Before 2012, the term “growth hacking” wasn’t a thing.
According to the mythology surrounding Facebook,[note]https://www.recode.net/2016/3/21/11587128/silicon-valleys-homogeneous-rich-douchebags-wont-win-forever-says[/note] Chamath Palihapitiya coined the idea of the first growth team during a meeting with Sheryl Sandberg.
Mr. Palihapitiya was struggling at the company. He was on the verge of being fired. Then he pitched the idea of leading a team in charge of product changes, SEO, SEM, and other optimizations.
Fine, Mrs. Sandberg said. What do you call doing all this stuff?
“Growth. You know, we’re going to try to grow. I’ll be the head of growing stuff.”
That meeting led to Facebook’s famous “7 friends in 10 days” Aha Metric, and put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users.[note]Chamath Palihapitiya – how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users – https://youtu.be/raIUQP71SBU[/note]
The Upside of Growth Hacking
In April 2012, Andrew Chen published the article, “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing”. Related, that’s when the term “growth hacking” exploded, per Google trends.[note]https://andrewchen.co/investor-metrics-deck/[/note]
Growth hacking was further popularized by articles from Sean Ellis, as well as a book by Ryan Holiday. Popular examples of tech founders using growth principles to quickly build incredible companies include:
- Building Paypal off the back of eBay
- Building Youtube off the back of Myspace
- Building Airbnb off of Craigslist
The Downside
The “growth hacking” trend led to a growth-above-all mentality, which has further transmuted itself into “grow fast or die.” Growth hacking and 4-Hour Work Week-ism mixed like jet fuel and napalm, and for nearly a decade we reaped the consequences: a mountain of clickbait articles and a deluge of content marketing promising to teach you How to Do X in 10 Days, where X = make more money, get abs, and have more sex.
Today it feels like (or perhaps that’s just Google’s algorithm doing its thing) “growth hacking” has reached its zenith, and is being replaced by its less provoking, more rigorous cousin, “growth.”
I hope we continue to see the cultural zeitgeist move in this direction as we realize that growth-above-all doesn’t create long-term value, and that achieving “hockey stick” growth is not the same as building a viable company. In doing so, perhaps we’ll get to the point where we remember that “slow” growth is just as sexy as growth hacking.
Slow is sexy
Painstakingly carving out your creation over a number of years — whether it’s your career, your business, or your body — in the early dawn hours or late at night, is sexy.
Sometimes that’s how long it takes to build something meaningful. There are many examples of this, but here are a few that have been top of mind as of recent:
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
I re-watched the 2008 film, Get Smart, on television recently. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a co-star, but I barely recognized him. It wasn’t just the hair on top of his head (though that threw me off too), but how small he looked. At 6’5″ and 215 pounds, he looked tiny.
I was used to seeing the new and improved Mr. Johnson. Post-Hercules Mr. Johnson. Hobbs from the Fast n’ Furious Mr. Johnson, who looks like he ate the old Dwayne Johnson as part of his 5,000 calorie, 7 meals a day, diet.[note]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rock-dwayne-johnson-diet/[/note]
It’s not just the transformation from huge to massive that’s sexy, but the fact Mr. Johnson recorded the work it’s taken him to achieve that growth on Instagram: the 4:30am workouts, the 10-pounds of food each day, and the jetsetting required to become a bonafide Hollywood star and transform his body over the past decade.
Conor McGregor
You can see the drastic transformation in “The Notorious’s” physique above, but it’s the upleveling of his skillset I want to focus on.
In February 2007, at 18 years old, Mr. McGregor debuted in his first amateur fight. He wins via TKO in the first round, but he’s all over the place. He swings wildly, his movement is fast but chaotic, and he refuses to engage with his opponent on the floor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnTgdNfdjrE
Fast forward almost 11 years. It’s November 2017, and Conor faces Eddie Alvarez for the UFC Lightweight Championship. Mr. McGregor doesn’t just win, he puts on a clinic. He stalks his opponent around the ring. His shots are crisp, fired with mechanical efficiency. He takes virtually no damage, manipulating distance with a marksman’s ability.
That’s an 11-year progression, a slow and sexy climb interspersed with explosions of violence. Mr. McGregor said that fighting was the only thing that held his attention for those 11 years. He didn’t care about anything else.
“There’s no talent here, this is hard work. This is an obsession.”
The Creative Artists Agency
On January 7, 1975, five agents at the largest talent agency in Hollywood committed career suicide: they plotted their departure from the William Morris Agency. The partners at WMA discovered the plot, fired the agents, and told them they’d never land another client in show business.
The agents rented dingy office space and filled it with card tables for desks. Their wives rotated shifts as the receptionist. Slowly, they built their book. They sold daytime television shows, like The Girl in My Life, which paid $1,000 a week. They sold game shows, like Rhyme and Reason. For years, they took no salary and made no profits.[note]Powerhouse: Untold Story of CAA by James Arthur Miller[/note]
That boutique agency was Creative Artists Agency, which grew to be one of the most powerful agencies in the business, rivaled only by William Morris Endeavor. One of its founders, the man who shaped CAA, Michael Ovitz, became known as the most powerful man in Hollywood. It took 20 years, but Mr. Ovitz created the playbook of the modern Hollywood agent.
“Michael changed the entire agency paradigm, those guys were only created because Michael created the playbook,” said Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of rival agency United Talent Agency.
“‘This is how we do this and this is how we walk and this is how we dress and this is how we talk and this is how we eat and this is what we do. This is how you threaten and this is how you woo.’ He did the whole thing. He was incredible.”
Mr. Ovitz left his company in 1995 to run Disney. He turned over the company to the “Young Turks,” the protégés of the company. Later, he’d open a rival company, Artists Management Group, and go to war with his former colleagues.
Today, Mr. Ovitz has no dealings with the company he founded. He pays no attention to its machinations. Yet it forges on, still larger than life, built on 20+ years of relentless work:
“To be a great agent in those days, you had to be a mini-expert on the beginnings of any subject. I had 250 magazine subscriptions. I was a strong believer in general knowledge.
Every time I went to an event, an opening, a dinner, or a meeting, I was given a short briefing card on one of our buck slips by one of my assistants, and it generally had everything I needed to know. I never thought anything I did was big enough.
During those years, I believed any idle moment was a waste of time. It was critical for me that in the course of a day, I got more done than anyone else.”
The Grow or Die Myth
This isn’t a knock on growth. Of course growth is crucial. For winner-take-all markets, the adage “grow or die” may very well be true.
The point is that it’s not true all the time, and that growth at all cost can be another way for people and businesses to meet their demise.
When we hold ourselves to the standard of growth-above-all, our souls become impoverished, and we suffer for it.
Growth may be sexy, but slow is too.
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Photo Credit: The Social Network
