How to become a growth hacker?

18 min readAug 19, 2021

Originally published on https://mygrowththinking.com/how-to-become-a-growth-hacker/

How to become a growth hacker? — today’s world. growth hacking is an emerging practice and is being defined by new breakthroughs daily. A wide range of growth hackers exist about 5,000 growth hackers are in the space today with about 3–4% of them being women and 87% of them in the technology space. Many startups fail due to the lack of being able to hire the right growth hackers. As a Co Founder of a startup, it’s crucial to hire the right people, and getting good growth hackers is at the top of the list.

What does it take to become a growth hacker? Growth hacking is one of the super skills of the future and is vital in today’s world. growth hacking is an emerging practice and is being defined by new breakthroughs daily. A wide range of growth hackers exist about 5,000 growth hackers are in the space today with about 3–4% of them being women and 87% of them in the technology space. Many startups fail due to the lack of being able to hire the right growth hackers. As a Co Founder of a startup, it’s crucial to hire the right people, and getting good growth hackers is at the top of the list.

Before we get started some helpful background to growth hacking

What is growth hacking?

Growth hackers explore new growth opportunities systematically at any point of the customer journey from awareness through the market to brand ambassadors by optimizing the product. In terms of technology, it originated in 2010 when Sean Ellis coined it is mostly used by startups because of its limited budgets and limited resources. Since then it has shown an incredible increase in popularization among large-scale and traditional businesses. Companies like Shopify like Uber has their own head of growth and dedicated growth team. The growth hacker is based on an experiment-based, data-driven.

As there is a wide range of definitions, in the Book Ready Set Growth Hack growth hacking is defined at a strategic level as a process that achieved disproportional results. This is best understood through an example of efforts v.s results. This is when less effort is exerted to get dispositional results.

How does growth hacking work?

Growth hacking as defined in the Ready Set Growth Hack is a systematic process where is governed by a concept called the growth cycle. the growth cycle is a three-phase process, where it starts with a growth problem, moves into experimentation then into scaling. Based on this process, once a growth problem is well defined through a specific process it would then be up to the growth hacker to find solutions. Solutions are found vis structured and systematic experimentations.

Using growth analytics for data-driven growth decisions growth hackers can quickly discover what works and doesn’t before investing a penny in more development. This is governed by a process called growth thinking which is a design methodology used for growth hacking.

Break the rules — growth hacking

The hidden weapons of growth hacking are simple and simple: Be a rule-breaker. The job requires you to think outside the box and unleash your creativity. A growth hack involves having the right mindset on growth. This job requires creativity and ad-hoc experiment with hypotheses and high potential. Be creative growth Hacks won’t come with any rules. Rule-breaking is at the core of growth thinking and how the growth hacking process works.

if a rule is working, find a better way to break I
If a rule isn’t working break it with a better one
If a rule is about to fail, let it and then break it
If a rule is about to have success, break that too

The growth hacking mindset or growth mindset is a very different way of working than that of other professions. Their goal is the north star metric which is basically a growth goal and only a growth goal.

Plan A or Plan B (A/B testing) — growth hacking

A/B test relates to the comparison of A/B versions from the user point of view. Data analytics behavioral psychology design and user experience are equally important for conducting successful experiments. Other factors you can also check include the number of e-commerce websites and the promotional promotions available to you. The Heatmap analysis tools such as Crazyegg can also be effective for A/b testing (Ex: Crazyegg ) How Facebook’s A-B test works well with Japanese and Russians: In Japan, the Japanese believe blood types are individual and have personality traits. This is why FB mentions blood type as a country-specific topic in Japan. In Russia, they bought words/phrases for every name and ran ads for each country.

Although traditionally marketing has always driven this idea of letting two variables compete to win it has worked in the past but with new data analytics that has changed. More sophisticated testing has merged in growth hacking where growth hackers use analytics on a whole different level.

The underpinning difference is not what wins, but rather behavioral patterns. this means, how do different people respond to different elements. This then allows for targeting by behavior rather than changing elements base on what wind today which may not be the case tomorrow as behaviors rapidly change.

