Author: Ricardo de Tomás

This past Monday, 23rd of June, the start-ups from the Area 31’s incubator were able to enjoy the company of one of the co-founders of Traity, as part of the many informative and inspirational talks organized by members of the incubator.  Traity is a very popular web and app resource dealing with trust and reputation. As many other companies of their kind, they had many problems at the beginning regarding virality and expansion as José Ignacio Fernández, CTO of Traity, personally explained on Monday. He described how their stagnation led them to explore the topic of growth and online metrics in depth, trying different approaches, and ultimately how they ended up knowing about Growth Hacking.

Growth Hacking is a group of numerical technics that basically encompasses online metrics and marketing. As José defined it for us, “it’s the marketing done by geeks”. A growth hacker uses data from its own platform to design virality strategies, or otherwise designs ways to obtain data and virality strategies, strategies varying from email, web appearance or links placement for instance. By doing some numbers, José easily proved the audience how you could calculate the virality of any app/website in percentages of effectiveness, using Traity’s particular case as an example, and make decisions on the data obtained to improve the results. For instance, a change of the interface of Traity’s main page led to an increase from a 12% of people that went into the website joining the platform to a radical 40%.

Virality nowadays is crucial for start-ups; exponential presence online at the beginning of a venture can determine the success or the failure of it. Online marketing clearly is changing everyday and virality is the principal preoccupation of many entrepreneurs. Growth Hacking offers a pragmatic numerical solution to this problem.