What makes a great growth hacker?

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

What makes a great growth hacker?

- Because growth hacking is a mindset and not a set of tools or a list of instructions, it all starts with the person behind the project. We could even take it a bit further and suggest that growth hacking requires disrupting an entire team. A great majority of growth hacks start with the actual product, so a successful growth hacker will plug themselves into the day to day of product development. If you're a small company, that'll be easy, but if you're marketing for a large entity you'll need to wedge yourself in within the product team. And there's two main reasons to sit close to product. First, to understand what they're building and why, and secondly, to champion for your own needs.

Think back to the Hotmail example. It required the product team or a developer to implement the idea. It was the product that enabled the marketing effort. On that note, you need to be agile as things can happen quickly and you might have a small window of opportunity to react. One growth hack might open the opportunity for another. Let's say a viral hit leads an unlikely audience to your website and you know that you can immediately cater to their needs with a small product tweak. Doing so will generate yet another influx in traffic, but to make that happen you need to remove as many roadblocks as possible.

If you're stuck in a regimented corporate environment, you'll need to start having key conversations to open up the pipeline. From idea to execution, you'll want as few people as possible getting in the way. Now, a lot of growth hacking is looking at data, so hone your analytical skills and gain as much knowledge as possible on the tools you'll use to collect that data. A lot of time is spent reviewing results, finding patterns, and creating new tests. That's not to say it's all analytical. A touch of creativity is necessary to understand how to act on the data.

With growth hacking, things might be a little haphazard and not fully vetted, and that's okay. The idea is to gain just enough data to make an educated iteration. Hopefully by iterating, you'll arrive at a growth point that works. I think some of the most successful growth hackers have been driven by the joy of competition, a true passion for marketing, and a willingness to fail big. There's a lot of reward, but it's not without risk. In all reality, though, there's not a real formula for a good growth hacker. Often times the most unlikely turn out to have a huge win.

I believe anyone with enough motivation and an ability to execute can innovate a successful growth hack.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/marketing-foundations-growth-hacking/what-makes-a-great-growth-hacker