Before he ran the test, Peter Murphy Lewis assumed cold calling had rules. You needed somebody with an American accent, and you needed them dialing between eight and five. He ran it anyway and found the opposite. “I actually found out that I don’t need somebody with an American accent who calls during the workday,” he tells Kandas Rodarte. His team leaves voicemails at nine o’clock at night, and the product is distinctive enough that people still call back.
Rodarte hosts Gratitude Geek, a show for women over 40 who have been through a major disruption and want to rebuild with systems rather than luck. She opens this one by telling Peter she suspects growth hacking is just repackaged bro marketing, and asks him to convince her otherwise. It is a fair challenge, and the answer he gives is unusually plain.
Peter has never taken a marketing class. He studied sociology, then political science, and taught the latter as an academic in Chile. What he brought back is a research habit rather than a marketing playbook: change one thing, measure it, and let the result decide where the next pound goes. The episode is worth an hour for that framework alone, and the second half covers what happened when his own business disappeared. For more on this, see our article on what a growth marketing strategist does.
Key Takeaways
1. Growth hacking here means finding out you are wrong, cheaply and fast
Peter’s definition has nothing to do with hacks. “You do a lot with a little in a small amount of time to know if you’re wrong or right, so that you can do it more, better, and have a better return,” he says. It is a framework for allocating attention, not a tactic, and he applies it to new companies, old companies, new products and new go-to-market plans alike. The output is not a campaign. It is an answer about where the next unit of effort should go.
2. One variable at a time, or you learn nothing
This is the discipline the rest depends on. Run twenty changes at once and a result tells you nothing about which one caused it. “Otherwise general marketers would have done 20 things and you would never know which one works,” Peter says. “If you do one at a time with a framework for determining what’s the best.” Rodarte, who studied qualitative research methods, recognizes it immediately as method rather than marketing instinct.
3. Direct mail is not dead, and it works best where the offer is expensive
He sent a hundred handwritten postcards. Not a thousand, a hundred, with a number written down in advance for what a good return would look like. Only then did he decide whether to scale to one or two thousand. His reasoning is that attention is cheaper to buy on social platforms but conversation is not: for something at six figures, or for custom work, “the direct mail actually works as well or if not even better,” partly because people under 30 no longer pick up the phone.
4. Choose the channel that answers you fastest, not the one everybody is on
Asked how a solo operator should start, Peter picks the platform that returns a verdict soonest. He would skip Instagram, not because it does not work but because it is saturated and slow to tell you anything from a standing start. TikTok allows about 25 posts a day without suppressing reach, so a week of shorts identifies the best performer. “I use TikTok to tell me what works organically. Then I move it over to ads,” he says, and only then to a funnel.
5. The audience for your content is often not the audience you pictured
Peter says on the episode that he told the American Healthcare Association that 67% of the people watching his nursing home content on YouTube and TikTok are men, and around 70% of those are under 35. He is candid that this contradicted his own assumption, which he describes as fifty-year-old women caring for ninety-year-old women. He attributes some of it to younger men reaching for feeling they have no other route to, citing Ken Burns making documentaries after seeing his father cry.
6. Niching down starts the conversation for you
For the first two years he made documentaries about certified nursing assistants and nothing else. He argues the narrowness did the selling. Describing yourself as someone who tells other people’s stories is vague, and the most it earns is a polite follow-up question. “If you niche down, people know right away that you’re passionate about something,” he says, and the first thing they ask is why. He has since widened to a community banker and a pygmy hippo, but the niche is what built the reputation.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Kandas Rodarte opens by asking whether growth hacking is just bro marketing. Is it?</