Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

The rise of the Growth Hacker
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
These skills are invaluable and can change the trajectory of a new product. For the first time ever, it’s possible for new products to go from zero to 10s of millions users in just a few years. Great examples include Pinterest, Zynga, Groupon, Instagram, Dropbox. New products with incredible traction emerge every week. These products, with millions of users, are built on top of new, open platforms that in turn have hundreds of millions of users – Facebook and Apple in particular. Whereas the web in 1995 consisted of a mere 16 million users on dialup, today over 2 billion people access the internet. On top of these unprecedented numbers, consumers use super-viral communication platforms that rapidly speed up the proliferation of new products – not only is the market bigger, but it moves faster too.

Before this era, the discipline of marketing relied on the only communication channels that could reach 10s of millions of people – newspaper, TV, conferences, and channels like retail stores. To talk to these communication channels, you used people – advertising agencies, PR, keynote speeches, and business development. Today, the traditional communication channels are fragmented and passe. The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.

Whereas PR and press used to be the drivers of customer acquisition, instead it’s now a lagging indicator that your Facebook integration is working. The role of the VP of Marketing, long thought to be a non-technical role, is rapidly fading and in its place, a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids have emerged.

Airbnb, a case study
Let’s use case of Airbnb to illustrate this mindset. First, recall The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs:

Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.

The converse of this law is that if you are first-to-market, or just as well, first-to-marketing-channel, you can get strong clickthrough and conversion rates because of novelty and lack of competition. This presents a compelling opportunity for a growth team that knows what they are doing – they can do a reasonably difficult integration into a big platform and expect to achieve an advantage early on.

Airbnb does just this, with a remarkable Craigslist integration. They’ve picked a platform with 10s of millions of users where relatively few automated tools exist, and have created a great experience to share your Airbnb listing. It’s integrated simply and deeply into the product, and is one of the most impressive ad-hoc integrations I’ve seen in years. Certainly a traditional marketer would not have come up with this, or known it was even possible – instead it’d take a marketing-minded engineer to dissect the product and build an integration this smooth.

Here’s how it works at a UI level, and then we’ll dissect the technology bits:

(This screenshots are courtesy of Luke Bornheimer and his wonderful answer on Quora)

Looks simple, right? The impressive part is that this is done with no public Craigslist API! It turns out, you have to look closely and carefully at Craigslist in order to accomplish an integration like this. Note that it’s 100X easier for me to reverse engineer something that’s already working versus coming up with the reference implementation – and for this reason, I’m super impressed with this integration.

Reverse-engineering “Post to Craigslist”
The first thing you have to do is to look at how Craigslist allows users to post to the site. Without an API, you have to write a script that can scrape Craigslist and interact with its forms, to pre-fill all the information you want.

The first thing you can notice from playing around with Craigslist is that when you go to post something, you get a unique URL where all your information is saved. So if you go to https://post.craigslist.org you’ll get redirected to a different URL that looks like https://post.craigslist.org/k/HLjRsQyQ4RGu6gFwMi3iXg/StmM3?s=type. It turns out that this URL is unique, and all information that goes into this listing is associated to this URL and not to your Craigslist cookie. This is different than the way that most sites do it, where a bunch of information is saved in a cookie and/or server-side and then pulled out. This unique way of associating your Craigslist data and the URL means that you can build a bot that visits Craigslist, gets a unique URL, fills in the listing info, and then passes the URL to the user to take the final step of publishing. That becomes the foundation for the integration.

At the same time, the bot needs to know information to deal with all the forms – beyond filling out the Craigslist category, which is simple, you also need to know which geographical region to select. For that, you’d have to visit every Craigslist in every market they serve, and scrape the names and codes for every region. Luckily, you can start with the links in the Craiglist sidepanel – there’s 100s of different versions of Craigslist, it turns out.

If you dig around a little bit you find that certain geographical markets are more detailed than others. In some, like the SF Bay Area, there’s subareas (south bay, peninsula, etc.) and neighborhoods (bernal, pacific heights) whereas in other markets there’s only subareas, or there’s just the market. So you’d have to incorporate all of that into your interface.

