I absolutely can't stand the whole 'growth hacking' phenomenon, usually it boils down to doing something at someone else's expense in order to improve ones own position in the market. It's the mafia mentality brought to start-up land, suddenly you find you have a 'partner' that you did not choose who skims off a good portion of your profits.
At this point, the entire phrase "growth hacking" makes me uncomfortable.
I gather that initially it just meant "engineering focused on growth", and I can see how you might want it as a counterbalance; if you have teams devoted to beautiful UI and stable infrastructure, but not growing, it might get neglected.
But in practice, it mostly seems like a "dirty tricks" role. Dark signup patterns produce growth, fake competition produces growth, dishonest countdown timers and 'rooms remaining' counters produce growth. Having a role devoted to hustling either your users or your customers isn't a good look.
That mentality has been at the core of every place I’ve worked. You dial it back when you have more to lose and then pretend like you never did anything wrong.
That Pinterest google spam paywall is equivalent to follow/unfollow bots on instagram. While it is effective at gaining followers/signups, it's not bringing value added people. Of course if your metric for success is hockey stick user growth, then sure. I suspect if Pinterest did some user account house cleaning, you'd see millions of trash accounts go with it.
https://firstround.com/review/pinterest-and-grubhubs-former-...
I absolutely can't stand the whole 'growth hacking' phenomenon, usually it boils down to doing something at someone else's expense in order to improve ones own position in the market. It's the mafia mentality brought to start-up land, suddenly you find you have a 'partner' that you did not choose who skims off a good portion of your profits.