and a celebration but no real impact. If there is an impact, that impact remains episodical due to the tissue incompatibility with the rest of the organization.
So, what is my way? My approach is based on unleashing the growth hacker within people, eliminating the cold start problem with my periodic table of hacks, and establishing an exhaustive system to measure field outcomes. This boils down to a simple and near-universal approach as follows;
Start with a periodic table of growth hacks and show cool examples that initiate the growth-hacker-within
Establish objective ways to measure field outcomes in an exhaustive way
Set ground rules to preempt inhibitive mistakes
Of course, this is only the gist. The remaining pieces of growth hacking are highly context-dependent and need tailoring.
©Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023
