Why developers should learn how to sell
by adam on June 12, 2012
Much has been written about Why marketing and bd professionals should learn to code. As everyone knows by now, Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. If you aren’t learning to code, you are going to get left behind.
Not so fast.
On the other side of the argument there are those imploring you to “Please don’t learn to code”.
While the debate rages on without an end in sight, there is a much subtler point that is being overlooked in all of this.
Cue dramatic pause for effect.
Once basic coding skills become common place amongst traditionally non-technical disciplines, what are people who’s primary role is coding going to do?
Of course, there will always be a need for talented programmers, but those who got by on simply being a ‘coder’ and not having any other talent or skill are going to be left in the dust.
In fact, all hope is not lost for these coders. Look at the list of founder’s of large internet companies who like Instagrams CEO, who had no formal programming training, and the list is fairly short.
Contrast this with the ever-expanding list of coding luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin & Larry Page and Bill Gates, just to name a few. All of these formally trained engineers were forced to learn the nuances of product, sales, business development and marketing out of necessity and ended up being good enough at each of them.
So the next time that one of your non-coding friends in sales asks you wether or not they should learn to code, instead of encouraging them one way or the other, simply give tell them that you will help them learn to code, as long as they help you learn to sell.
Want start learning how to market?
Pinterest Growth Hacks: How did it grow so fast?
by adam on June 2, 2012
Growth Hack #1: Insta-follow
Upon signing up for Pinterest you are automatically following a select group of high quality users. This in turn helps alleviate the cold-start problem, where I have to go looking around the site to find boards and people to follow. Instead I get a sampling of high quality content immediately filling my feed.
Growth Hack #2: Facebook Friend Follow
When you sign up for Pinterest with Facebook, your friends who are already using Pinterest auto-follow you and you follow them back. But all this auto following doesn’t seem to happen all at once but is staggered over time so that you get periodic notifications that someone has just started following you on PInterest. This brings you back to the app again and again. This also helps alleviate the cold-start problem and gives me a social incentive to maintain my presence on the site, lest I look boring in front of my friends.
Growth Hack #3: Always Available UI
The user interface of Pinterest, while seemingly uncluttered, hides a tremendous amount of features and functionality within immediate reach. For example, I can perform almost every action that I would take anywhere on the site all from within my feed, including: commenting, liking, re-pinning a post, following a friend. With one more click to view a pin I can then follow the author of that pin, like/tweet/embed/email the pin, follow the board the pin is from, follow the website source of the pin.
Having all of these possible actions omni-present streamlines the amount pages that I need to navigate to and from to perform any desired actions and has the effect of increasing the overall amount of interactions and actions that I perform with the users of the site and the content being posted and in turn increases the overall flow of new visitors and traffic.
Growth Hack #4: Infinite Scroll
Try and scroll down your pinterest feed and you will never reach the bottom. The auto-scrolling technique that pinterest employs when you scroll down the page produces a state of ‘flow’ that is very easy to get lost in, spending minutes or even hours scrolling through pins without being mindful of the clock.
Growth Hack #5: Social Bookmarklet
The “Pin” bookmarklet is a low friction tool that does not require immediate action, but if you want to complete the Pin from the stash area its straight forward to do so. Visual browse requires scanning or skimming images rather than reading through laborious text, which is also a lower friction search experience.
Like what you read?
Want more Growth Hacks?
Learning from Success vs Failure
by adam on April 29, 2012
Learning from Failure
Learning from failure can be summarized as learning ‘what doesn’t work’.
Out of an arbitrarily large universe of possible things you could be trying (say 18,for the sake of this example), you have successfully accomplished narrowing down the scope of your next trial.
In practice, this can become problematic, because if you are looking to make an informed decision on what to try next, having only crossed one approach off your list (of the hundreds or many thousands of possible approaches to solving a problem), you are left only slightly more informed than where you started.
Learning from Success
Contrast this approach with a model of learning from success, where you have through a series of failed attempts hit upon something that is working and considered to be successful.
In this case, you well served to learn from this success and try to repeat it as much as possible, since success’s are fewer and far between.
Of course, most success come after a long string of successive failures, but in each failure there is some element of success (what actually worked) which can be far more informational than what didn’t work in terms of guiding your decision in what to try next.
Further reading:
Rewards vs Punishments by Jason Hreha of Dopamine.
Software Estimations
by adam on January 31, 2012
Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?Edit
Visually
Instagram
Quora