What does growth hacking look like in practice?

AirBNB used Craigslist — a platform for thousands of people seeking hotels — to increase their user base dramatically. The reason for this is Craigslist’s no public API. The company had to rework the way Craigslist forms are developed and make them compatible, without even having access to the Craigslist codebase. It’s also a good subject to be learned by growth hackers. Most growth mechanisms have definite lifetimes. I’d be unreasonably afraid that people would post their own items on Craigslist for the next 10 years, and assuming they’d be able to take a hit with their followers every few days. In fact, it looks like Craigslist has “fixed” the vulnerability that permitted the integration.

Now although those are traditional examples of growth hacking that we are well known they serve as a great guide all of us can refer to as we have seen this unfold. In today’s work growth hacking and growth, hackers are taking much deeper and more sophisticated approaches with keeper data analytics.

Analytics shift the focus of growth hackers

Analytics can help your pile ranks your list. You probably hadn’t imagined investing more dollars or having a referral loop. It may have been a useless feature you added to the product just because you saw what was going to happen. After the analysis, you realize that almost 40% percent of all signups come from this loop and their lifetime value is high then your average user. You know you can make the loop very efficient so you changed the focus of your team for the next two weeks to focus upon this feature. You can also find ways of increasing the number of signups from the loop.

Experimentation is key, and ensuring those experiments yield signals is the secret. growth hackers are seeking signals not results. Results can often through people off. Signals give a growth hacker the ability to see growth opportunities where others do not. To gain a competitive advantage this is critical.

Analytics make success repeatable

If you have any knowledge that Q4 made higher amounts of money than Q3, you don’t need to understand what happened. How many users signed up to use your product before the conversion and how many didn’t register?

What features did the new website add? Can an Adwords campaign really increase its effectiveness without being cut? Are Google’s advertisers really using it to increase their ad spend? How? If you know what leads to a successful outcome then you can repeat what works (and stop what does not work). If you do not take analytics seriously you can’t efficiently repeat past successes.

Scalability is key, and being able to take a growth experiment and transforming that into a growth hack isn’t an easy task. But ensuring it can scale is the main measure. if you can repeat it and repeat it without distortion and its longevity is there you go something that will have a high success rate.

Analytics keep growth hackers honest

Analysis of your performance will determine whether your incredible skills or your nipper, period. The main engineer behind Etsy told Dan McKinley an extraordinary story about his infinite scroll failure. There are many valuable things we can take away from the case but for our sake, we’ll take a look at analytics. Had they ignored analytics they wouldn’t have discovered their fault. Analytics keep growth hacks up to date. Our aim is to know more about Marketing. Share your ideas about what you have to say on [link]. Welcome back.

Hiring a growth hacker

As a growth company, you will need a mindset that is built on growth. Let’s learn about what works best for growing a team. Are there any good companies that hire growth hackers or a website? Allow Andy Johns to answer his own question. Tell me the most important point of an interview with a growth hacker? Hopefully, the answers you find on Quora will explain your question better. Can you list the interview questions of growth hackers?

Recommend the best questions to raise before hiring a Growth Hacker. Should we hire hacking companies or one that provides real money development hacking? Why not? Share your thought or opinion over there on Facebook or Twitter.

breaking this all down one of the main tools that are used in the field o growth hacking is the “T-Shaped” skills. This is essentially a method on how to evaluate the cross-section of skills needed and used for a growth hacker. A growth hacker needs to be cross-functional but good at many different parts all at once. The T-shaped skills challenge the traditional marketers; a few things like

strategy overall
marketing strategy
marketing departments are obsolete
Analyzing data and data analysis
growth rate
learn growth hacking
viral marketing strategy
viral ideas
viral tools
digital marketing strategy
advanced marketing campaigns
how to manage potential customers
how to acquire new customers
true north concept
reverse engineer
more traffic is not enough
advertising
going beyond search engines
going beyond basic analytical skills
going beyond landing pages
going beyond your own website
mastering repeat users
mastering viral loops

One last but important note, growth hacking is not digital marketing this is one of the biggest misconceptions in today’s world. growth hacking has many more aspects to it beyond marketing or digital marketing.

