Growth hacking - and debugging

I stumbled upon the term "growth hacking" a while back and although it seemed interesting, I quickly forgot about it. Yesterday it once more washed up on a shore close to me, and I figured: Why not find out what this really is?

The idea seems to be that a technical person will have a better skill set for growing customers in a digital world than a pure, traditional marketer. Although a different interpretation sees growth hacker as an analytical and creative person who sees a challenge and finds a solution. But how's that different from traditional marketers and ad persons?

Some also point to the fact that there must already be growth for there to be growth to hack, and that the users are the key source of user growth, i.e. growth hacking is word of mouth, liking, tweeting etc.. But it's also ads, ofcoruse. Just not branding. But, also branding. So yes, anything goes as long as it creates users or customers.

Another idea is that growth hacking starts after you have found  your market-fit. Which is a term for knowing who your customers are, what you're selling (perhaps the experience of driving a certain car brand, and not the car in itself) and where to market it.

Growth hacking is also a realization of how things work in digital. Such as: When a tactic is used more, it's effect will plummet which means that new and unusual tactics will have far better effects. Basically the creativity that the ad industry speaks so highly of, combined with the script kiddie mentality.

One example was airbnb's feature of publishing to Craigs list - a service which has no public API. Another was the optimization of the Twitter's front page.

There's a bucket of great links at the bottom of this posts for more exploration. My conclusion is that growth hacking seems to be one of those elusive terms that for some reason reflects an important insight, yet is so frustratingly difficult to define more specifically. It is smart marketing in the age of digital. It is an hands on job, like Art Directors, but not as campaign based - more permanent. Something like traditional recruiters, but armed with the power tool that is the internet.

Since I've seemed to reach the end, I'll spit out a summery (or tl;dr since we're already into buzzwords): a growth hacker is the adman of the digital age, where there are no consumers, only users.