A Decade of Growth Hacking: Then vs. Now

An article we liked from Thought Leader Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz:

10 years after "Growth Hacking"

What's changed and what's new

More than a decade (!!) ago, I wrote Growth Hacker is the VP of Marketing predicting that traditional marketing teams were soon to be disrupted. In particular, I made several provocative points:

In the future, Marketing will require technical proficiency and less touchy feely skills

Tech products are ~trivial to build, and distribution will get harder than ever

New “superplatforms” are giving startups access to 100s of millions of users, raising the stakes for all

Hooking into APIs and integrating into new platforms are the domain of technical distribution-minded teams, not in the world of traditional marketing — which I defined as brand/comms/PR/etc

This was all published under a cheeky phrase that went right after the “VP Marketing” causing much chaos and FOMO that spread the post far and wide within the tech industry. (As designed 😜).

Soon after, the age of growth hacking emerged, with many changes happening in the industry. Many new job titles appeared — such as “Head of Growth” jobs, entire Growth teams forming within consumer + SaaS startups, and a blizzard of new terminology (NURR CURR RURR!? k-factor? D1/7/28!?), and much more.

Since then, 10 years have passed. How are we doing?

From abundance to scarcity

A decade ago, product growth was in a period of abundance. The iPhone launched, followed by the App Store, and people were excited about installing new apps. After all, you were competing against waiting in line and sitting quietly on the toilet. They’d actually check the App Store to see what had launched each day, and go look at the leaderboard — thus “trending” in the top apps was a big deal. They’d click on ads, curious about new experiences, and actually sign up and convert. In parallel, a decade ago Web 2.0 was in full swing. New social apps often got people to invite their friends. A developer could use email contact scrapers to juice the invites, deliverability was high, as were acceptance rates. New products were launched at major conferences like SXSW or on media publications like Techcrunch (before both rode into the sunset, from a relevance perspective). Channels that had been around for ages, like SEO, SEM, and email, were still relevant. Abundance.

Then the music stopped.

In 2024, things narrowed quite a bit. Scarcity has replaced abundance, as we are on the closing years of the mobile S-curve. The novelty drive has decayed, and it’s now very low on mobile — people aren’t interested to try new apps, as their homescreens (and brains) are full of apps developed over the past decade. Instead of competing with waiting in line, developers now compete with...