Marketing is dead. Advertising is deader. Long live growth hacking? Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com

Part 1 of this article published on HIipanicAd,CLICK HERE

• As we discussed last week, many growth hacking schemes are based on some sort of referral incentive: reward existing users for reeling in friends and family.
• In other words: allocating a company’s marketing budget to ¿bribe? acquisition through commission-based efforts.
• Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, Groupon, Acorns resorted to these methods in their early days.
• Still do.
• Techies call it “gamification”, “network effect”.
• I call it Ponzification.
• Multilevel marketing.
• BTW, have you been to an Ozemparty lately?
• It’s like a Botox Party, only attendees inject one another with Ozempic instead of Botox.
• Just made that up.
• FOMO is possibly the strongest underlying human emotion fueling growth hacks.
• Bernie Madoff’s tactic to attract investors was to give them the cold shoulder.
• People used to chase him around Palm Beach imploring him to accept their money, which he would reject once and again.
• He knew from experience that they would keep coming back willing to sink ever larger and larger sums into his investment fund.
• Poor souls.
• Speaking of which, most tech startups lose money for long period of times.
• The “fake it till you make it” ethos is so widespread in Silicon Valley that they even came up with a sanitized euphemism to measure it: “burn rate”.
• Also known as the amount of investor money a startup incinerates per month attempting growth at all cost.
• Amazon, Uber, Facebook were in the red for many a fiscal year until they turned a profit.
• They just subsidized growth with successive rounds of funding.
• The logic being that eventually they would obtain a dominant market share conducive to hyper profitability.
• In Silicon Valley parlance this is called “runway”: the time & money that will be dilapidated until takeoff.
• How long a runway does a so-called startup need to stop being one?
• One, two, five, ten years?
• You gotta know when to hold ’em
• Know when to fold ’em
• Know when to walk away
• And know when to run.