In January 2020, I gave a presentation at Sofia Future Farm about a trendy marketing technique beloved by the start-up world, also known as growth hacking. I combined a lightning talk and a more hands-on part to share concrete examples, in a very SEO-fashioned way. This will de developed in another post.

The goal here is to uncover what growth hacking actually is. What should you really expect if someone is selling you growth hacking service? And why do we all get so excited about growing things in a marketing context? If you want to discover my personal take on this, enjoy this post!

A lightening talk about growth hacking and patriarchy

Growth hacking is a trendy marketing technique which is a little bit like sex in high school: everybody talks about it, however not that many people really knows how to do it.

Growth hacking was invented in 2010 by Sean Ellis and has been über trendy ever since. 

It started in relation to early-stage startups who need massive growth in a short time on small budgets (as you can read on Wikipedia). So growth hacking is intricately connected to marketing strategies for startups. 

And, as you may know (since you're reading this on my website) a big part of my job (SEO, search engine marketing) evolves essentially around language and keywords. Recently, I was working for a cool Finnish startup (Calqulate, a financial reporting and forecasting platform). While heavily benchmarking other startups’ content strategy, I realised something was a bit off...The rhetoric!

The rhetoric of gross

Here’s what I could read everywhere: 

"9 things you MUST do today to grow your small business" (smallbiztrends.com)

"We solve the hardest parts of subscription growth" (profitwell.com)

"(...) grow your business without spending money" (bplans.com)

"(...) grow your business fast" (entrepreneur.com)

And I got this feeling of déjà vu in the early 2000’s and in a completely different industry:

This is obviously a funny example but my point is simply to say that growth hacking was created in the startup world, where the gender gap is huge (one of the many sources treating this infamous topic). And so maybe, the hype around growth hacking is not only explained by how revolutionary and efficient this kind of marketing is, but also partly because it sounds appealing to refer to sex in a very manly way, even unconsciously...

And you can even add to the sexual connotation another sexy dimension: the piracy coming from the term “hacker”, which refers to internet and computer hackers.

In other words, this men-dominated world loves sex and pirates and big money (you don't say?!)

Now, what is it really about?

A mindset we can all adopt

More than being a marketing discipline, growth hacking is a mindset. It's about observing before assuming, it's about increasing the feedback, opening up the conversation in so many ways to eventually reach an amazing level of satisfaction that triggers virality.

Start-up, small companies or bigger corporations, we can all benefit from shifting our behaviour to a more data-driven, user-centric, and cost-efficient modus operandi.