Today we’re going to talk about the limits to growth marketing, aka “growth hacking.” In his book “Growth Hacker Marketing,” Ryan Holiday defines this person as:
“A growth hacker is someone who [works] with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users.”
There’s nothing wrong with this practice per se. But there are stages in an industry’s life cycle where it’s the wrong approach. You can’t, for example, continuously improve a metric when there’s no data to base the metric on in the first place. There are other industries where privacy or perceptions require you to use a different approach.
This is the world that Ned Nadima lives in. Growing up in Ottawa, he now spends much of his time in Newfoundland, studying and working as a marketer in the Biotech industry
His main passions are growing businesses that involve neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He avidly follows his crossfit routine and practices optimal living, experimenting with fasting, sleep hacking, diet and other ways to promote longevity. Like Ryan Holiday, he’s also into stoic philosophy.
Listen to Ned explain what you CAN do when you CAN’T growth hack.
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
- Ash Maurya’s books Running Lean and Scaling Lean
- Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup
- An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore