What’s a growth hacker?

What’s a growth hacker? Here in London it’s the moment of growth hackers. It’s the word of 2015. Are you looking to scale your project? You need a growth hacker, at least with 2 years of experience scaling other projects, who knows the winning tricks. Are those really secret tricks? And which are the winning ones?
Am I a growth hacker too, then?

A couple of days ago I listened to a really interesting podcast where Graham Hunter has been asked a lot of questions about hiring a growth consultant and what to ask a growth hacker. Graham has been a marketing consultant for several agencies and he’s now Head Instructor of Growth at Tradecraft (USA) where they train smart people to succeed in traction roles at high-growth companies.

So, what’s a growth hacker? He’s a digital marketing person with a to-do-approach and a growth-mindset. Marketing is broad and sometimes marketing people working at corporates knows everything about branding and nothing related to customer acquisitions. So, that’s why startups are now looking for growth hackers: they have limited resources so they need to grow, acquire new users and retain them.

Which are growth hacker’s skills? Graham says they should: “Take a not prescriptive approach, being a generalist, have a data-driven approach and knowing a fair amount of everything“. So, if someone told you that, in order to take a step further you should focus and specialise on specific topics, well..now you know it’s bullshit.

What should a growth hacker ask you? He’s the specialist, so, be prepared to reply to a lot of specific questions, mainly about your audience, your user acquisitions strategy or your retention rate. In order to hire the best growth consultant, Graham suggests you to ask: “How do you grow my business“? and I think this is a great point.
I had several discussions with people asking which is my experience scaling businesses. Can I ask you why? If you’ve not been part of the early team at Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox or Slack is hard giving outstanding examples. So, why are you asking? Focus on people’s skills and mindsets, listen to experiences and suggestions, and a final tip: asking about scaling twitter followers is not the most important thing a growth hacker can do for your business.

If you want to listen to Graham Hunter’s podcast click here.
If you want to learn more about Growth Hacking click here