Growth Hacker

Oh My Job is a web series that helps you learn about specific roles from the people who carry them out every day. In this episode, a growth hacker named Alexandre shares his professional insights and daily working life at technology-consultancy company Nimley.. The role of a growth hacker is to boost the company’s expansion in a way that’s fast and cost-effective.

Responsibilities

A growth hacker’s main responsibility is to expand the development of a business intelligently and quickly. Popular in start-ups, growth hackers aim to enable a company to gain the greatest number of users possible, whether for a service or product. This means doing whatever it takes—implementing marketing strategies such as advertising campaigns, SEO or emailing, data and traffic analysis, and product design such as adding a feature or improving customer experience. A growth hacker brings a critical and external perspective to the problems of a company and also attempts to identify and eliminate possible disruptive elements in the processes to optimize the actions of the teams.

“It’s my job to identify factors that might be game changers and find a solution that can be implemented company-wide in a sustainable way,” explains Alexandre.

Career path

Just because the job title uses the word “hacker,” this profession is not reserved for computer engineers. More than anything, growth hackers are self-taught web enthusiasts. While it’s great to have a master’s degree, the most-valued qualities are the right mindset and variety of skills.

Skills

Because of their backgrounds, growth hackers are versatile and creative, and possess excellent analytical and critical-thinking skills. More specifically, their technical skills in web development mean they can work independently, thereby reducing the cost of certain hacks by doing their own coding. Finally, knowledge of marketing, SEO, content/community management, or project management are just a few of the tricks they have up their sleeves to rapidly increase the growth of a company.

“An example of a famous hack? Dropbox set up a referral program where each time someone recommended it to a friend, they were given free storage space on their cloud. Through word of mouth, people signed up and the user community grew exponentially,” says Alexandre.

Collaborative relationships

Whether alone or within a team, a growth hacker works on projects quickly, sometimes with just a week’s turnaround. Depending on the potential growth levers they’re analyzing, they are just as likely to work with the teams in charge of content for social networks as with development or sales teams.

“When people come up to you and say, ‘What you did is amazing, that saved us X amount of time in the day,’ it’s a sort of recognition,” says Alexandre.

Salary

In the United States, the average monthly salary for a growth hacker is $6,600 before tax.

In France, for a junior position, it’s about €3,000 before tax, while for a senior role, it can range from €5,000 to €6,000, depending on the industry and company.

“I think the highest salary I’ve ever been offered was €80,000 per year,” says Alexandre.

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