I had submitted my portfolio to Facebook and heard nothing back after several weeks just like ninety-nine percent of people who apply.

I’ve wanted to work at Facebook for awhile. I had worked at a Facebook marketing software company for a year, written a two-hundred and fifty-page book about Facebook, helped create the first paid subscription Facebook group, and developed the first digital course on Facebook. Why wouldn’t Facebook like me?

There was a huge obstacle I had to overcome. I excel at problem solving, but I only learn technical skills when needed.

Facebook is all about technical skills. Plus, they want to see that fancy Ivy League school on your resume.

Well, I had opted out of Ivy League, and went to the school of hard knocks — young startups, and most of them failed.

So, I needed a way to stand out.

As a growth marketer, I thought to myself, Josh, you can do better. Be creative. Solve your problem. After all, it’s your job!

Then an epiphany happened. I was thinking of this Hustle article, The LinkedIn Hack That Made Me $120,000, where Jack Smith, co-founder of Vungle, used LinkedIn ad targeting to land an incubator spot in AngelPad along with $120k of funding.

Inspired, I thought to myself why not target Facebook employees in Menlo Park? If I were to target all Facebook employees, the chances are it would target too many people who say they work for Facebook, but actually don’t – there’s a surprising number of them. I realized that by using geo-location and a work demographic, my advertisement would be hyper-relevant and hyper-local increasing my odds of getting in front of the right people.

Here’s what my targeting looked like:

Next, I needed to be creative with my ad. Luckily for me, I’d taken a few pictures with Facebook employees about a year ago. This reminds me — never throw away your pictures! They may become useful at random times in your career.

The ad took the Facebook employees to a landing page I created on a Facebook Fan Page. I knew they would appreciate a landing page on Facebook over a website.

The landing page included a video I made at 5 a.m. that morning explaining why I wanted to work at Facebook. I only did one take. I was still sitting in bed when I made the video.

I also included a slideshow of me hanging out at marketing events, a messaging app to get in touch with me, copy outlining past accomplishments, Facebook comment section, and a download button for my resume.

The reason I included different mediums of content is that people prefer to consume in different ways whether video, images, or text. So, it’s best to have all three; moreover, it shows creativity.

In less than an hour, Facebook employees were sharing my portfolio around the company as an example of creativity and hustle. These were the comments I received from them.

You can check out the entire landing page here (it was hacked together in less than an hour): www.22s.com/joshuafechter/facebookresume

Within two hours I had several employees contact me through my messaging app, comment on my landing page, a Facebook employee Tweet at me, and a recruiter contact me requesting an immediate interview.

This story may be about hacking Facebook to get into Facebook, but it’s really about getting in through a door when the more obvious ones are closed. Similar, hustling is getting results when a predetermined system doesn’t do it for you. It’s important you see life as more of a game where the only rules you have to obey are only the ones you choose to follow.

The best part of this story is that you can do it for the job you want. The landing page took me about an hour to set up, and the ad took about fifteen minutes. It doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be creative and implemented with some hustle.

This picture was taken a month before our startup failed. I’m on the left, and one of my co-founders is on the right.

Let me take you on a journey of how I learned to deal with being comfortable to jump at potential opportunities.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #1:

I dropped out of college on the first day of a new semester to found a lifestyle publication. I convinced several of my peers to work full-time on my vision, too.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #2:

We were broke.

Barely-able-to-pay-rent broke.

We worked close to one-hundred hours a week for an entire year.

All we ate was oatmeal, spaghetti, and peanut butter.

Oh, and there was a lot of shitty coffee to fuel us.

We recruited 150 writers, published hundreds of articles, but never figured out how to make enough money.

So, our startup failed.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #3:

A month later, I joined a young, angel-backed startup in San Francisco as their head of growth.

We had seven employees, but only 500K in funding.

Too much overhead, so we blew through the money rather quickly trying to figure out our product/market fit.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #4:

I couldn’t find a job for the next two months. No one wanted to hire someone who dropped out of college with a history of failure and who seemed desperate.

Why?

Life had broken me.

And I remember the exact moment.

I’d moved back home with my mom. Within a week, I’d landed two interviews for marketing positions in San Francisco. After twenty bad interviews, I finally had some hope.

The problem was I had $500 in my bank account. If I didn’t land either job, I would be almost entirely broke from travel costs.

They didn’t want me.

My shoulders felt too heavy because I couldn’t handle so many rejections.

I came home and had a mental breakdown in front of my mom. I remember repeating these sentences several times over, “Mom, I think I’m having a mental breakdown. Am I having a mental breakdown?”

If you have to ask, you’re probably having one.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #5:

I didn’t have the budget to wait for a phone interview. I remember my bank account floating around $100. So, I began walking into companies demanding to talk with the person in charge of hiring.

A couple of weeks later, I took a job as a copywriter that paid me pennies of what my skills demanded.

So, what did I do?

I found my courage.

UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION #6:

Without any money to pay rent, I moved in with my dad to a one-bedroom apartment. Due to lack of space, we slept in the same, small room.

