Transitioning from Engineering to Growth Hacking

Back in January, 2012 I became the VP of Engineering at RESAAS. In a little over a year we've achieved some great things as a company:

• We're now powering some of the biggest real estate conferences and events in North America: REX 2013, MRED 2013, Inman Real Estate Connect SF 2013 and the Xplode Conferences
• We've signed up over 25 new real estate brokerages on the RESAAS platform
• We won the 2012 Microsoft Impact Award for Windows Azure Platform ISV Partner of the Year
• The engineering team now continuously deploys new code and database changes to production on a daily basis (instead of only monthly or even weekly)
• We released a solid iOS and Android mobile App called reblasts for real estate professionals 
• We plan to raise an additional $2 million for expansion into Europe
• ... and the list could keep going on

It's been a great year but as time passes and RESAAS grows, change and opportunity abound. 

While RESAAS was growing, I became fascinated by the concept of growth hacking after watching a YouTube video of Chamath Palhapitiya (VP of Growth @ Facebook). I subsequently came across Andrew Chen's post titled "Growth Hacker the new VP Marketing" which really drives home the point about how marketing teams are being disrupted by an engineering type of thinking and problem solving. Here's another article on the difference between a growth hacker and a marketer by Gagan Biyani on The Next Web. I then came across Kareem Mayan of SocialWOD and his blog and realized that we lived in the same city which was great because we could chat about retention tactics over a morning coffee. Not only was growth hacking an incredibly interesting topic but the concepts and tactics that I was learning were directly applicable to my work at RESAAS and they were helping us grow. I just needed more time to dig even deeper into growth but unfortunately that would have come at the expense of my role within engineering.

After taking on board many of these new ways of thinking about marketing and growth within a startup, I had the opportunity to transition fully from engineering to growth and I took it. By doing this I could focus full-time on building out a growth team along with setting up, analyzing and implementing growth hacks across the entire RESAAS platform (including our mobile Apps). Its an exciting time to be the VP of Growth at RESAAS, engineering is always close at hand but I'm diving head first into a world of acquisition, activation, retention and metrics with my team and we're really enjoying it.