Then there’s the problem of the listing itself – by default, Craigslist works by giving you an anonymous email address which you use to communicate to potential customers. If you want to drive them to your site, you’d have to notice that you can turn off showing an email, and just provide the “Contact me here” link instead. Or, you could potentially fill a special email address like listing-29372@domain.com that automatically directs inquiries to the right person, which can be done using services like Mailgun or Sendgrid.

Finally, you’ll want the listing to look good – it turns out Craigslist only supports a limited amount of HTML, so you’ll need to work to make your listings work well within those constraints.

Completing the integration is only the beginning – once it’s up, you’d have to optimize it. What’s the completion % once sometime starts sharing their listing out to Craigslist? How can you change the flow, the call to action, the steps in the form, to increase this %? And similarly, when people land from Craigslist, how do you make sure they are likely to complete a transaction? Do they need special messaging?

Tracking all of this requires additional work with click-tracking with unique URLs, 1×1 GIFs on the Craigslist listing, and many more details.

Long story short, this kind of integration is not trivial. There’s many little details to notice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial integration took some very smart people a lot of time to perfect.

No traditional marketer would have figured this out
Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above – there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist. Who knows how much value Airbnb is getting from this integration, but in my book, it’s damn impressive. It taps into a low-competition, huge-volume marketing channel, and builds a marketing function deeply into the product. Best of all, it’s a win-win for everyone involved – both the people renting out their places by tapping into pre-built demand, and for renters, who see much nicer listings with better photos and descriptions.

This is just a case study, but with this type of integration, a new product is able to compete not just on features, but on distribution strategy as well. In this way, two identical products can have 100X different outcomes, just based on how well they integrate into Craigslist/Twitter/Facebook. It’s an amazing time, and a new breed of creative, technical marketers are emerging. Watch this trend.

So to summarize:

For the first time ever, superplatforms like Facebook and Apple uniquely provide access to 10s of millions of customers
The discipline of marketing is shifting from people-centric to API-centric activities
Growth hackers embody the hybrid between marketer and coder needed to thrive in the age of platforms
Airbnb has an amazing Craigslist integration

Good luck, growth hackers! (Thanks to Semil Shah)

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studgeek

Some really great points and increasing the awareness of hacking for growth is a great thing for startups. In general I think all great startups apply a hacking mentality towards every aspect of their business. The instinct to game systems is certainly one of the things I think great founders share in common.

It think it even applies to accelerators, the top accelerators all have hackers at their core (YC, 500, TechStars) and I think its reflected not just in their disruptive approaches but even in the tools/hacks they use (e.g. TechStars – auto-pushing to CrunchBase, internal application processing across the entire network; 500 – big data mining to detect and predict not just winners, but upcoming financing events).

All that said, I think you are selling traditional marketing folks short (and I am a hacker to the core :). Lots of the core ideas of marketing clearly still apply for startups (just like traditional design applies in web design), even if the approaches have evolved. And I think many good marketing folks would certainly have the idea that they would like to push to CraigsList (I mean it is THE way to find an apartment in the US). Good companies ensure their teams have a healthy respect for each others skill sets and work to leverage them together in new ways.

In terms of the CraigsList hack, variations of it have been done many times before (and Craig always finds a way to squash it as he just did again :(. It’s definitely harder than posting to a public API like Facebook, but its also not rocket science either once a good engineer is trying to make it happen. The key thing was envisioning it and then investing the resources to make it happen, something that takes a company-wide fertilization of ideas and awareness of the potential you describe.
http://www.briansolis.com/ briansolis

Agreed. In fact…as I read the headline, I thought of Noah Kagan straight away. @facebook-1203598:disqus hope you’re well!
http://twitter.com/jhupcey Joe Hupcey III

Indeed, if you have on your payroll and/or you are a “growth
hacker” it’s a wonderful thing. However, regarding comments like, “Certainly a
traditional marketer would not have come up with this, or known it was even
possible” — Really?
If anything,
as a product management & marketing director (EE undergrad + masters for 8
years before going to the MBA dark side) I see the “reverse” waaaaay
more often: many EE/SW engineers are unconsciously constrained by their
real or preconceived fears of the limitations of platforms/APIs. In contrast, a truly creative, strategic
marketer who is blissfully unaware of any technical challenges can
brainstorm things like, “Why can’t we integrate the room sharing functionality
with Craigslist? It’s a potential huge
channel for us — way too important to ignore!
Let’s do it!”

