Sales and marketing aren't the same. This is not sales. A growth hacker is a marketing engineer, and I don't think that role has been prevalent until recently. Counterexamples are welcome.
Yes, it has been around for a long time. Deal is that these people decide to build a business for themselves and not others. Counterexample? Dan Kennedy is a good and recent one (recent as in still alive). His partner, Bill Glazer, is also a good example.
No, growth hacking is something new. Or rather: "growth hacking" is a term people are using to describe a genuinely new phenomenon. You can trace this phenomenon back maybe 10-12 years, but there is something interesting happening -- interesting enough that people feel the need to coin a term to describe it.
Andrew's example is a good one. AirBnb grew in part by piggy-backing off a pre-existing platform (Craigslist) in a way that required skills in copyediting, marketing, engineering, design, and psychology.
YouTube did similarly via MySpace. PayPay did similarly via email. Lots of people, like Slide, Zynga, RockYou, and even LivingSocial did similarly via Facebook.
There's something new happening here, and it's not coming from "top sales people" or even "top marketers." It's coming from engineers who have decided to approach marketing, customer acquisition, and distribution as an engineering problem.
It's more than quantitative marketing or direct sales. The best growth hackers have a STEM background. This thing, whatever it is, is "growth hacking."
It's not entirely new, no, but it's new like the iPhone was new. None of the component ideas in the iPhone were 100% new, but it wasn't possible to build one at a consumer price-point until certain preconditions, both technological and economic, were met.
I'd claim this: marketing more than most disciplines lives or dies by the state of communication technology. The best marketers in any generation know how to use that technology to their advantage.
But communication technology is radically different today than it was even 20 years ago, let alone 120 years ago when PT Barnum was alive. For one, it's more digital and more technological. It's also changing at an accelerating pace. 10 years ago neither Facebook nor YouTube existed. 6 years ago Twitter didn't. Tumblr, 5. Pinterest, 2. Instagram, 1.
Or, think of it this way (as a marketer might): the rate at which new marketing channels are being created is accelerating. We're talking channels that can potentially reach 1MM, 10MM, 100MM people sprouting afresh every year. That's not the world PT Barnum lived in.
Why is is so crazy to think that this new environment results in a new breed of marketer, more at home in bits and bytes than in creating hoaxes which spread through poorly fact-checked newspapers and traditional marketing "stunts?" And that therefore engineers -- the same people who are creating these new channels -- are perhaps best adapted to this new environment?
It's also presumptuous to think that growth hackers -- and I'd include myself in that lot -- aren't familiar with PT Barnum, David Ogilvy, Jack Trout, or other famous marketers.
In a thread extolling the virtues of Reddit's early sockpuppets and AirBnB's Craiglist games, it's a bit much to try to claim "growth hackers" are superior to old-tymey hoaxes, whatever their facility with bits'n'bytes.
I'm not saying such approaches don't have their place, but you can't on the one hand look down on similar tricks in the past and then on the other claim that performing them in new channels somehow make them better.
Also, PT Barnum was much more than hoaxes. Seriously, read up a bit.
I didn't claim they're superior. I asked: "Why is it so crazy to think that [growth hackers] are perhaps best adapted to this new environment?" Are fish superior to dogs because they can stay underwater their whole lives?
I also never said PT Barnum was nothing more than hoaxes. Nor am I sure how other people's commentary on Reddit and AirBnB's respective growth strategies does anything but reinforce my point, viz., we live in a world where huge marketing channels are being created every year and (for now) engineers rather than traditional marketers are best suited for taking advantage of them.
Was it traditional marketers who planned and executed those strategies? Even if they had planned it, could they have executed it?
At this point I'm not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding me, but I've been as explicit as I know how. I'll have to leave it at that.
As for reading recommendations, I own both his autobiography and "The Art of Money Getting." Is there something else you'd recommend?
If you've read those books, do you not see that he was taking advantage of the way the world was changing in his time? That he was being quite creative in finding new opportunities to reach people?
That's the entire point here. That taking advantage of new opportunities in marketing is absolutely nothing new. It's what has always been done.
Since we're going down the road where you question my sincerity (seriously, does that ever work?), I'll also point out that you selectively quoted yourself. The second half of the sentence, which is still right there in your original post after all, very clearly has a tone that Mr. Bits'n'Bytes Growth Hacker is superior to the oldster Hoaxer who spread through "poorly fact-checked newspapers".
Come now, you have enough facility with language that you must know quite well what you were doing there.
Well, ok. I don't think that: I've known growth hackers who have done incredibly shady, unethical, and borderline illegal things. The Reddit and AirBnB examples are probably a ~4 on a 1-10 scale of stunts growth hackers pull.
I'm not sure what you're hoping to get by continuing, but I'm ready to stop. Later!
Finding the right channel that will scale a startup is an experiment and a process.
If you knew what was going to scale your product, you would of done it by now.
Growth hackers do whatever it takes to find growth and that might require a range of skills for user awareness, acquisition, retention, engagement and resurrection.
