Beyond Hacker Mindset - by Mitch J.
Stories We Tell About Each Other
SubscribeSign in
Beyond Hacker Mindset<br>How to speedrun failure
Mitch J.<br>Jun 24, 2026
Share
Hacker mindset is a real-life superpower. The idea is simple: instead of treating a system or process as a black box that comes with rules that you have to follow, treat it as a collection of component parts that you can engage with individually, often in unintended ways, in order to accomplish your goals. That way, instead of doing what a system explicitly allows you to do, you can hack into it and do whatever you want.<br>There is an established literature on the topic; Henrik Karlsson recently added to it with “How to walk through walls.” He gives the example of director Robert Rodriguez, who started his career by spending $7,000 to shoot a movie at a time when film budgets were already regularly hitting the tens of millions. Robert Rodriguez didn’t follow the standard procedure of hiring a crew, scouting for locations, and buying enough cameras and film to shoot from multiple angles at once. Instead, he used his actors as his crew when they weren’t currently in shot, made a list of the locations available to him from where he was staying and built the film’s settings around those, and filmed with a single camera that he simply moved several times over the course of shooting a scene to simulate multiple cameras’ worth of coverage. He dealt with the needs for a crew, location, and equipment one by one without following the typical process or deploying the usual systems.<br>This thriftiness is visible in the final result, with mistakes by actors and continuity errors left in that would be verboten in a standard, big-budget project, but the movie still made millions. Other classic examples of hacking to power concern the job market, which you can see as a large, standardized system made of job boards with postings that ask for certain qualifications, or as a large group of individual people that you can talk to who are looking for someone to solve problems for them, and speedrunning, a practice that breaks video games down into a bunch of physics systems and objects in memory that can be manipulated into unintended interactions, letting you “see the Matrix” and break the rules of the in-game world. There are a lot of great videos about how speedrunning glitches work; here’s one that explains how a recent one was found.<br>My last normal job was at a small, independent tech startup, and we did tons of this kind of stuff.<br>Growth Hacking
The “hacker mindset” approach is highly valued at startups, where egos are often large and resources are often slim. The famous startup incubator Y Combinator includes it as a question when you apply to partner with them: “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.” A classic example: cloud services like Dropbox and Digital Ocean will often give you free credit if you get someone else to use their service using your own personalized referral link. If you know how to use Google AdWords, you can take out an ad, pay Google a few dollars to show it to hundreds of people, and put your referral link in it, generating huge amounts of free credit. (This was more effective before everyone had Dropbox.)<br>My boss in particular was obsessed with this approach; he pursued it in all aspects of his life. He gathered coupon codes to experiment with to figure out which ones would stack additively when making online purchases, so he could put in two 40% coupons and reduce the price of something like a hat or a coffee mug by 80%. Credit cards offer bonuses and cashback rewards to try to get you to use them and pay interest on them; he knew all of the major providers’ rules, and used them to pointsmaxx. If you needed someone to get a whole series of free trial accounts for something, he was your guy.<br>We were trying to create an e-commerce platform, and there was a lot of value in figuring out how the businesses of existing competitors worked. One way you can do that is by looking at your competitors’ public websites. Another way is by making a Shopify account, setting up a fake store, and installing every app on the Shopify App Store that integrates with existing online marketplaces. If you install the app that lets you sell products through an online distribution channel like ShopCanal, you can learn how they run their platform and what their product category breakdown is, even if you have no intention of actually selling anything through ShopCanal.<br>Target operates a marketplace for third party sellers called Target Plus, and if you go to their website and click through to some of their forms you end up on a URL that looks like forms.target.com/1. If you change that 1 to a 2 or a 3 or a 4, you can see different ways that Target communicates with their sellers. There are lots of things like that.<br>When you’re figuring this kind of thing out, it’s easy to narrativize it: to see...