Ward van Gasteren embraces the “growth hacker” term, despite the fact that some in the profession prefer the term “growth marketing” or simply “growth.” What’s the difference to him? The hacking part should be a distinct effort from ongoing marketing efforts, he says.
“Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work,” van Gasteren said. “Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant.”
“The choice between working with a growth hacker versus a digital marketer is not a one-or-the-other choice; the fields are very different in focus and actually complementary to each other.”
Based in The Netherlands, he has developed his own growth hacking courses, Grow With Ward, and worked with large companies like TikTok, Pepsi and Cisco, and startups like Cyclemasters, Somnox and Zigzag. In the conversation below, van Gasteren shares the importance of building internal processes around growth for the long term, the state of growth today and his own development.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re a certified growth hacker — how do you think this sets you apart from others? How has this certification changed the way you approach working with clients?
I was part of the first-ever class from Growth Tribe (when they still offered multimonth traineeships), which was an amazing experience. The difference that a certification shows is that you know that a certified growth hacker has knowledge of the beginning-to-end process of growth hacking, and that this person is supposed to look at more than just a single experiment to hack their growth.
There are a lot of cowboy growth hackers who simply repeat the same tactics, instead of trying to work from a repeatable process, where you identify problems through data, have a non-biased prioritization process for ideas and will focus on long-term learnings over direct impact. A proper certificate shows that you know what it takes.
When do you think clients should invest in the beginner growth hacking course you offer on your website rather than investing in working with you directly?
I created the course to make growth hacking available to a larger audience. I noticed that almost all other growth hacking courses fell into one of two buckets: (1) cheap (<$200), but focused on superficial growth tactics, or (2) good quality in-depth content, but very expensive ($1,500-$5,000). And I believe everybody should have access to that knowledge of how to build a systematic process to achieve long-term sustainable growth, so I created my own course, since I know that working one-on-one with me is also too expensive for most people.
Especially if you’d look at students or junior marketeers, for whom I created a proper beginner growth hacking course that will teach you 20% of the knowledge that is necessary to achieve the first 80% of the results.
Growth hacking does have some noticeable differences from marketing, as outlined on your website. How should clients make the decision between working with you, a growth hacker, instead of with a marketer?
The choice between working with a growth hacker versus a digital marketer is not a one-or-the-other choice; the fields are very different in focus and actually complementary to each other. Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work. Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant. You shouldn’t hire a growth hacker to maintain your marketing strategies; they’re excited to make new growth steps and would get bored when they can’t test new ideas.
Most of the time, I help a client get up to speed, show which opportunities are valuable and give them a strategy to execute. Then I hand it over to marketing for the long-term execution and coach them on the execution, and step back in when there’s a need for new growth input.
What are some common misconceptions about growth hacking?
A lot of growth hackers still present growth hacking as a perfect approach, where thanks to our data-driven way of working we can always make the right moves. But that’s not true: The hard data that you see in your analytics tools, can only tell you what is slowing down your growth, but not why your growth slows down there. While the “why” is what we build our experiments on top of … many growth hackers just fill that with their own assumptions to keep their speed, but that’s not sustainable long term.
Next to the hard data, you need soft data: the why. And that comes from talking with customers, running hypothesis-focused experiments (not result-focused) and maybe by looking at your feedback from customer support or surveys. Every time I implement a soft data feedback loop with my clients, I see that we increase our experiment effectiveness from 1 in 10 up to 1 in 3.
What trends are you seeing in the growth hacking world right now?
The growth industry is definitely maturing. Less hacks, more teams, more focus on velocity. Everybody within the field is getting to know the best practices very quickly and implementing them even quicker. So then what? We need more knowledge, more qualitative feedback and a more systematic approach to scale up our impact, to be able to rise above best practices and implement truly relevant and sophisticated tactics for our businesses. Since the field is maturing, you see people starting to get rid of the shoestring tools.
For this reason, I’m currently rolling out a growth management tool for growth teams, called Upgrow, where teams can more easily manage their experiment velocity, report to stakeholders with the click of a button and make sure that they systemize the knowledge retention from their articles to build companywide knowledge. And you see that mature growth teams need this kind of software to really level up and manage these trends that are putting stress on their process due to the growth of their company.
What do startups continue to get wrong?
Most startups just keep perfecting their product forever-and-ever: “Just this one extra feature and then we go live.” I can understand that, since north-star metrics, NPS scores and product-led growth are dominating the conversation around startup growth nowadays, but let me be real: You will never be fully done. There will always be a next feature. And you will only have a benefit if you grow alongside your customers. Put a “coming soon” on your website for the features that are in the making, and just start selling and scaling up your growth efforts: Different channels bring different kinds of users, who will have new demands, so you have to be adapting all the time. Not just now.