What are the T-shaped skills?

The T-shaped approach is spread across sections of skills that are combined towards a specific skill set. The T-shaped process isn’t the only model but one of the most popular for growth hackers. This brings into play several aspects like:

LEVEL 1 — skills and capabilities

Front-End Code
Service Design
UX Design
Behavioral Psychology
Stakeholder Management
Augmented / Virtual Reality
Finance
Omnichannel Marketing
Distributed Ledgers

LEVEL 2 — skills and capabilities

Analytics (not just google analytics)
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Experiment Design
Funnel Marketing
Automation & APIs
AI & Machine Learning
Branding / Storytelling
Copywriting

LEVEL 3 — skills and capabilities

Paid Social
Organic Social
SEO/SEM
Tools Marketing
Marketplaces
Sales
Email Marketing
Content Marketing
PR / Influencer
Qualitative Research
Virality
Retention
Mobile Optimisation
Landing Page Creation & Optimisation
Lead Generation
Revenue Testing
User On-Boarding
Lifecycle Marketing

These 35 skills over three levels are what help determine a good vs. a rising growth hacker. This helps growth hacking teams also manage diverse skills across the whole spectrum.

The T-shaped skills / Marketer model explained.

Building T-shaped knowledge and competencies are one of the most valuable things you can do for your future career and personal development. T-shaped skills can be much more than just a bridge to IT; they can also be people who can bring significant value to your team and your organization. The high-level mix of broad skills is technology, marketing, strategy, and business operations. Technology plays the most vital part as it helps accelerate growth, and hence this becomes core to the cross-skilled approach.

T-shaped people possess cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and creativity, making themselves the whole package. T-Shaped Skills integrate newly acquired knowledge with previous knowledge and gives your team the ability to understand various new information.

Agility is key to making T-Shaped teams work.

When you are building an agile team, you should look for agile teams made up of people with T-shaped skills. Teams that consist of T-Shape team members who possess and want to acquire these abilities tend to be more flexible and resilient, as their capabilities enable swarms to occur faster. By searching for T-Shaped skills, a T-Shape person helps you build your company’s best interdisciplinary teams. T-shaped people promote this attitude and make it practical, as these people can work on more than one type of task. A Good T-skilled attitude is:

Someone who is flexible
Someone who is creative
Someone who is a team player
Someone willing to consistently learn
Someone willing to share knowledge and train
Someone willing to collaborate with others

You need T-shaped skills, and you have to be aware that not many people in the market are good. They need a T-Shape person with the right combination of skills to shape their abilities.

Isolated skills don’t work.

You develop expertise and experience in a single area and never learn to apply those skills, including the complementary skills described by Brown and Gardner, to other areas. T-Shaped specialists who delve deeply into a particular field cannot use these skills in other areas. We need a new generation of T-shape people with the right combination of skills for the new market. This cross-skilled approach gets talent focused on multi-level and making them way more valuable.

Can T-Shaped Skills fit with Leadership Skills? If you do not have a program in place for this, it’s best to include T-shaped professionals in your leadership training. T-shaped professionals can contribute to your team in various ways, not only in their respective fields of expertise.

Developing T-shaped skills

Focusing on being a T-shaped person and acquiring expertise in an area makes it easier to maintain that expertise even after you have reached that skill level. There is a level at which you can take these skills a step further and place even more value on them. As more and more people come to know the T-shaped skills and their benefits, there will be a surge in the number of people interested in their respective fields.

Skills of a Growth Hacker

A Growth Hackers should have 25% knowledge needed for the execution of 80% of a project or program. He/she can’t really be the expert about all but can understand every aspect so he/she will be able to complete the major part with his/her own knowledge for the entire system. It therefore more effective to at least learn some basic and general growth hacking skills and access a large arsenal of growth hacking-based tools.

T-shaped Hackers require knowledge on the job if they want to succeed while developing specialist skills on the job. What? and that’s what it’s about. This growth hacker requires technical skills to put these solutions into real life and come up with solutions.

The profile of a growth hacker

As with other careers, the same individual will have better success than most but prior to this let’s dispel some mythos. Growth hacking is a new world of growth hacking that opens up job opportunities. Certain people can succeed in this new work. Working within a growth team is critical not just working on a marketing campaign or understanding growth marketing or being part of a traditional marketing team.

That is all something else. Being about to work within a growth team is a different dynamic altogether. being able to be creative, flexible, and open to working with others, but more importantly, a structured and systemic process that enables everyone t to challenge highly controversial ideas and bring them into action.

The importance of a growth team

Growth hackers have to be able to work within very dynamic teams, They have to be bake to deal with different types of people and have a high tolerance. Diplomacy isn’t a well-known skill among many growth hackers, and this is vital in order to ensure dynamic teams work well. This doesn’t;t mean being passive but rather assertive in your approach to ensure growth teams work well.

Software Hacker

Growth hacks are often more technical in their work or they have software to meet their business goals. Hackers use software programs to build their startups. If growth hackers aren’t programmers they will still have to understand programming enough to coordinate with others who also write programming. Remember, the product is now a technology-based product. Mastering the technology will be critical for growing the venture capital industry. For growth hackers, you need to understand much more technology for success with a startup but it’s not necessary. Usually being a programmer you can get better in progress but it can’t be emphasized too.

Learn analytics.

The data shows you what works or not. Data indicate expansion or fall. The analysis provides you enough of the information needed to start to map a course. If you start using stiff data and make yourself a growth hacker you can’t succeed. Learn data. Then you will master a growth hacker technique. Is the evidenced truth-telling for you? Data determine how to perform a growth hack. It will help you to understand user interaction from a user’s point of view. If you have rigid data. You have to learn how to grow as a growth hacker. It is important to respect information and to do actions according to data.

Analytics is a vital part of growth hacking and a very big part of the role of a growth hacker. If you want to become a growth hacker you need to master analytics and data-driven decisions. Although new ideas are important historical data can play a vital role in the future. This is essential in startups as it plays a role in getting new customers, retaining older ones, and even getting investment.

You have to be unethical to be a growth hacker

To become a growth hacker has to come close, and as with any discipline, it has bad people behind it. Path users cannot undo the spam out of their name. Most growth hackers never ask ethical questions. They are building harmless product features that increase conversions and they are getting this product into the public with their knowledge and distribution routes. It’s clever but not unethical. Most growth hackers don’t even get asked if they will be Jedi or Sith in the future. They’re smart and ethical. But that’s exactly what he meant. Do you feel moral is moral? We are here to discuss it.

What does it take to become a Growth Hacker?

This type of technology gives early-stage companies a way to get large amounts of capital. Growth Hacker’s weapons provide creative and almost cost-free business strategies in regards to securing and maintaining a healthy client base. It is possible for growth developers to make their websites scalable by introducing features like displaying products and services to consumers, analyzing traffic sources, managing contacts, converting simple web viewers to customers. In the United States, the average salary for a growth hacker is around $153,738 annually.

A few important things to note, that have to have depth in the growth hacking process and be involved in many experiments including the latest tools being used. They must know how growth hacking works. To become a growth hacker isn’t easy but all the skills needed are easy to obtain and most important need to be mastered with time and experience.

Find a mentor who has done growth hacking before.

Your experience and heartache will be gone if you get the right mentor. Find someone who does this successfully and not someone who simply says it. Mentor — or several mentors — can help you overcome mental challenges, overcome your obstacles and get the keys to growth hacking.

Growth Hacking courses and training

Many online hacking courses exist. All are very expensive, very different formats. I put my list of growth marketing courses in this list. Although there are many ways to obtain growth hacking skills taking a good quality course can go a long way. Visit the growth ninja school where you can learn more.

