Why am I Here Anyway?
I came here to learn what’s happening in more advanced industries. My goal was to poach and apply these future practices in the antiquated industry of food. And I now realize how non-existent our company’s internet presence is. But it just seems like I’m at a fancy engineering conference. I don’t see how Growth Hacking is any different than simply spending more money on testing. Our company already does this with product design, though not to this level of scientific scrutiny. Sure, cool terms like “onboarding” are mentioned, but don’t involve water torture. The word “churn” has nothing to do with the movie Jaws. That was chum and the screaming of your customers as they die is completely silent in this industry. Instead a number on your screen next to “D.A.U.” (Daily Active Users) drops by one. You don’t see the blood until you start firing people.
The talk continues with Thibault Imbert from Adobe. He gives one of the more helpful lectures for wanna-be hackers. Thibault explains how to implement change in big companies. I’m struck by how amazing his English is (and a bit jealous with my Barney Rubble French). His theme of growth in unexpected places at Adobe is practical and realistic. Ironically it isn’t until the presentations get technical that I start to see where all of this is going.
Chris More from Mozilla is next up, wearing a blazer and Firefox t-shirt. When I saw him in line I thought this was just a L.A. style thing. Nope, he’s literally wearing a corporate badge. His topic is how to build predictive growth models. He breaks things down into a straightforward X-Y axis, inputs vs. outputs approach. Maybe it just took some time to get it through my thick skull. But as Mr. More mathematically shows the huge impact of compound interest, I think about the ramifications of Growth Hacking. My face becomes a billboard for what my brain is thinking. I am currently advertising the Turkish word for “Stop”.
Growth Hacking uses constant experimentation to change the D.N.A. of a website. It’s artificially imposing evolutionary pressure in an accelerated environment. But let’s be clear, the “environment” being tested is not the website. It is the pitch-black vault of wet bone between your ears. Your brain is a technological P.O.W. Floating in darkness, it hacks Morse code rhythms of data into meaningful sights or sounds. We are always one step removed from our physical reality. Patterns are its’ ambassadors, and our brain is the ultimate Turing Test.
And Growth Hacking is reverse engineering a relatively new part of that organ. “..the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision.” (Source Scientific American 4/11/13 The Reading Brain in the Digital Age). The approach might be reminiscent of 19thcentury brain surgery (poke around and see what happens). But they are deconstructing how a very primal force of human behavior works.
You might think I’m exaggerating. Moving the “Click Here to Sign Up” button from the top to the bottom of the page, so what right? Dr. Yuval Harari wrote about how odd it is that only recently humans have become a literal force of nature. “Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago. But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other