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Why The Haters are Wrong About Growth Hacking

Both Sides of the Table

“Growth hacking perpetuates this myth that you can magically achieve hockey-stick growth by using short-term “hacks.” “ I have always encouraged teams to think about growth as daily blocking-and-tackling rather than a dark art. I laughed as I did at much of his rant. He even used some terminology near and dear to my heart.

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When Employees Misinterpret Managers

Ben's Blog

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter.

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The #1 thing successful founders think about for their next startups

Hippoland

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. You will use your fridge for a decade or more so the retention here is high. don’t think about at all.

Founder 48
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The #1 thing successful founders think about for their next startups

Hippoland

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every repeat, previously-successful-founder focuses on the same thing for their respective startups: customer acquisition. Forget about traction and hockey stick growth. You will use your fridge for a decade or more so the retention here is high. don’t think about at all.

Founder 48
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Reaching Escape Velocity as a Bootstrapper

Software By Rob

VC companies need hockey stick growth. Acquisition can be manual. Anything that isn’t automated, in terms of customer acquisition, is ignored when you’re trying to dominate a large market. Retention can be relational. Linear growth, or heaven forbid, sporadic-up-and-down-non-uniform growth, is heavily frowned upon.

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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Products can find sources of validation with impressive stats along a number of dimensions, such as high engagement, viral coefficient, or long-term retention. This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us: A hockey stick shaped growth curve. involved before we go into production.

Customer 167
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The Coming Zombie Startup Apocalypse

This is going to be BIG.

Instead of paid acquisition fueling an up and to the right hockey stick, these companies would grow organically. Retention, referral and growth hacking experts would be in high demand, asked to squeeze blood from a stone in order to grow a userbase without paid acquisition.