Interestingly article, but it says more about how to be a Growth Hacker Advisor than how to be a Growth Hacker. Of course, that is likely what he learned since he presumbaly already knew how to be a Growth Hacker when he took the job.
Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things:
1. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references.
2. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.
The scary thing is I can't decide if this is more of a critique of people who hire programmers or of the different tools (e.g. woods and hammers) that programmers use.
A lot of the foundation of Agile is improving communication. Communication works better face to face. Whether there are mitigating factors such as not being able to get really awesome people to participate is another question, but I've no doubt that my #1 problem with developers is how to facilitate their communication.
You can only get so many people to communicate well on a team anyway. 10 at most and you're into the Mythical Man Month. That being the case, you find the 10 best people who have good chemistry together, that's job #1. Job #2 is to colocate them if you can, but let's say it is a less significant digit than Job #1.
BTW, developers also need to be able to concentrate. That's another thing that fights with the communication imperative. I'm all in favor of at least 2 of the 5 week days being work at home days.
Wouldn't it be nice if defending against frivolous patents didn't cost $1.5M. Unfortunately, it does cost that much.
There are 3 problems that make this so:
1. The courts are unpredictable. You can be right and still lose. The cost of losing is typically huge, else the trolls wouldn't have bothered you. So you have to prepare with quality counsel and pay them to do it right.
2. Settlements are entirely predictable.
3. Based on what #1 costs and #2, the troll simply negotiates to settle for less than just appearing in court for #1.
Last time I was at a company that was sued by a troll, counsel said it would cost us $1M to prepare for the first day in court. The troll had a bogus patent that basically said any application that applies business rules to a database infringed--I kid you not. I think we settled for circa $600K.
It sucked and wasted everyone's time like crazy, not to mention the wasted $600K.
Something needs to be done to either eliminate software patents or get rid of this ridiculous asymmetry of costs where trolls are rewarded for playing as many cheap lottery tickets as they can.
Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.
CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.
And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.
Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.
What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?
Those are among the key initial questions to answer.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it's too early to chalk up wisdom learned -- but the main point of writing this was to get a discussion started and see what feedback people had. In my experience, blog posts do better if you offer something in them. In this case, I was sharing what the first two weeks of launching a site and trying to get traffic were like, for all the readers who haven't done it yet but want to do it some day.
Smart people are assholes, it goes with the territory. Not all, but many are. It's insecurity coupled with the incredible pain that comes when other smart people catch you being wrong.
It seems like sliders are there for gratuitous sex and violence (to paraphrase a line from Never Say Never). In other words, on commercial sites that don't have much to say, but they just want something even remotely flashy, they go with a slider.
Seems like if you're really into content marketing, you've got something to say, and a slider wastes way too much space versus say something more like the home page of a blog (albeit often laid out in multiple columns).
If you don't have much to say, I'd do something more along the lines of 37Signals and just pitch your products and vector them off to the appropriate one.
By comparison, sliders seem to be wasting the viewers time. FWIW, both of the two I looked at from links here, mobelux and infomedia were awesomely slow to load the pages too.
What a pity the lawyers have misinterpreted the patent to mean that the application's language itself should be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
Interestingly article, but it says more about how to be a Growth Hacker Advisor than how to be a Growth Hacker. Of course, that is likely what he learned since he presumbaly already knew how to be a Growth Hacker when he took the job.