People who were at best average chess players with weaker computers savaged the Grand Masters. All that was missing was for the winners to scream “THIS .. IS .. SPARTA!” and kick over their geriatric opponents.
A process is just a sequence of steps that allow you to get something done. You can call it a fancy word like “algorithm” or something mundane like “recipe”. Growth hacking is figuring out these bastardized formulas which are the building blocks behind the decisions we make. “Over the last few decades biologists have reached the firm conclusion that the man pressing the buttons and drinking the tea is also an algorithm.”(Source Homo Deus by Dr. Harari Pg 84)
When you look up at the sky and the clouds look like faces or cute kitty cats, do they really? No, nothing is really sculpted there. It is your evolutionarily honed instinct to seek out faces that are forming your subjective experience. Magic creates the illusion of a false reality. Congratulations, you are a magical creature!
Growth hacking is cracking the code of the subjective, primeval processes that form who we are. Through trial and error, they are learning how to influence the more malleable part of our subjective realities. Tell 151 people to stare at a rock until it actually becomes a human face! Probably not going to happen, but tell them to see a human face on the rock, far easier. Now replace the word “rock” with “computer screen” and “151” with “billions”.
Marrying the tangible and intangible, the objective and subjective is the whole point of the social network that we call the internet. We’ve gone in a scant few decades from Don Draper’s
“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” (source Madmen The Summer Man episode) to:
(source North Star Metric SQL NSM Code_edited.jpg)
When Lothar Meggendorfer invented children’s pop-up books in the 1800’s, he had no idea what internet pornography would do with it today. Pop-up’s sudden movement triggers the same rods in your eyeball that warned our ancestors of predators. In copying biological systems to manipulate human behavior, there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” algorithm. Christian conservatives and BDSM website both have pop up ads because they work. There is no inherent moral component to recipes that have been refined for millions of years. Whether you are the bouche or the amuse bouche is irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, the weight of evolutionary history aside, Growth Hacking is still in the “stick a pin in his brain and see what happens” phase. Marrying the objective and subjective sounds great on paper. And in their new book Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown give an example of a grocery chain’s online business.