18 Foreign “Growth Hacking Cases”

The concept of Growth Hacker was first proposed by Sean Ellis, and later became known to the public due to an article by Andrew Chen, head of growth at Uber. This concept then became popular in Silicon Valley, and its ideas were practiced by a large number of Internet companies in the Valley, having a profound impact on Silicon Valley and the entire Internet field.

Today I will share with you some classic growth hacking cases from abroad. I hope that domestic growth enthusiasts can be inspired by this and better apply the concept of growth hacking in light of domestic actual conditions.

1. Hotmail

Hotmail was founded in 1995 by Jack Smith and Indian entrepreneur Shabir Bhatia and began commercial operations on July 4, 1996 (US Independence Day). It is one of the earliest webmail services on the Internet.

When users use Hotmail accounts to send emails, Hotmail will add a line "PS. I love You" at the end of the signature, but this is actually a hyperlink to the Hotmail official website. It was this extremely simple growth method, which spread virally through word of mouth from one user to ten, and ten to a hundred, that helped Hotmail acquire a large number of free users in its early days.

2. Buffer

Buffer is an enterprise-level service product that helps customers build brands and grow their businesses on social media. As of now, Buffer has covered 15 countries and served more than 75,000 customers.

When Buffer was first launched, it was just one of hundreds of social media tools, and the industry was highly competitive. To this end, Buffer launched content marketing. Through the process of "content production-delivery-data analysis-optimization-content reproduction", it continuously produces a variety of research reports, industry information and other content that is valuable to users, as well as various content presentation forms such as pictures, articles, and videos.

High-quality content is continuously disseminated through social media, and at the same time, it is also deposited on Buffer’s official website blog to enhance search engine optimization. As Buffer's content became more and more influential, the startup quickly grew from 0 to 1 and started global expansion.

3. Hubspot

Hubspot is a comprehensive product that provides marketers with services such as social media marketing, content management, website analytics, and search engine optimization. Founded in 2006 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, its current market value has reached US$6.2 billion.

As the company grows, Hubspot has a very successful growth strategy, which is to provide a free on-site scoring tool - Website Grader, which allows marketers to intuitively see which parts of their website are performing well and which parts are not performing well and need optimization. Through intuitive data presentation, marketers are guided to make more correct marketing behaviors.

This free on-site rating tool, which is loved by marketers, brought a lot of traffic to Hubspot's website and helped Hubspot achieve rapid growth.

4. Groupon

Groupon is the world's largest group-buying website, offering discount shopping, low-price shopping and other activities every day, and providing a wealth of coupons for customers to make group purchases. It was founded in 2008 and by 2010 it had covered 49 countries and more than 500 cities, with 115.7 million members.

Groupon's growth strategy is simple. When users complete any purchase on Groupon, they can choose to share it on social platforms such as Twitter. They can get discounts by getting likes or shares. This small sharing growth strategy helped Groupon grow 228% in one year.

5. Gmail

Google created Gmail in 2004. At that time, Google was not yet a super unicorn, and no one dared to think that Gmail created by Google could stand shoulder to shoulder with Hotmail and Yahoo.

In order to promote its new product, Google used scarcity to create a rush and chose to launch it on April Fool's Day. Registration is by invitation only, and only 1,000 opinion leaders have invitation slots to invite friends to register and use Gmail.

This creates a sense in the minds of users that signing up for Gmail symbolizes a certain identity, similar to the status of an opinion leader, the title of a high-level club member, and so on. This creation of scarcity allowed Google's newly created Gmail to quickly gain a large number of users in a short period of time.

6. Instagram

Instagram was founded in 2010 and is a social application software that provides free online photo and video sharing. As of June 20, 2018, the global popular Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users.

When Instagram was first established, it was a product that even its founder could not clearly explain what it was. It included many applications such as social networking, photography, check-in, games, etc., and it barely reached more than 1,000 users a few weeks after its release.

Through data analysis, it was found that users seemed to like the photo sharing function very much. At the critical moment of life and death, the two founders made a decision: cut off other functions and only keep the photo, comment, and like functions, and add filters. Instagram, a photo-based social networking platform, gained 25,000 users on the first day of its launch and reached 1 million users three months later.

7. Paypal

PayPal was founded in 1998 and allows users to transfer money from one account to another using their email address.

At the time, the idea was so advanced that it was difficult to describe its functionality to users. In addition, advertising costs are very high, so it is very difficult for a startup company to find initial users. In order to solve this problem and achieve user growth at a low cost, Paypal pioneered the cash back discount model. Get a $10 cashback when you sign up as a new user, and get an extra $10 cashback when you recommend a new user to sign up.

In the end, Paypal paid a total of $6 million in cash back, and through invitation incentives between users, it brought an average daily user growth rate of 7%-10%.

8. Dropbox

Dropbox is an online storage service company that uses cloud computing to synchronize files on the Internet, allowing users to store and share files and folders.

Over the past five years, Dropbox has not only reduced advertising costs to a minimum, but also achieved a growth in users from 0 to 1 million. Through some user questionnaires, A/B testing, a series of process optimization experiments and data analysis, Dropbox developed a user recommendation system (a "two-sided reward system", using the product's own storage space as a reward). After a user invites a friend, both the inviter and the invitee can get an additional 500MB of space.

After the system was put into use, users sent 3 million invitations within 30 days, resulting in a 3,900% user growth for Dropbox in 15 months. Now, Dropbox is basically synonymous with cloud storage.

