I’ve started a podcast! I’m too self-critical to churn out blog posts, but talking endlessly? That I can do.

My friend Vincent Barr (a super smart and fun fellow digital marketer) and I are planning to record one episode every two weeks for a while, to see how it goes. Here’s the first one, “Is Growth Marketing Real?”

Some interesting points:

On whether “growth hacking” is real:

Justin: I keep hearing this idea that there's such a thing as “growth hacking”. That there are meaningful, and repeatable marketing hacks that work, and a lot of it is about taking short cuts. I think one reason that we wanted to start this is just our frustration with the idea that exists. I think there's an aspect of this, which is doing good marketing is really hard, there aren't any hacks to it.

On how to know if someone’s a good marketer:

I was having a conversation with a company that provides assessments to evaluate marketing talent. They actually found an inverse relationship between the number of times someone mentioned marketing on their LinkedIn profile and their test score.

On what the “growth marketing” role really means:

Rather than maybe needing to build out a designer and engineering team, or hire an email person, and a site person, and an analytics person, you can sort of have this one person who may be able to serve as a jack of trades. I think the term growth hacker has this connotation that it delivers results quickly, and in new novel ways that haven't been done before with minimal resources, which is sort of the silver bullet that a lot of people refer to in marketing, that usually doesn't really exist. It's the product of lots of hard work, and time, and testing.

Check out the rest of it and let us know what you think!