Silicon Valley Marketing Technologists: Growth Hackers

Awesome little essay by Andrew Chen from last week: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. As far as I’m concerned, you can almost perfectly substitute “growth hacker” with “marketing technologist,” as much of the rationale for this new breed of marketer is the same.

Here’s his opening paragraph (emphasis added is my own):

The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

At the end, he summarizes:

• For the first time ever, superplatforms like Facebook and Apple uniquely provde access to tens of millions of consumers
• The discipline of marketing is shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities
• Growth hackers embody the hybrid between marketer and coder needed to thrive in the age of platforms

Well worth reading the whole post.

P.S. Amazingly, “growth hacker” can’t be generated by the marketing technologist job title automata. Will have to work on a patch.