Any hype or trend is easy to become detached from reality and overgrown with myths. It takes just several wrong readings or subjective opinions for an idea to go far away from it’s original message. It happens often. When we talk about growth hacking the story is no different. That is why it’s important to dig out the truth behind this term.

5 most common delusions about growth hacking

Nowadays growth and the strategy of its’ achievement is one of the trendiest theme to discuss in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are seeking to hire the growth hackers and to develop their own growth strategy. Today you can learn about five delusions that may lead your growth hack strategy into the wrong place and give it wrong goals and hopes.

Delusion 1: Growth Hacking is a universal cheat-sheet to use for growth

Real picture: There is no one secret universal toolset, but for your business to grow you should think differently

Growth hackers are usually mistaken to be some universal gurus that know the secret recipe of success. People think that such managers can easily create a successful startup from scratch in a matter of seconds. People also think that growth strategy is a book of secrets or a universal guidebook to lead you through the promotion and channel distribution. The delusion here is that every growth hacker has a secret tool hidden somewhere in his mind. In real life every growth hacker goes to success with hard work and prioritisation.

Sometimes growth hacks can be found in basic instruments of product marketing that were able to raise the bar in your own certain occasion. There is no magic behind growth hacking, — it’s just a certain mindset that focus on things most companies and startups forget to consider: usually it’s all about distribution. When growth hacker advise something, his advice is rarely is a completely new thing for business, usually it’s a thing you decided to put aside for future investments. There are many roads available for your business to blossom, but things that correspond for growth are usually forgotten or laid aside for long-term future.

The founder of 500 startups Dave McClure once said that many startups focus on their products, while the main risks of their companies lay somewhere in distribution field.

Delusion 2: Growth Hacker can solve any company problems

Reality: Growth hacking is not something that can be made overnight and it cannot solve all the problems with your product.

It’s rare thing to grow in a matter of a day. Viral growth and tools to make it happen are not applicable for just any strategy of business. Moreover, even if some thing was successful for one company, it’s not necessary to help in your occasion. Nobody can guarantee that exact hack will bring you the same success as for your competitor.

‘Not everything can go viral’, — said the founder of streaming platform Bebo Michael Birch. ‘It takes great time and great number of diligence. Before the success and actual viral thing you may face long list of falied experiments’. ,

Moreover, there are two different types of growth — small and big wins. Growth hackers are usually look on things that lay outside the standard optimisation. They consider some predictions about features that may burst. It means that growth cannot be something that happens easily, especially when it means not only finding new clients, but retaining the old ones too.

If you decided to hire a growth hacker — never hire a person who only makes some A/B testings and focus on local things. The real growth hacker is someone who can ask deeper questions and plan the growth of your product in a long-term.

Finding the answers to the complex questions takes great deal of focusing on changing exponents and quick iterations. Tactically, such strategy must focus on testing results, not just some features found in business books.

‘Somehow it’s similar to stock investments. Even if there was a formula of success, nobody will talk about it’, Ivan Kirigin from Dropbox mentioned. ‘I think all strategies are saying that you need to create a process that will give you an ability to learn and to test many things faster in order to make the possibility of success clearer’.

Delusion 3: Growth Hacking is some new and unknown animal

Reality: Actually, growth hacking is not entirely new

Facebook and LinkedIn were the first to try growth hacking, because right from the very beginning they focused on the growth strategies and user engagement into working with their services. It happened long time before the term growth hacking was actually introduced.

The truth is, for the long time such type of strategical thinking didn’t have its’ own unique name, but it still existed.

Delusion 4: Growth Hacking is marketing

Reality: Growth hacking and marketing have the same goals, but use different tactics

Good product strategy based on data is a key to business growth. There is no place for marketing strategy. Many growth hackers believe that it’s necessary to be engaged in all product activities from the design to development. Promoting your business is just a small part of huge strategy.

For example, if you have 1000 visitors that you need to convert into clients, — it’s marketing and lead generation. If you want to take a product and with its’ help to convert 1000 visitors to 10000 clients — this is a growth strategy. Growth hacking takes you more far away than marketing. Usually the growth is achieved with viral engagement to the product, not with general clicks on links and landing pages.

Delusion 5: Growth Hacker is a one man

Reality: Growth is rarely an achievement of one person

In the beginning of the project one man, usually it’s the founder of the business, may be responsible for growth. However, with the growing of the company and product features one person can transform into the whole growth department. It depends on needs of the company. Just remember that the most objective results can be achieved in team collaboration only.

Long-term growth strategy is a complex work that require many tests even before you can find the one that is the most suitable for your business. It’s necessary to track metrics and results that you want to achieve beforehand or your growth strategy will be changing constantly and will lead to nothing.

If you’ve decided to go further with growth strategy, be ready to face some difficulties. Such strategy requires different view on product and priorities. Things you considered important before may become unnecessary and vise versa.

3 most common characteristics of a growth hacker

It’s time to share some common characteristics that growth hack managers need to have. There are many different things, but they all have three common characteristics as their base.

Data

Growth hackers are real maniacs to calculations and metrics comparison. Growth hacker feels nude without having data and his metrics. Strong focus on data helps growth hackers to find the solutions that help your business to grow quickly. For such people metrics are not just statistics and reports, but also an inspiration and a way to create a better product with tests and theories.

Creativity

Often you can hear that growth hacking is a mix of art and science. Together with data usage mentioned above, growth hackers are staying on the front line of the creative approach to problem solving. Such person never gives up and goes further.

The mix of analytical thinking and creativity can be easily defined as a main characteristic of a growth hacker. Real unicorns appear in places where one man can see the value of a project and product from all sides at the same time.

Curiosity

Every growth hacker appears to be a curious person. How the regular users transform into clients? Why some products are more popular than others? Growth hacker will never stop until he finds all the answers. Growth hacker always looks for a method to turn conversions and user behaviour where he needs to. For example, Facebook, has more than 1 billion users already, but it never stops and still has its’ own growth department.

“You just can’t stop in a middle of the way. If you stop, you’ll loose”, — Heads and Hands team thinks.

Growth hackers always want to learn something new. From every novelty such person can grip something that he can use in his own business.

No matter the age of the term itself, there are many growth hackers around the world. Many of them became what they are due to needs of their companies — they created their business with no budget to spend on marketing.

To summarize growth hacking

The main thing that differs growth hacking from the regular approach to work is a fail fast principle.

As it was said before, growth hacking is full complex of work to gain traffic, analyze it and work permanently with conversions. Complex work is more often to lead towards synergy of results. Fail fast principle helps to avoid long and fatal mistakes.

Why create a complex service when you can firstly test its’ main feature with prototype? Why spend money on a website if landing page is enough? Moreover, why create if not analyze?

To summarize, growth hacking isn’t a checklist or a guidebook to lead you toward success. It’s a mindset and clever usage of analytical tools.