Andrew Chen writes a fascinating analysis of growth hacking:

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.

This isn’t just a single role – the entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers. The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself. Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.

The stakes are huge because of “superplatforms” giving access to 100M+ consumers.

He then walks through Airbnb as his example. Fascinating read.

Everyone in an early startup is a hacker now.

• The marketing head is a GROWTH HACKER.

• The analytics head is a BIG DATA HACKER.

• The head of revenues is a MONETIZATION HACKER.

• The engineers are, of course, engineers.

• And the CEO? A STRUCTURAL HACKER, of course.

And this is what StartupLJackson had to say about it:

https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/197043814584688641

Bawhahaha... Brilliant!

Fascinating writeup by the Facebook Growth Hacking team: http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Growth-Traction/What-are-some-decisions-taken-by-the-Growth-team-at-Facebook-that-helped-Facebook-reach-500-million-users/answer/Andy-Johns