Breaking into Growth Hacking

First, Why It’s Hard

Many web career paths involve starting as an amateur and growing into a professional: the bar to becoming a Developer can be as low as reading a tutorial and writing your first “hello world” script, and the bar to becoming a Designer can be as low as viewing an inspiration gallery and posting your first illustration on Dribbble.

Both will probably result in terrible, painfully amateurish output, but it will be a start – a start that a Designer or Developer can build on and, if they get good enough, eventually charge for.

Not so much for Growth Hackers.

While it takes very little to learn growth hacker tactics and methodologies on your own, trying to actually put them into practice on your own can pose significant challenges. The heart of growth hacking involves conducting experiments & measuring results, and you simply can’t do that from scratch in your spare time, like a designer sketching in a notebook or a developer forking a git repo.

Your Canvas Is Traffic, and Traffic Ain’t Cheap

While the tools of the trade for designers and developers are usually either inexpensive or completely free, you can’t conduct experiments without something very expensive: website traffic. In order to achieve statistical significance in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe, you need a minimum level of monthly visitors to work with (running 3-month-long A/B tests isn’t a sustainable career development strategy).

A high-traffic site isn’t something that can be created out of thin air, and it raises the barrier to entry far beyond weekend side-projects. It even excludes the “mom & pop” type sites that constitute a lot of the first paying gigs for designers & developers who are just starting to cut their teeth. Photoshop and a customer with a $1000 budget might get you your first job as a web designer, but the stakes for growth hacking are much, much higher.

Mo’ Traffic, Mo’ Problems

Of course, the sites that do have enough traffic are usually, by their very nature, well-established. This often also means that they have entrenched internal stakeholders with a nontrivial amount of influence (they’re who got their site to where it is, after all). If those incumbents don’t already have a growth hacker mindset, it can be very, very difficult for an outsider to inspire such a culture change.

It also greatly raises the risks for both parties – the aforementioned designer and their client can probably afford some rookie mistakes on that $1000 website, but an up-and-coming growth hacker cannot afford to make nearly as many when a six-digit ROI is on the line. This is a very difficult profession to learn on the fly without the safety net of a forgiving team behind you, which is unlikely to happen if you’re an outside contractor. Speaking of which…

Outsourcing Hands vs. Heads

Many designers and developers get their start with one-off paid gigs, with lots of companies happy to farm out production work like comps for a redesign or to bring in another pair of hands for an engineering effort. It is much less common, however, for a company to contract out business results (a growth hacker’s stock in trade).

How many companies would sooner delegate the design of their entire brand identity or offshore the development of their entire web app before they’d allow an outsider to even look at their sales funnel conversion rates?

Outside of perhaps the SEO world, I don’t know of many entry-level web gigs based around performance instead of production. There is simply not much of a precedent of companies bringing in an individual, opening up their kimono regarding their most sensitive business & customer data, and allowing said person to conduct an experiment that requires cross-departmental effort to pull off. (Individuals like Lincoln Murphy and agencies like Conversion Rate Experts are the exceptions here, afaik)

So what can you do to get started? I see three main tracks:

3 Tracks for Breaking into Growth Hacking

In-House

Become an established player at a company that has enough traffic to hack on. Gain experience on their dime.

Pros:

If employer & employee see eye-to-eye, this is by far the most straightforward track.
If you don’t have a growth hacker background, you can aim to be hired as something close (a Product or Marketing role) and consistently stump for adopting GH practices.
I also see a lot of companies hiring people on their potential to be a growth hacker, which can be a great approach for both parties.

Cons:

If you’re hired on for something non-growth-hacky, don’t underestimate the time involved in doing your “real” job – this approach may wind up being a “long play” in gaining GH-specific experience.
If your ultimate motive is to gain transferrable experience, watch out for NDAs – you may wind up with three years of awesome GH experience that you can only discuss in the broadest of terms.
Of course, if the company doesn’t already have a growth hacking mindset, you’re rolling the dice that you can win them over.

Money Risk: Extremely low – you’re on a (presumably) competitive salary

Speed to experience: Very low in the right environment, surprisingly high in the wrong one

Bootstrapped

Screw working on someone else’s high-traffic site, just build one for yourself! Generating your own site with five-digit-plus uniques a month is certainly not easy, but once you’re there…

Pros:

You can experiment to your heart’s content, with no politicking necessary.
If your website is related to growth hacking, it’s a double-win (Bronson Taylor seems to have done this very effectively with GrowthHacker.tv).
You now also own a valuable web property!

Cons:

See above – “Generating your own site with five-digit-plus uniques a month is certainly not easy.”
If you screw up, it’s your wallet that takes the hit.
You may find yourself too busy maintaining the success you’ve created to get the growth hacking experience you originally set out for.
Getting a taste of independent success may take you off the “growth hacker” track and put you on the “entrepreneur” one.

Money Risk: Very high. This is all your own elbow grease.

Time Risk: High until you can get it off the ground, then very low after.

Contractor-with-Benefits

Get paid for gigs in whatever you’re already good at, but only take on ones that give you growth hacking experience on top. For example, if you can close deals as a UX designer providing wireframes, you can do so only under the condition that the final product is rolled out as a split test and the results are reported back to you.

Pros:

You can chart your own destiny without risking significant time or money.
You can work with a variety of companies, on your terms of future disclosure.
It may be easier to land future contracting gigs when you’ve already established yourself as a successful consultant, rather than a successful part of an in-house team.

Cons: