The Myth of Instant Wins: Real Impact from Growth Hacking

Work, family, cooking meals, walking the dogs, after school activities, exercise…the list of things that take up our time goes on and on. We’re all busy, so being more efficient is very appealing. It’s so appealing that we’ve grown obsessed with finding shortcuts, turning the phrase growth hacking into a mainstream buzzword for instant success. The original idea behind growth hacking is solid, but I use it with a fair bit of caution and here’s why.?

• The word hacking raises a few eyebrows. It brings to mind shadowy figures typing away in dark rooms, bending and breaking the rules to get what they want. The term growth hack isn’t about bending or breaking rules but approaching challenges from a new angle.
• Growth hacking is not a fast track to success. Unfortunately, many are made to believe they are the secret sauce for overnight success, leading them down a path reliant on hacking their way to success. Growth hacks can be valuable and help you get past challenges, but they’re not magic.?

What Growth Hacking Really Means

At its core, growth hacking is about looking at your business challenges through a new lens and using innovative problem solving to find creative, sometimes unconventional, strategies to overcome them. They can inspire you to think about problems differently than you have in the past or implement new processes to make specific tasks or steps more seamless and efficient. Sometimes they’re unique to a niche, other times they’re more universally relevant.

Let’s use social media as an example. Everyone knows that social media is important, but few have access to strategy knowledge on a daily basis. A useful growth hack would be to look at the social media trends that are current on the platform(s) they want to use. Then when they spend their (limited) time creating content, they'll have something that is more engaging and shareable simply because they paid attention to trends. It’s a small change in one step of the approach that can have a positive impact on the output. This is unlikely to change everything on its own, but if executed consistently beside other strategies, it could be part of the reason for success.

So yes, growth hacks can save you time, streamline processes and make success feel a bit more within reach, but it’s not effortless or an instant win. They’re great tools that can support your journey but like most tools, they still require effort and skill to succeed. I think we can all agree that any help is useful, so stay open to learning new things that could help you out.

The Real Foundations of Success

It’s important to know that growth hacks are strategic enhancements, not shortcuts, and require a foundation to be effective. You need hard work, a good product or service, understanding of how to run your business, and knowledge of your market and customers. Success depends on a complex mix of knowledge, skills, and solid plans. Anything that has been shown to simplify elements of that process is worth considering, but not at the expense of the fundamentals.

If you’re early in the process and you feel like your foundations are less than solid, spend the time to get those sorted out first. There’s no growth hack that can make up for the lack of a proper foundation, but there’s plenty of people out there selling a growth hack that guarantees success. They’re lying.

Get your foundation in order, layer on growth hacks as tools, and stay focused on the long game.?

So, Where Does That Leave Us?

Growth hacking is fun to say and exciting to think about. After all, who doesn’t like imagining their business exploding in growth with breakthrough success after breakthrough success. Back here in reality, growth hacks can be useful tools that support a smart approach to solving challenges.?

The hard truth is that success takes longer than we all want and only comes after you’ve built momentum. Momentum takes a lot of effort to get started but far less effort to derail. Use smart growth hacks as tools to build momentum, but be careful of those promising the world otherwise you might stall. And remember, the real magic happens when innovation, hard work, and solid fundamentals intersect.

So, let’s embrace growth hacking for what it is: a tool in our business toolkit, not the entire toolbox.

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