The many mistakes of growth hacking

The term growth hacker is attributed to Sean Ellis, entrepreneur and manager of companies such as LogMeIn, Dropbox and others, in a 2010 article entitled “Find a growth hacker for your startup”, which describes a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.”

Since then, the term has been applied to a wide range of techniques, ranging from email marketing to recommendation algorithms and virality, creating a supposed professional category and even consulting services on the subject, as if it were some kind of new religion that all companies must embrace and practice, as though growth hacking were an unquestionable truth.

In reality, of course, there is an obvious problem with growth hacking: in the vast majority of cases, making growth the unconditional objective of a company is a delusion. Sure, all companies want to grow. But when growth is the sole objective and is sought by all possible means, important mistakes are made and conceptual illogicalities are incurred, which may even run contrary to one of the defining characteristics of growth hacking: sustainability.

An example: I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2003. It’s a service I use to distribute a good part of my writing. By now, the company should know my habits, my way of using the product and my practices when managing my professional contacts. And yet, LinkedIn’s growth hacking techniques mean that every time I accept somebody to join my network, automatically all that person’s acquaintances appear immediately at the same point I click to accept, both on a computer and smartphone, in an attempt to get one more click and get me to invite one of those acquaintances to join my network. As if that weren’t enough, even if I ignore those recommendations, LinkedIn moves them to the part of the screen where I’m accepting the invitation, obviously hoping that I’ll click there accidentally. So, dear growth hacker who came up with this clumsy stratagem: I know that for LinkedIn, the more contacts we have in our professional network, the better. But do you really think my professional network will improve because I accept more contacts unwittingly? Will that increase my satisfaction with the product, my use of my network or anything else positive? In other words, can we please abandon these tiresome practices, which only serve to give the impression that what LinkedIn wants is for the whole world to be friends… thus detracting from the true value and meaning of a network of contacts. Let me spell it out: regardless of the growth LinkedIn’s growth hackers create, a successful network is not necessarily the one with the most contacts, but instead a well-configured network that may well be selective, rather than based on a scattergun approach.

And another thing: why keep sending users continual promotions such as free premium trials? Surely it should be obvious that somebody who has been using LinkedIn pretty much since the get go will have considered this possibility and, for whatever reason, has decided not to take it up? Is it really worth sending emails at a level that approaches that of spam just because some growth hacker has decided to set certain conversion goals that must be achieved at any cost?

Turning my attention to Facebook: do you really think there is any sense in pointing out to me every single day that I could reach even more people by paying Facebook to advertise my work and that I’m going to take up its offer of a €30 initial discount? Does anyone really think that strategy makes any sense, that I’m missing something here? How long have I been on Facebook? A long time. Have I ever made the decision to advertise my work? No, right? If I had, you’d know about it, right? We all know that Facebook makes its money from content creators who spend money on advertising, but it should be pretty clear that my personal strategy is different. Surely Facebook’s algorithms have grasped this, given that they analyze me constantly and by now should have realized that I’m not going to pay to advertise my content? But of course it doesn’t matter, because some growth hacker has decided that the objective is to generate more advertising, regardless of what I think, and so continues to make my life a misery with interminable offers and promotions.

These are just two examples that come to mind of companies driven by growth hacking. I could name any number of others. These are simply two services that everyone knows and that I use frequently, which are important to me, and that help distribute my content. Overall, I have to say I’m quite happy with their level of service. But I’d be even happier if they stopped beating me over the head with their clumsy growth hacking strategies.

As a rule, absolutism is a bad idea. Just about all strategies are conditioned by circumstance. In businesses like LinkedIn and Facebook’s, when the end is seen to justify the means, it’s users who suffer, although such policies can end up creating creating confusion about the mission of the company and its products. With this in mind, perhaps it’s time to rethink growth hacking and start applying a little common sense.

(En español, aquí)