At twenty-three-years-old, I felt utterly demoralized.

It was here – at my lowest point – where I found my courage.

I had enough money for one thing: books.

In one year, I read over one-hundred and twenty books about marketing, entrepreneurship, and startups.

Through reading, I became more self-aware. I could better evaluate all my actions.

I gradually began to reverse the actions that fueled my sad state because I recognized all these negative micro-actions from an objective standpoint.

And the biographies I read of those who faced some of the greatest struggles including Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired me to move forward.

In these books, I found humility, inspirational stories, wisdom, and the courage to continue jumping out of my comfort zone to take risks.

And the principles that held true with all success stories taught me something that I will never forget:

If you keep moving forward with purpose to help others and spend almost all your free time learning from those who you want to become, then you’ll eventually realize your dreams.

I take risks because I read hundreds of stories of how these principles made dreams a reality. Then, I saw first-hand how they made many of my dreams a reality, too.

To get out of my low-pay copywriter job, I created a persona of who I wanted to become, and then avidly began re-branding myself.

I quit my job and joined a profitable tech startup with seven employees. This time would be different.

They paid me pennies, but they offered a network, an opportunity to do meaningful work, and most importantly, mentors.

I absorbed every piece of new knowledge.

I invested every ounce of my time into finding better mentors and providing people with free value.

Then something happened

People wanted to work with me.

They were willing to pay me a lot of money – seven times as much as my job paid me!

At this time, I was still broke, but I felt like the wealthiest man in the world.

And it wasn’t because of the new opportunities to make more money; it was because I finally understood where courage came from – helping others.

I was always thinking about me. As soon as I focused on helping others – my mom; my siblings; my friends – I lost all notion of being scared. All of a sudden, I had too big of a purpose not to take risks; not to be uncomfortable; not to be willing to fail.

This attitude has put me on a fast track to success. Within a year, I had my writing published in outlets such as Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur, wrote a best-seller, helped companies achieve incredible growth, and was hired to manage growth for one of the best tech training programs in the country, GrowthX Academy.

So, I hope the next time you need to take an uncomfortable risk, think of others who would benefit from it rather than yourself.

As a result, don’t be surprised at all the beautiful things that will come your way.

Here I am growth hacking 🙂

You can tell I’m a growth hacker by how many logos I have on my laptop (just kidding).

So, what is a growth hacker?

Here’s – what I believe – to be the best answer.

When you create a new product, you’ll probably need to build product/market fit (PMF) into it.

When products hit the market, few instantly have customers.

Without customers or trial users, you don’t have the data to back your decisions when trying to build product/market fit. You’re simply guessing, and that’s not good.

The problem is no customers want to buy or trial your product if it doesn’t have PMF.

You’re stuck. It’s the classic which came first the chicken or the egg?

Who do you call when you need data points to create product/market fit?

A growth hacker.

They help build a better know, like, and trust factor around your product.

They create an excellent blog, engaged Facebook Group, awesome newsletter, high-level copy, and more, all to distract prospects and customers from a product that doesn’t have PMF.

While the customers and prospects are distracted, the growth hacker dives into resources such as Optimizely, Hotjar, and Google Analytics to figure out how to improve the offering using better design and copy.

They then use tripwires, and surveys such as Google Forms and Jotform to gain an understanding of what prospects would want from their product.

Once the prospects become customers, they use Excel, SQL, and maybe a software like Mixpanel to collect data on how to better their product.

All this time, the product still hasn’t been improved.

But that’s okay.

There are finally data points to analyze to make the necessary changes to the product.

Now, you can implement the right behavioral trigger points to increase retention.

You can rely less on distracting customers.

You can pool more resources into actually improving your product.

This doesn’t just happen with new products, but new features as well (each feature is like a mini-product).

Once the product has PMF, then the company hires a growth analyst (not to be confused with a growth hacker) to spend most of their day in Excel and SQL.

When this company launched, I thought that if they ever got traction, then education will never be the same.

For two years they had little traction as they continued to refine their value proposition and outreach.

For two years they hustled writing hundreds of blog posts.

Then something happened.

They figured it out.

Praxis provides an alternative to college where students don’t take on debt. Instead, these students work in young companies close to a CEO for ten months doing creative work. Granted the program costs money, but the students get paid for their work. Moreover, the pay outweighs the cost of the program.

And almost all graduates receive a full-time job offer once they finish the program.

So, what makes this program special?

Students don’t drown in debt.

Students get real-world experience.

And they have an online curriculum where they’re assigned to create value every week whether that’s a podcast, blog post, YouTube video, or something else.

Why?

Giving value is how you become successful. The earlier you receive feedback on the value you provide, the faster you can improve.

It gets better – the students are assigned to read books written by high-level entrepreneurs like Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

This sounded like a cool idea several years ago because that’s all it was. It wasn’t until recently when many parents began seeing more value in this program than college.

It started with one student.

One student turned to two.

Two students to ten.

And from there the company began to experience fast-paced growth.

A movement out of traditional education is happening.

Praxis is on the forefront.

Watch out.