It's possible this sentence hinges on "hacks" vs "hacking". I'd be surprised if PG had a problem with hacking for growth. In fact I think he would embrace such a thing mightily.
It's not really "hacking" - it's just marketing. Occasionally you may beat use a trick to beat a system, but mostly it's a bullshit buzzword that marketers came up with.
Unfortunately, it works really, really well.
I wrote a (free) book[1] on user acquisition, following the pattern of a lot of the programming tutorials that helped me learn to program. I originally called it "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition." The title got tons of traffic and interest - up to 100 tweets a day, many from people I'm convinced never read it. When I changed it to "User Acquisition for Developers," the traffic dropped significantly, so I changed it back. But I don't think I can live with myself, so when I have time I'm going to take the word "hack" back out of it.
Bullshit buzzwords sell. And for every critic in the comments section, this post has a bunch of upvotes. That's almost a marketing truism - a few people will be annoyed, but it's really easy to drive the masses.
I've been resisting the urge to use "growth hacker" as a title, so I still go by "user acquisition consultant." Every now and then I get asked if I can help a company with "growth hacking," and more often than not it's an early warning signal that the company thinks they can sneak their way to success without putting in real work.
