When one thinks about a hacker, a couple of things probably come to mind: the classic movie starring Angelina Jolie or a computer specialist eager to either innovate or destroy something. Lately, a new use of the word “hacker” emerged. Called the “growth hacker“, this is someone who someone, typically a marketer, who is passionate in growing their business through “empirical and scalable methodolgy”.
It’s important to note that a growth hacker isn’t a programmer. It’s a way to describe business people and marketers on how to really scale their business and separate their company from its competitors and succeed. Next week, the Growth Hacker conference is going to be the place for marketers to assemble in order to learn from some of the leading companies in the marketplace today on how they “hacked the system” to be a success.
Aaron Ginn, one of the organizers of the conference, says that growth hacking, while new to Silicon Valley, is important for businesses. He says that people are suffering from too much data and marketing and there needs to be another way for people to improve their reach and distribution system. Basically, this hacker will “leverage across disciplines, pulling in insights from behavioral economics and gamification” in order to frame the right message for users.
On October 26, thought-leaders from across Silicon Valley will gather at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park to join the discussion on using data to drive their business. Representatives from investors, startups, and public companies will be there, including from LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, and Twitter.
Attendees will gleam insights from regarded experts like Greylock Partners’ Josh Elman, Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt, Refer.ly’s Danielle Morrill, Twitter’s Eric Florenzano, KISSMetrics’ Hiten Shah, Bump CEO and co-founder, David Lieb, Tapjoy’s Linda Tong, entrepreneur/blogger Andrew Chen, and many others.
The conference quickly sold out within two weeks with over 250 attendees scheduled to participate.
Ginn believes that “The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions; however, growth hacking is a process. It is never instantaneous. It is never overnight.” He’s right, nothing is easily done overnight, but with this conference, hundreds of new ideas will spring up and may help to speed this new age of hacking along.
Image credit: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images
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