Ten Years After Growth Hacking

More than a decade ago, I wrote Growth Hacker is the VP of Marketing, predicting that traditional marketing teams were soon to be disrupted. Ten years later, how are we doing?

In that original essay I made several provocative points:

• In the future, marketing will require technical proficiency and less touchy-feely skills.
• Tech products are nearly trivial to build, and distribution will get harder than ever.
• New "superplatforms" are giving startups access to hundreds of millions of users, raising the stakes for all.
• Hooking into APIs and integrating into new platforms is the domain of technical distribution-minded teams, not traditional brand or comms or PR.

Soon after, the age of growth hacking emerged. New job titles appeared: Head of Growth, entire Growth teams forming within consumer and SaaS startups, a blizzard of new terminology (NURR, CURR, RURR, k-factor, D1/D7/D28).

From abundance to scarcity

A decade ago, product growth was in a period of abundance. The iPhone launched, followed by the App Store, and people were excited about installing new apps. You were competing against waiting in line and sitting quietly on the toilet. People actually checked the App Store daily to see what had launched and went to look at the leaderboard. Trending in the top apps was a big deal. They clicked on ads. They signed up and converted.

In parallel, Web 2.0 was in full swing. New social apps got people to invite their friends. Email contact scrapers juiced the invites. Deliverability was high, as were acceptance rates. New products launched at SXSW or on Techcrunch. SEO, SEM, and email were still relevant.

Then the music stopped.

In 2024, things have narrowed. Scarcity has replaced abundance. We are in the closing years of the mobile S-curve. The novelty drive has decayed. People are not interested to try new apps, as their homescreens (and brains) are full of apps developed over the past decade. Developers now compete with a killer lineup of the most engaging, most addictive apps ever, from messaging to short-form video to twenty-four-hour email.

There are real limitations to growth hacking

The old hands who used growth hacking techniques across many products and channels eventually found major limitations:

You can't A/B test your way to product/market fit. Startups don't have enough users to generate statistically significant data, and the changes they need to make are big, not small. Make big, bold moves, not little landing page tweaks.

Steady +5% lifts can't fight the bigger waves. Seasonality, poor retention, S-curve dynamics — growth teams often can't move these. Sometimes you just need to double the customer acquisition budget or drop the price.

Growth projects work best with lots of data, fast metrics, and clear levers. Best for top-of-funnel initiatives at large products. Less useful for startups and long-term factors like retention.

Aggressive growth projects produce UX cruft. Yes, you can move short-term metrics by throwing a blocking modal that upsells a subscription. But how long before that alienates long-term users?

In larger companies, product teams end up fighting with growth teams. The growth teams often get the reputation as hacky and bad, the team that doesn't stretch beyond technically simple projects.

I originally hoped to find a new scientific process for finding product/market fit. Instead I mostly found new tools and processes that helped big products get even bigger.

Distribution culture won, even if growth teams didn't

Despite the limitations, this mindset around metrics-oriented distribution succeeded across larger products and teams, something I had not initially expected. Product managers are now simply expected to understand A/B testing, CAC, LTV, D30, and the rest. You interview for it. Companies have teams focusing on new-user experience, and teams that help marketing groups with landing pages and adtech APIs.

The language also expanded. A very large share of marketers now describe themselves as growth marketers. Even a Head of Sales in a B2B context might describe themselves as a Head of Growth. At its peak, we saw Coca-Cola appoint a Chief Growth Officer.

Rather than get disrupted by growth, as I had predicted, the other functional disciplines absorbed it. The ideas, jargon, and titles permeated the industry. This helped many companies. It also commoditized the techniques. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs applies: the performance of every growth channel decays over time because consumers become acclimated and tire of it. When many teams use the same tactics on the same channels, they burn out the collective customer psyche.

Where growth goes next

The fundamentals still apply. Tech products are nearly trivial to build, and distribution is harder than ever. Platforms are even bigger than they were. New memes, apps, and conversations spread instantly across billions of people.

Today's effective tactics are different than what existed before. We are unlikely to install new apps, but we are willing to follow new creators or share videos, links, photos. We spend a lot of time on social, in video apps, in workplace comms and collaboration products. It is why creators, short-form video, and shareable memes have become such important growth drivers for new startups, even though the spikes are short and ephemeral. In the workplace, it is why PLG and bottoms-up growth are fueled as much by co-workers sharing content as by anything else.

This naturally leads to a new generation of video-native products that automatically generate content as part of their use, which in turn drives growth. No wonder generative AI tools are spreading rapidly based on people posting amazing creations — whether 3D assets, video snippets, or images — on visual social networks.

As we jump from one S-curve (mobile) to the next (AI), we are seeing the novelty drive come back into the ecosystem. People share, invite, discuss simply because they are excited about new product functionality, simply because of the "it actually works" feature. Instead of highly optimized flows that have been endlessly A/B tested, startups can simply show a first-gen AI tool for making okay-but-not-great videos, and everyone will endlessly talk about it.

One day this novelty will settle down. Until then, game on.