Growth Hacking is a discipline that aims, as its name says, to hack the growth of a business and it does so through actions that involve a temporary or financial expense that is supposed to be much less than the benefit that said action will bring to the company.

It is, in short, a discipline that seeks to grow the business in the most efficient, fast and agile way possible and with the minimum of resources.

A characteristic and differentiating feature of Growth Hacking with respect to Marketing is that, while the latter focuses on growth through sales, Growth Hacker will seek to grow the business through strategies that may be marketing but also product or business design to a broader spectrum.

The Growth Hacker is therefore a person who investigates the business globally and identifies the part of the business whose optimization or improvement will bring more benefits.

In the Software Development sector, since we are talking about an industry whose product and its use are fully digital, it is very important to have knowledge about User Experience, User Interface and Semiotic Psychology.

The first thing we must do if we want to grow a Software business is to establish a growth objective. This goal, to be considered fit and smart, must follow the SMART philosophy. This philosophy establishes that an objective must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and temporary.

For example, to achieve the growth of a Software business, we could establish the following objective: “We want to improve the conversion rate by 15% in the next 2 months and we will measure it by the number of purchases”.

The way to know that we are pursuing the correct objectives is to select those who work towards optimizing the part of the funnel where we lose the most customers.

The next step will be to choose the drivers. Drivers are those elements of the marketing or product strategy that, if we optimize them, will achieve a greater impact on business growth.

When in the software sector we have a value proposition that we know works, there are usually a series of drivers that can make us grow significantly. One of them is to have an attractive and intuitive design, which is the basis of all good UI / UX; however, one of the drivers that is often neglected the most is user on-boarding.

The software must not only have an attractive and intuitive interface, but it must also accompany the user to become familiar with the program so that he learns to use the software in an easy and attractive way and does not feel intimidated by the learning curve of the new and unknown tool. Like these there are many other questions that we can validate throughout the funnel:

• Do we reach the right audience? 
• Do we connect with our target in the content of our campaigns? 
• Are our features as efficient as possible? 
• Are we reinforcing enough through email marketing? 
• Do we solve all the doubts of our users?

Once we have selected the driver that we are going to use to achieve the objective, we reach the experimentation phase.

Experiments are just those tactics by which we will test and work the drivers.

In the case of opting, for example, for the onboarding driver, we must make a list of those tactics by which we could eliminate friction that the user may be encountering. 

• Could we accompany the user more throughout their learning process?
• Is the software visual enough? 
• Could we put fewer ideas per screen? 
• Could we simplify the interface while keeping the same functionalities? 
• Do we show the results in a really understandable way?

All those experiments that we carry out must be recorded and monitored to extract what will be the last and most important of the steps.

After the experiments, the last stage is the registration of learning. At this time we must write down all the data that we have obtained on which experiments have worked and which have not, which have been the most efficient, which words we have tried ... This record will serve us in the future to analyze all the experiments done so far and thus see which ones work best and which drivers can be optimized the most.

For more information on the drivers and the most effective experiments applied in the software industry you can register at Hypertry; there you can find continuously updated information.