Growth Hacking Can Do More Harm Than Good To Your Startup

Growth hacking doesn't turn a bad product into a unicorn. Neither does it helps get to product/market fit. Your early stage startup should stay far, far away from growth hacking until the point when you're drawing in steady number of users.

Growth hacking doesn't replace all the hard work one has to put in the customer development lifecycle-build something, test the market with the product, talk to your customers, get feedback, rebuild. It doesn't replace good old marketing either.

Let's first understand what it is all about without necessarily getting into the definition. Growth hacking is about making small, tested changes to the product, it's presentation, a communication message or marketing tactics. These seemingly small changes create growth spurts in traffic, conversions, engagement and retention.

If you were the founder of an early stage startup, growth hacking just wouldn't work for you. And here are the reasons why.

1. Growth hacking works when you have product/market fit

Products need to get to a point when they have acceptance from the customers. In the early stages, the focus is more on understanding where and how the product must evolve to meet customer needs by talking to the initial or early adopters.

If the product doesn't have adoption in terms of engagement and retention of about 40% (as is widely spoken about), then the product needs to evolve or make amends to fix that problem of usage.

Morgan Brown, co-author of Startup Growth Engines says in this video, "the first step before you think about creating large scalable growth is to make sure that you've validated that people love your product. And the way you do that is you get just enough traffic, just enough growth going to see how real people respond to your product and whether they consider the product that you have something that they have to have, that they love."

The early stages should be focused not on getting to a 1,000 or a 100,000 customers, rather getting at least 40 of the first 100 customers to use it consistently. With validation, you can then focus on growing your customer acquisition and traffic building activities, leading to the second point.

2. Growth hacking works when growth channels are identified

In the early stage of the product development lifecycle, you're also discovering your marketing strategy and the growth channel-one that produces the maximum results and conversions with the best possible quality of relevant audience.

You'd typically have to experiment with a number of them such as content marketing, PR, social media, paid marketing, etc or a combination of these. At the discovery phase, you're testing out your marketing strategy and the effectiveness of various marketing channels. Growth hacking can help bring additional spurts to an existing effective channel, but it cannot activate a new or an ineffective channel if that's not where your audience can be found.

"There's only really five channels that are super scalable-sales, paid acquisition, virality or word of mouth, search such as large scale SEO and content marketing. And if you look at most $100 million companies, they have scaled off of one of those five channels," says Brian Balfour of Coelevate.

3. Growth hacking works when you have traction

As discussed above, once you have your growth/marketing channel identified, at that stage you're already pulling in traffic and conversions from that specific channel(s). Getting consistent results lays a foundation for future growth hacking.

You now have room to play with tweaks in strategy and tactics for those specific channels that work for your product as you've established the fact that your target audience can be found at these places. These tweaks or small changes are referred to as growth hacking.

Growth hacking isn't something you'd borrow from another product's experience such as changing the color of a button, etc. What's worked for one may not work in your case given that your audience may be completely different from that of the ones you're taking inspiration from. Also, your product serves a different purpose and therefore, growth hacking has to be an investment you make in the long term to continuously implement, test, evaluate results and rework.

4. Growth hacking is a solution to a problem

When you've achieved all of the above-product/market fit, traction, identified a growth channel, you start with a problem you want to solve when it comes to growth.

Growth challenges or objectives can be from many different areas of product marketing. You may want to grow the traffic to your website or your app, or with a decent enough traffic flow, you may want to increase conversions. You may be getting good traffic and conversions, but would like to focus more on engagement, retention and increase virality of the product.

Based on the current state of your product's growth trajectory and its current challenges, your focus needs to be to solve that specific problem. Growth hacking isn't only about increasing traffic or conversions.

Looking for a detailed plan to launch your idea into a successful app business? 

My eBook will give you step by step and actionable tactics and strategies to build a successful mobile app business. Download here.

This article originally appeared in Inc. Magazine, where I contribute as a columnist. I'm the co-founder of Arkenea, a mobile app development consultancy.