I can’t think of a buzzier phrase in the tech industry these days than “growth hacking,” and in some ways I also can’t think of a more dangerous trend to glom onto. Sure, growth is good. But only if it’s real growth.
If it’s a marketing campaign that goes viral and wins you a bunch of one-time “users,” it can actually do more harm than good. If it’s a product that is growing through spammy unsolicited social “sharing,” the growth numbers will massively misrepresent the health of the business. The really great growth hackers out there — people like Andy Johns, who helped Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora all reach record user numbers — understand that it’s not just about getting as many users as possible, but about helping to get the product experience right and ultimately amassing as large a user base as possible. Those are two very different things.
Take what happened with Formspring as an example. In 2010, the Q&A site experienced the fastest growth of any site ever (as its top brass were quick to point out on Twitter when TechCrunch awarded that honor to Pinterest last year). But within a year that growth had trailed off and eventually the site traffic/usage began to decline. Why? Because of its integration with social media sites, Formspring was able to generate rapid growth, but once visitors had taken a look at the site once or twice, they realized that there was very little value in the underlying product and, as a result, the vast majority of “users” that touched the site didn’t ever come back or engage in a meaningful way.
I am starting to fear that Zynga is destined to be another such example: They did well early on by leveraging very aggressive viral marketing techniques and combining them with what was, at the time, cutting edge in-game monetization. However, it appears to me that the company has lacked something that I always look for as an investor: Product Soul. By that I mean a founder’s vision for the products he or she wants the company to create, a strong belief in the product’s ability to change the lives of its users for the better, and an unrelenting focus on making those products great and easy to use.
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