Talk to people

Never forget to talk to your fellow colleagues from the CTO to the senior-most customer helpers. Growth hackers need to be very aware of the profile inside the business organization. So a hacker can collect information like this and act. Never forget: never forget to meet his colleague from top to senior level (Client Services or Support) at the.

What is the Growth hacker mindset?

Four main taxonomies determine a growth hacker’s mind: driver’s reach, decisions, and tools. The combination of the four forms the underlying idea of aching disproportionate results.

1. Drivers

The drivers are the underlying motivations and stimuli that inspire how growth hackers think and take action.

Mischiefness

They deeply need to break the rules, as they do not believe in the rules they have not benefited from governing and limiting their way of life. Therefore this underpins their thinking to find a way to break the rules to their benefit.

Curiosity

They are fascinated by digging deeper into how things work by asking the big why questions. This allows them to understand theories and phenomena better to map out their mechanics to manipulate them toward their benefit.

Status quo

The general rules over institutionalization drive their need to challenge the establishments surrounding them. This allows them to break the rules and change the norms of how society around them works.

2. Reach

Growth hackers have a goal to reach as many people as possible without the general population knowing how they did it.

Focused

They have a too-focused approach by pinning done abstract problems and creating unique structures to solve them.

Collaborative

They have a resourceful approach where they work with like-minded people and find other cross-functional people to reach their goals effectively.

Value-creation

They focus on creating value with monetization, often trying to reach the masses to make a change.

3. Decisions

When hacking growth optimization is the goal to solve at a high level, there is no one solution to a single problem but finding the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way.

Creativity

Growth hackers are resourceful; they find simple, fast, and digestible ways to solve problems. One of the challenges for growth hackers is thinking too technically.

Experimentation

They run tests and lots of them to determine the most optimal approach to getting results using all possible avenues.

Data-driven

They make decisions based on data, even if the data might potentially be blinding. Data helps determine the most optimal options.

4. Tools

Growth hackers are always seeking new tools, optimizing existing ones, and finding optimal ways of connecting them to get solutions.

Systemization

For a solution to work, it needs to be automated, and when automated, the probability of scalability is a lot higher when seeking exponential growth.

Optimization

When finding the right tools and connecting them, the goals are optimizing the way they work together. This holistic approach helps maximize optimization.

Technology

Technology enables automation, scalability, and integration, which underpins growth even if you’re a non-tech company.

The mindset of a growth hacker is defined by how he or she solves problems. The elements described above are the most common thinking patterns of growth hackers.

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Introduction to growth thinking — growth by design, how to thinking design, and growth hack.

GROWTH BY DESIGN — Most Growth Hackers struggle to get traction for new ideas. A lack of guidance and exact next steps are to blame. Imagine if you could grow a new concept from beginning to end, with a framework to move from thought and action in a fast, simple, and low-cost approach. Actioning ideas with precision isn’t easy; with the growth thinking, science-backed design system built by the top minds in growth hacking, it’s a simple, well-structured yet creative system that allows you to find growth.

Growth thinking is a fast, easy, and simple way to prototype growth hacks. This enables growth by visualizing a growth hack in abstract and then detailing them into a systematic approach. This makes it easy to develop and improve growth hacks and generate new, better growth hacks.

Benefits of the growth thinking design methodology —

From idea to action — accurately and rapidly turn growth hacking ideas into execution quickly and cost-effectively,
Think at scale — quickly and effortlessly find methods to take an abstract growth hack, structure it, scale it, and
Save time and money — rapidly prototype your growth hacking ideas saving time and money.

This methodology uses a design system that Visualization, Systemize, Optimization, helps Rapid development, and instills Collaboration.

Nader Sabry

Strategist, innovator, and entrepreneur in NASA space tech, government, & health/wellness who has raised $120 million. The author of bestseller “Ready Set growth Hack: A beginners guide to growth hacking success,” and featured in Mindvalley, Entrepreneur Magazine, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, MIT Technology Review, and NASA Spinoff magazine. He is also the bestselling author of Ready Set Growth Hack, a Beginners Guide to Growth Hacking success.