A corollary is the Jobsian-like leader that knows full well
there are limits / tough technical issues in the way, but pounds the table and
demands people get over them and just make it work somehow. (And thus, the
command would be, “I don’t care if the Craigslist APIs suck or are
essentially non-existent. Make it make
it f*&%ing work, or we’ll find someone who will because this channel is too
important to ignore.”)

In a nutshell, strategy — buttressed by some analysis –
should always come before implementation.
Again, I fully agree that if you can get someone who can do both well it’s
a great thing.
http://lianza.org/ Tom Lianza

Yeah, I think Craigslist was an unfortunate example. They block everyone eventually. ( I remember http://www.kashless.org/ had a great-but-temporary implementation as well ).
niallsmart

Ivan Kirgin and Drew (&co) at DropBox (two sided referral program, shared folders, get link, API, etc).
niallsmart

Ivan Kirigin & Drew Houston (&co) @ DropBox. Their “Startup Lessons Learned” deck is about exactly this. http://slidesha.re/9x5THt
http://twitter.com/AvishkarAA Avishkar Autar

Not to distract from your central point, but craigslist actually does have a public facing API, they just don’t call it an API: http://www.craigslist.org/about/bulk_posting_interface

Despite being the “bulk” posting interface, it will happily accept single posts.

This is widely used in real estate and I’d be very surprised if the engineers at Airbnb didn’t use it, as reverse-engineering “Post to Craigslist” is a terrible approach b/c:

(1) your integration will break w/ even minor changes by craigslist to their code, even trivial frontend stuff (like renaming an input field)

(2) Too many posts and craigslist will block you as it’ll suspect your spamming the site
Steve Klebanoff

The Airbnb workaround is super creative and inspiring. I’d love to see a series of posts highlighting interesting “growth hacks”.
http://www.seobodybuilder.com/ Russell Jensen

I don’t dare share this with the VP of my marketing department… But he needs to hear it.
Bill Nigh

Excellent insights.
http://www.firstmeta.com aileen sim

Interesting read, thank you! And thanks for sharing the details of the airbnb-craigslist integration too. I like the concept of “growth hacker” and I get the point you’re driving at.

However, I have to disagree that you need to be an engineer (i.e. know how to code) to come up with something like this.

Yes technical details (i.e. is it possible and how best to implement) need to be figured out. But I do believe that anyone who thinks hard enough about the problem, is observant of how things work, willing to think outside the box and is constantly on the look-out for solutions, can think up novel ways to acquire users.

He may not necessarily be able to implement it himself but he can certainly (if required at all) work with the engineering team to do so.

Unless you’re using a very loose definition of an “engineer” here, I see no reason to limit ourselves to think that only people with CS degrees/skills can become good marketeers. All you need really, is people who are observant, and can think critically. PS: I can’t code (yet) but i am working on a new app right now for which I’m constantly thinking about how to drive adoption, and I think we have some great ideas around this!
http://www.facebook.com/tobydownton Toby Downton

Interesting to see that Sean Ellis registered the domain name growthhacker.com at the time of writing that post…!
http://www.facebook.com/gohawks David Rodnitzky

Definitely agree that marketing today requires knowledge of technology and technology platforms. Most online marketers worth their chops today and highly quantitative, understand the basics of APIs and platforms, and spend significant time talking to the engineering team to make sure that data is being tracked correctly and products are being built in a way to capitalize on the virality of social media.

The notion, however, that “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” is a bit silly. Great VP of Marketing have spent thousands of hours focused on honing their marketing skills, just as great engineers have spent the same amount of time focused on honing their ‘hacking’ skills. As Malcolm Gladwell has noted, you need 10,000 hours of experience to be an expert at anything. There are few people that will be able to spend enough time on both marketing (growth) and engineering (hacking) to be experts at both. Or, to put it another way, an expert at everything is an expert at nothing.

There are certainly examples like Airbnb that used technology to grow virally (though, it should be noted, that their initial Craigslist ‘hack’ was a massive violation of Craigslist’s Ts and Cs (http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/), but for every Airbnb success story, there’s 100 engineer-driven start-ups that try to drive virality through social media, or cool API integration with Yelp, or whatever, and never make it beyond a few mentions on hacker news.

And while hiring a six figure VP of marketing does not guarantee success, there’s a long history of companies growing market share through this method. If I was doing the hiring, I would certainly hire a VP of marketing who has a great understanding of technology and emerging online media over an MBA who spent the last ten years hawking toothpaste for a giant brand. But I’d still hire the VP of marketing instead of some clever engineer who thinks he can disrupt marketing with his API chops. Maybe bring that guy in as a junior marketer at let him collaborate with the VP, but that’s it.
stephendaimler

Hi Andrew, nice post. It was the first time I heard someone describe a growth hacker as technical. I have spent the last few days thinking about it. A few thoughts:
1. I think what you describe is more of a founder than some new marketing/engineering hybrid. Because really, what is stoping an engineer/marketer from starting their own company? Seems like a unicorn to me.
2. I think a growth hacker is just a savvy (or scrappy) non-technical internet marketer like Sean Ellis or Andy Johns of Quora. Andy thinks there needs to be a “growth team” with a full stack engineer, front end engineer/designer, data scientist, analyst, product manager/acquisition marketer. So maybe “growth team” is a better term than “growth hacker”? I guess all startups are growth teams!
3. Airbnb was really savvy on Craigslist. What you describe is actually part 2 of their strategy, or getting hosts to post to CL. Part one, which I think is far more critical, was getting the hosts to list on Airbnb to begin with. This is outlined well in this article: http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/
Thanks for making me think.
http://www.facebook.com/ajohns Andy Johns

Woah, thanks for the tip of the hat Stephen. Honored to be mentioned here.
http://jasoncrawford.org/ jasoncrawford

Good post! One quibble: I don’t think a growth hacker *has* to be an engineer. It *can* be a non-engineer with good marketing sense and good techincal intuition. Such people are rare but valuable. The best PMs are like this, and I’ve met a few of them in my career, mostly at Amazon.
cezinho

I think the bigger theme of this post is that the requirements for people tasked with growing a startup are increasing, in the same way that launching a startup is becoming more and more competitive. A growth hacker could be an engineer as much as s/he is a marketer, provided that each does not fit the stereotypical mold of the job title. So, an engineer who doesn’t have a clue about consumer needs and business fundamentals won’t fit this role, nor will a marketer who does not balance a creative side with nitty-gritty analytics and an understanding of product virality.

Coming from the marketing angle, I strongly believe in marketing fundamentals when it comes to launching a startup. You can’t simply decide to grow a company without having a proper understanding of your consumer and the problem you’re trying to solve, as well as developing the right message to fit your audience. At the same time, those principles must be applied in the proper context, which is helping an emerging company gain traction in the marketplace. I call this approach “lean marketing,” and it draws on classic marketing principles, an understanding of the web, and the realities of a startup with limited resources.

Regarding the notion of being able to code to be a great growth hacker, I disagree with Andrew. Sure, it’s a huge asset if you can do it (though there’s always a risk of being jack of all trades and master of none if you try to do too much), but next best thing is to have an open channel with your tech team and involve them in the marketing process. A good marketer with business savvy will be able to devise integrations like the Airbnb/Craigslist example by asking the right questions (eg “is there a way to gain distribution through other platforms?”) and leaning on his/her tech team to determine what’s technically feasible.

Ultimately, the question of user acquisition is one that addresses human behavior and ways to influence it, which is what creative, web-savvy and results-driven marketers do very well.
http://twitter.com/sgclark Stephen Clark

Great post and makes complete sense. I have always believed that a digital marketer who does not understand the underlying technology is at a huge disadvantage. So while I have a Marketing degree, I taught myself CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL mgmt, etc, and actively build and develop websites and apps for clients on the side. Having that knowledge is amazingly useful.
Talton

tl;dr – Everybody codes.

