Why We Don't Have a Growth Hacking Team (And Why That's the Point)

There's a playbook that most tech companies follow.

Raise money. Hire a growth team. A/B test every button color. Optimize the funnel. Run retargeting ads. Build a drip sequence. Track activation rates. Reduce churn. Expand MRR.

It's not a bad playbook. For some companies, it works beautifully.

It's just not ours.

What is growth hacking and why don't you use it?

Growth hacking is the practice of using rapid experimentation across marketing, product, and distribution to find the fastest, most scalable path to user acquisition.

It's a legitimate discipline. Some of the techniques it produced — referral loops, viral onboarding, product-led growth — are genuinely useful.

The problem isn't the techniques. The problem is the underlying assumption: that users are variables to be optimized, not people to be served.

When your primary question is "how do we acquire more users faster," you eventually stop asking "are we actually helping the ones we have?" Those two questions don't always conflict. But in our experience, the moment a company gets serious about the first one, the second one quietly leaves the room.

What do you do instead of growth hacking?

We focus on the thing growth hacking is trying to shortcut: genuine usefulness.

If a small business owner sets up their referral program on It's Buzzing and it generates real results, they tell someone. Not because we built a referral loop into the onboarding flow — but because they're genuinely excited and they want the same thing for the people they know.

That's not a hack. That's how word-of-mouth has always worked. We just built infrastructure around it.

Our version of "growth" is making the product work so well that the user becomes the distribution. That takes longer than a paid acquisition campaign. It also lasts longer, costs less, and produces customers who actually stick around.

Isn't that just product-led growth with a different name?

Partly. Product-led growth is real and it's a smart approach for the right kind of product. But even PLG, in most implementations, is still optimizing for a funnel. There's still a growth team. There are still activation metrics and conversion benchmarks.

What's different about our approach is the orientation. We're not optimizing a funnel. We're building a community. And those require fundamentally different decisions.

A funnel asks: how do we move more people through this faster?

A community asks: how do we make this worth showing up to?

The first question produces dashboards. The second one produces advocates.

Doesn't that make It's Buzzing harder to scale?

It makes it harder to scale quickly. It makes it easier to scale sustainably.

Every growth-hacked company eventually hits the same wall: the tactics stop working. The ads get more expensive. The organic reach dries up. The referral loop loses novelty. And at that point, if you haven't built genuine loyalty, you have nothing to fall back on.

We're building the fallback first. A community of small business owners, ambassadors, church leaders, and creators who believe in what we're doing — not because a retargeting ad followed them around for two weeks, but because someone they trust said this is worth it.

That kind of growth is slower at the start. It's also the only kind that compounds.

What does that mean for someone considering It's Buzzing?

It means we're not going to make you a promise we can't keep to get you in the door.

We're not going to offer a free trial that turns into a confusing cancellation process. We're not going to lock your data behind an export fee. We're not going to change our pricing the moment we hit a user milestone.

We're building something we want to still be running in ten years. That means treating every person who signs up like they matter to the long game — because they do.

How does this philosophy show up in the actual product?

In the decisions we don't make as much as the ones we do.

We don't send seven onboarding emails in the first week. We don't dark-pattern our cancellation flow. We don't add features nobody asked for because they look good in a pitch deck. We don't optimize our trial experience to confuse people into staying.

What we do: we build tools that solve the problems we've watched real business owners struggle with, in real communities, with real stakes. We keep the interface simple because our users are busy. We price it honestly because our users are watching every dollar.

We're not a growth-hacked company. We're a community-built one. And for the people we're building for, that distinction is the whole point.