©Shutterstock/TashatuvangoTraditional marketing versus growth hacking
Traditional marketing has always been about getting customers to (become interested in) your product. Its major focus is on promoting finished products, and its biggest goal is to fill your sales pipeline and generate revenue. It does this through a variety of methods — content marketing, search engine optimization, public relations, social media ads, and anything else that will bring attention and interest to the product they’re selling.Morgan Brown, coauthor with Sean Ellis of the book Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success (Random House), describes growth hacking as “experiment driven marketing focused primarily on how the product is used to create growth both from the distribution and retention side. The key differentiator being the product-level focus vs. the channel-level focus of traditional marketing effort.”
Did you catch that difference? Growth hacking relies more on the product itself to unlock growth instead of simply attracting people to the product. Whereas traditional marketers may no doubt be optimizing for how they draw people to the product, growth professionals consider the entire customer journey, with an explicit focus on retention.
Because of this product-level focus, growth hackers can team up with product-and-engineering folks to learn more about what it will take to get someone to not only come to the product but then also remain a devoted customer because they experience so much value from the product.
So, it should be clear that although traditional marketing and growth hacking have some overlap — so much so that practitioners on both sides of the aisle may even use many of the same techniques — they have fundamentally different goals.
Lean startup versus growth hacking
A 1-line definition from the Lean Startup site, co-founded by Eric Ries, says that Lean Startup provides a) a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and b) a proven way to get a desired product to customers' hands faster. Some of this sounds just like growth hacking, doesn’t it?Now, growth hackers were lucky at GrowthHackers early on to have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session that featured both Eric Ries (the author of the most famous book on the lean startup methodology) and Sean Ellis. To no one's surprise, folks were eager to find out whether the two approaches were substantially different.
Eric said that the lean startup approach emphasized two coequal parts of any startup or business strategy: the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis, with both given equal importance. However, in terms of what’s written about the lean startup methodology, more attention has been paid to value hypothesis activities. Even Sean admits that, until that particular AMA, he had thought of lean startup as being about making something growable (validating product-market fit, in other words) and growth hacking as the process of growing it.
Morgan Brown noted in that same AMA session that, whereas growth is definitely part of the lean startup approach, the growth hypothesis has elements that might have been ignored because of the product-centric thinking of Silicon Valley — a thinking that, in the past, had espoused a "build it and they will come" mentality.
He further hypothesized that the perception that the growth aspect was somehow missing from the lean startup approach could have lit the spark for the growth hacking movement.
But getting back to how Sean Ellis articulated the differences between a lean startup approach and growth hacking, the one thing Ellis felt was 100 percent true about growth hacking is that you shouldn’t even be thinking about growing a product that has not been validated yet. All you’d do is expose potential users and customers to a product they'll come to hate, ensuring that they’ll never want to return to it in the future.
Don’t let all this talk about terminology become the start of some semantic discussion about whether one methodology is better than the other. What you should be doing instead is taking concepts that work for you from wherever you get them so that you can get the results you want. Nothing is more important than that.
Agile product development versus growth hacking
The most consequential differences between agile product development and growth hacking are their goals and rhythms. Agile product development’s primary focus is to develop a product that works.Growth hacking is about developing a product that attracts and retains customers. You could say that product retention, monetizing users, and making the product experience so great that it drives word of mouth are the product team’s responsibility. The growth team would constantly evaluate all these aspects in order to figure out the best way to get users to the product and provide them with a great first experience.
Again, you can see a bit of an overlap here. Both focus heavily on the user and delivering something of value, but the way they do it is quite different.
The other difference between the two is that agile processes like Scrum create sprint backlogs that define the tasks for the next two, three, or four weeks. A growth hacking process, on the other hand, is based on a high tempo of experimentation with weekly or biweekly sprints that can show wins in the most unpredictable places and times and that could be systemized within the product experience. This makes it nearly impossible to align the growth hacking process with product development sprints.
There are other alignment challenges as well in lining up testing with product development, but the tension between prioritizing changes based on tests versus new features development or bug-fixing is real.