I love where this post takes us in terms of continuing to expect more from traditional non-technical roles. General marketing, ignorant of any technical knowledge, has given rise to too much marketing douche-baggery. A technical knowledge can give employees in general (community, support, etc.) the eyes to see better opportunities and hopefully offer a more authentic relationship between their users or customers. In a company with a flat hierarchy this methodology helps make everyone a more powerful asset.

As a testament to this, Disqus, with a community of over 73m, has been around for 4 years and is just now looking to fill a marketing position. I feel as though it says a lot about Disqus as a company and how people should rethink the marketing role.

Great post (despite the buzzwords)! :-P
http://profiles.google.com/mondojohnson Christopher Johnson

I’ve forwarded this to all of the Marketing Professors at the Graduate Business School where I work. As always, a step ahead — and delivered with your trademark clarity. Thanks Andrew!
http://www.about.me/tgowland Tara Gowland

This is great!
galenward

Adam, you are a quintessential growth hacker.
http://twitter.com/mschiefelbein Mark Schiefelbein

Great post and great thread of comments. Glad to see that the meme “growth hacker” is getting more and more attention!

Interesting to see the discussion on the “hacker” part of the term, and whether it’s hacking in the sense of tinkering or actual development work, even if just crude.

Most of the examples seem to be in B2C. I have mostly worked in B2B and consider myself a growth hacker there, starting with a deep understanding of technology, going out and selling to the first early adopter customers, and finishing the product by tinkering with features, UI, etc. in close co-operation with customers and development.

Curious is people think this fits the “growth hacker” profile and how it’s related to the customer development methodology of Eric Ries?
http://000fff.org Thomas Petersen

But but I said it first!

http://000fff.org/the-power-of-digital-ecoystems/

Great great post Andrew
http://www.facebook.com/people/Net-Jacobsson/513434100 Net Jacobsson

Hey Andrew,
http://realfilling.com/ the99th

Fungality
http://twitter.com/schav Steve Chang

Agreed. I’d also say that a hacker/engineer, elite as he may be, is often heads down in code, logic and details and usually less inclined to step back and look at the big picture or think about attacking a problem in a novel, or even naive, but potentially game-changing way. Many nerds (and I am one) tend to think very logically, and rules-based…and sometimes you need someone like a Steve Jobs (sorry, too hard to not use him here) to push them to think differently or change the rules for a problem. Sometimes the coolest innovations come from the dumbest or most naive ideas…
http://twitter.com/mvolpe Mike Volpe

Not sure I deserve this… but I will take it!
http://www.brandings.com/ Kim Oakland

Profound visionary. Innovation, creativity and attention to detail in execution are a part of the equation.
http://twitter.com/lexilewtan Lexi Lewtan

Great Post, Andrew – I’ve been waiting for this type of job to exist for awhile now! Any thoughts/suggestions at becoming a particularly great growth hacker?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1104560836 Jimmy Joe

couldn’t agree more andrew!! there is a shift. in my experience, those that don’t understand technology talk around it. those that do, execute and test because they know what it can do.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

I think two things are important:

1) Get as technical as you can- in particular, down to the level of detail where you really understand how different apps hook into platforms like Facebook or iOS.2) For now, it’s really an apprenticeship structure- you have to work with great people who are already doing a good job here (there’s a small number of companies I’d put into this group) and work there. Alternatively, starting a company and getting someone great at growth to advise is also a good idea

Unfortunately this is cutting-edge enough that it’s not something you can learn by reading books or going to an MBA. Bits and pieces are in the blogosphere, though.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Yes, but it’s a lot more core to traditional marketing than it is here. PR/advertising agencies have always been insanely creative and innovative, but in the realm of branding. In the world of growth, it pays to be execution-oriented, technical, and iterative. These are the skills that are the most different.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Related, but not quite.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Agree with everything you said.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

I think of the old-school equivalent of this as direct marketing, database marketing, or maybe even operations research. I think this has been given a new name just because it’s completely digital and online, in nature. Otherwise instead of talking about websites or social networks we’d just be talking about “stores” “parks” and their offline brethren.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

