Software Startup Education : Gamifying Growth Hacking

Abstract

Marketing is a vital activity for software startups as they seek high growth. A specific type of digital marketing, growth hacking, in particular has attracted a lot of attention in software startups. Growth hacking is about utilizing low-cost marketing practices and existing platforms to rapidly increase the user count of a service. Though topics related to growth hacking such as marketing on a general level have been extensively studied in the past, growth hacking has not seen much direct interest in the academia thus far. As a result, we currently have few tools to teach growth hacking in startup education. In this chapter, we present two board games intended to serve as an introduction to growth hacking.