Should You Hire A Growth Hacker?
I’ve talked to hundreds of founders, many of whom have been continually working in vain to fill a “growth hacker” or “user acquisition manager” role.
It puts a zombie-running fear in my heart that young companies are waiting to adopt a data-driven approach until they find some unicorn marketer who may not exist.
We know that growth culture is more important than anything and young companies simply can’t afford to waste time.
Growth is a mindset, not a hat
Within the early-stage tech community, we talk a lot about team members wearing multiple hats. Being growth-focused is a hat that everyone on your team should wear.
Regardless of title or role, your team should be asking and answering questions using data, testing frequently, about learning what actually works.
These things need to be fully baked into the product development process sooner rather than later.
Learn by doing
The only way to do effective user acquisition and retention is to start running tests and learn along the way.
Instinct is important, but it should be supported by rigorous analytical insights.
Instead of making a drastic change, roll out changes to a set of your audience with a hypothesis about what will actually happen. After a week or two, the data you collect will show if users prefer one approach versus another based on how well the change improves that metric you care about.
Even better, consider forcing users to enable feature in order to get access – you’ll know exactly who likes a feature versus who doesn’t, or if that feature is even worth while at all. SnapChat runs these kinds of tests to ensure ongoing user-centric product improvements.
Instead of emailing your entire audience, send targeted emails to a segment of your audience to see how receptive they were to it. Instead of launching a master plan to acquire users, make some best bets on a few channels, and see which one performs the best.
Unfortunately, getting started is not without its challenges. Choosing a software product or combination of products is confusing; integrating these products can require development resources. It’s difficult to know about how to take advantage of new channels, measure in the appropriate way, and figure out what motivates people to take action.
Hack your team
From what I’ve seen there just aren’t enough marketers with this set of skills in the current job market.
Sean Ellis, the first marketer at companies like DropBox, EventBrite and Xobni and CEO of Qualaroo relays a similar thought: “The marketing leader is one of the most challenging roles for a startup to hire.” He even later goes to suggest hiring a “complete rookie” who can learn and adopt new effective tactics.
Lack of experience won’t kill you as long as you can create a culture for growth. Try to make this hire and you’ll end up wasting valuable time where you could have been growing and encouraging a focus on growth. Instead of looking outside for help, why not incubate this culture within your existing team?
Ivan Kirigin, who helped Dropbox drive 12 times the growth in two years before founding YesGraph, shared some great advice on how to make this happen:
“Make the goals open for everyone…Make a daily metrics email, and get the whole team on it. Give public kudos not just when something ships but when the team learned something. Give everyone on the team an understanding of how their role affects the core goals of the company.”
Do members of your team have complementary skillsets? Get them thinking about growth and working together to implement and test ideas. The Admitted.ly team decided to share the role between their community manager, who heads up marketing campaigns and engages with users regularly, and COO Emily Cole, who has an extensive academic background in analytics.
Conrad Wadowski of GrowHack recommends, “If you can get members of the team bought in and engaged around this type of culture and rigorous around testing – you can prioritize and take advantage of opportunities much faster”.
Once you have a culture of growth in place, you’ll not only grow your user base, but you’ll be able to assess what set of skills you need to grow.
At Quotidian, I work closely with our portfolio companies to determine their biggest challenges as they grow. It was feedback from our portfolio that led us to team up with GrowHack to develop an 8-week User Growth Bootcamp for Startups.
Beginning April 7, this combination in-person and online course will introduce startups to best practices from experienced experts, and get them running tests each week so they can begin to make data-informed product decisions right away.