You miss the point- it’s just that it’s impressive to spam Craigslist, as you know, it’s easy to do something like that. What’s impressive is to design and create a gorgeous product like Airbnb, and then bake the Craigslist integration. Then track the analytics around it and optimize it. That’s the impressive part. It’s the difference between being able to play the violin vs composing a new orchestral masterpiece.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Anything’s possible :) But my point is that the traditional marketing discipline is being disrupted and people with technical backgrounds have a huge advantage. That’s pointing out a trend, though obviously some datapoints will fit in and out of this trend.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

You use yourself in the example, yet would you consider EE undergrad+masters a “traditional marketer?” I think of a traditional marketing background as one that’s a liberal arts degree followed by years at a P&G or on Madison Ave or at a tech company doing marcomm. And for sure, I’m skeptical that this group would be effective growing a Facebook or iOS app.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

The reason why Airbnb doesn’t use this API is explained by a section about halfway down, titled “Categories for which bulk posting is no longer supported.”

I think having this tool is still a great approach as long as you’re willing to maintain it and make sure it works on a consistent basis. It’s obviously better than doing nothing.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

I think it’s super important to be technical. I don’t know that you need to code, specifically, but it helps to be as technical as possible. The more technical you are, the better you can understand the various APIs, channels, and ways to drive growth/engagement through those channels.

People who think they can be an expert in this type of growth – and I say expert, not “somewhat competent” – are kidding themselves if they think they can be non-technical and do this.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Glad you liked it! Hope it stirred up some trouble at your bschool :)
http://000fff.org Thomas Petersen

Yeah i was specifically thinking about this part :

“If you have followed me this far, let me offer you a final observation.

The next big battle is going to be a battle between digital ecosystems; not gadgets, not products and not services.

The most important weapon is going to be the WMCs: Weapons of Mass Connection, a.k.a. the APIs.

These APIs will make it possible for different organizations to have data flow freely between them. Allow for anyone with the right idea to leverage on others’ success without taking anything away from them. On the contrary, the more trusted interpreters you can give access to the data flow, the more robust the digital ecosystem will be.”

But other that that yes the focus is a little bit different.
http://twitter.com/BrianCrouch Brian Crouch

Of all the people I know in Seattle, I’d put you, Damon Cortesi, Aviel, and maybe 5 others definitely in the category of Growth Hackers.
lpacalin

Andrew: As a former sales guy, product manager and marketer, I agree that a strong technical understanding of the “super platforms” is paramount. However, I see it only as a necessary but insufficient dimension. A strong narrative that creates meaning and purpose needs to be developed simultaneously to the “hacking effort”, so as to enable a sustainable endeavor.
http://twitter.com/DavidAnthonyBiz David Anthony

This is a woWOW (world of WOW XD) article. Game changing in my approach for my new startup, wikiduca (gamified language learning for kids). THANKS
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=268100238 Nai Chng

The first person who came to my mind when I saw the title was actually Sean Ellis although I guess he’s a different type of growth hacker.
http://jesperastrom.com/ Jesper Åström

HA! But it takes a marketer to come up with the name “Growth Hacker” :). I like to call what we do “in-line conversion/sharing/actions”. Read more here - http://jesperastrom.com/conversion/in-line-sharing-optimization-seo-and-conversion-rate/
secorp

Chris Neumann runs his own shop (http://www.growth-hacker.com/) as a growth hacker doing conversion optimization and other analytics-related optimizations. He’s familiar with all of the various tools (Google Analytics, Optimizely, Adobe SiteCatalyst and Test&Target – where I ran into him, etc.).
http://www.CROmetrics.com/ Chris Neumann

Another thing to keep in mind about traditional marketers (not figuring this out) is that there is a strong incentive to not disrupt the status-quo and stick to the traditional activities they were hired for. Doing something like this that requires a bunch of engineering time is a big risk for a traditional marketer and their career. Therefore, permission to do this sort of thing must come from the CEO. If there is not CEO buy-in, the company should not even attempt to try and hire a growth hacker, as their efforts (and perhaps the company!) will fail.

@andrewchen