A lot of growth hackers sell this BS of "simple tips & fast hacks" whereas the awesome professionals I know have "boring" methods and experiments.
So the market gets crowded with clickbait stupid drivel while the real science is lost.
It seems like the work would be different for each stage (finding product/market fit, finding a niche, scaling that niche, finding another niche, etc etc).
Stripping all leading Hows turns out to produce too much collateral damage. For example, consider a title like "How Paper Is Made".
Edit: this one worked nicely though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597937
2. Perform basic SEO
3. Founders made initial deliveries themselves
4. Market to a nearby, reachable customer base via email
5. Pass out fliers
6. Capitalize on their email list to encourage repeat customers
I think there's a larger gap here, in that the audience of HN (largely being engineers or "makers" or some sort) generally use "How" as "a piece of advice that is repeatable", ie, we can get the same result if we implement the same steps.
So searching for eg: "how do I crop a video using ffmpeg" will produce a nice set of results on the internet that will give you a replicable set of steps that lead to a pretty clear outcome.
"How do I get my first 1000 customers" isn't the same, and it's a disservice to publish clickbait headlines like that.