9. Hotel Tonight

Hotel Tonight is an online travel application that provides users with discounted hotel information throughout America, Europe and Australia. It had 15 million users in 2013 and was acquired by Airbnb in March 2019.

At the time, hotel booking apps were not unique. Due to industry restrictions, users are also unable to get cheaper hotel reservations in a short period of time. What is the reason for Hotel Tonight's growing popularity?

Hotel Tonight's growth is due to its excellent user experience. When tourists first arrive in a small town, they are accustomed to using their smartphones to find hotels. Hotel Tonight continuously iterates and optimizes its products through A/B testing and data analysis to ensure that users can complete a series of processes such as registration, search, reservation, and payment in the shortest time possible.

With its continuously optimized smooth user experience, Hotel Tonight won user reputation in the early market competition.

10. Tinder

Tinder is a mobile social application commonly used for same-sex dating.

As the originator of “slide matching”, the App’s downloads reached 100 million in 2014, and the total number of daily swipes by users in the app reached 1 billion.

Why is Tinder so successful?

Through integration with Facebook, users do not have to go through a lengthy registration process: based on the user's basic information on Facebook, Tinder will use the data to filter potential dates according to personal interests and geographic location. Based on the filtering, users can choose to like or dislike through the "slide to match" function. Swipe right to start the conversation, swipe left to make it disappear.

It is precisely based on data recommendations and easy-to-use dating functions that Tinder has achieved rapid growth.

11. Slack

Slack is an enterprise collaboration application. Since the product was launched in February 2014, its valuation has increased from 0 to 7 billion US dollars in less than 5 years, making it the fastest growing SaaS company in Silicon Valley and even in the world.

Slack's outstanding performance is due to its "word-of-mouth from the grassroots" strategy, the ultimate on-boarding experience that requires only three clicks to get started, and fair pricing with refunds upon discontinuation of use. Slack will sign a trial version contract with users. Through the ultimate product experience, once users use Slack, they will recommend Slack to more people. Word of mouth spread throughout the company, and Slack achieved exponential growth.

12. LinkedIn

LinkedIn started operations in May 2003. As the world's largest professional social networking site, as of 2018, LinkedIn's monthly active users worldwide have reached 590 million and have maintained a steady growth momentum.

In the early days, in order to achieve rapid growth at low cost, LinkedIn discovered through data analysis that many users came to LinkedIn by searching for colleagues or other people’s names, and that its user activity was three times that of users on the email channel.

So, the first thing LinkedIn did at that time was to develop a resume editing function and then improve SEO by optimizing the match between resumes and Google search engines. After doing this, LinkedIn's organic traffic began to grow slowly, increasing by 60% in the second month, and the number of users also began to grow significantly.

13. Airbnb

Founded in 2008, Airbnb currently covers 191 countries and 65,000 cities, with more than three million listings, making it the world's largest shared accommodation platform.

A long time ago, Airbnb discovered through data that the booking rate of listings with good picture quality is twice that of poor quality. The quality of the property listing photos has a huge impact on the booking rate, but landlords don’t know that the photos taken generally have poor lighting, are untidy, and have low pixels, which greatly reduces users’ desire to book.

Since 2010, Airbnb has started hiring professional photographers to assist landlords in taking photos of their listings and uploading them to their listing descriptions. Thanks to attractive photos taken by professional photographers, Airbnb's bookings at the time increased two to three times.

14. Uber

On May 10, 2019, Uber, the pioneer of the global taxi-hailing software, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Ten years ago, Uber was just a taxi service platform that could only meet local supply, demand and payment. Ten years later, Uber, with online ride-hailing services as its core, has successively added food delivery, freight services, shared electric bicycles and other businesses. Now, it has covered 63 countries and more than 700 cities, becoming a typical example of rapid global expansion.

Such rapid expansion is based on a complex data model developed by Uber, which enables Uber to learn from the first batch of seed users in new markets and predict whether they will become loyal users of Uber, which helps Uber quickly understand and adapt to new markets.

The data + technology drive is the key to Uber's rapid growth, helping Uber to quickly open up new markets and find market fit quickly after entering them.

15. Pinterest

Pinterest was founded in 2010 as a tool for sharing themed content. On September 10, 2018, Pinterest announced that its monthly active users exceeded 250 million, an increase of 50 million users compared to last fall.

Compared with the gradually slowing growth of Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest's growth rate is surprising.

In the early days, the registration conversion rate of new users on Pinterest's official website was less than 1%. After some tests and data analysis, corresponding adjustments were made: when visitors enter the official website, they can only browse 25 pictures instead of unlimited pictures before. If they continue to scroll down, they will be prompted to register. This small change increased Pinterest’s official website registration conversion rate by 50%.

In addition, Pinterest launched the Pinterest Lens in 2017, which allows users to find creative ideas inspired by photos taken with the Pinterest camera (for example, you can discover your favorite recipes by taking photos of ingredients). After its first year, user engagement with Pinterest Lenses increased to 600 million searches per month, a 140% year-over-year increase — technology has made a new contribution to Pinterest’s growth.

16. Twitter

Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey in March 2006. It is popular in many countries around the world and is one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet. As of 2018, Twitter's daily active users have reached 126 million.

In the early days, in order to improve user retention rate, growth hacker Andy Johns conducted a series of data analysis and found that when a user follows about 7 users, there will be relatively stable activity and a certain product stickiness, and the possibility of user loss will become smaller.

Based on this discovery, Twitter introduced the “10 New People to Follow” feature at the end of new user registration, so that new users can also see the impact Twitter has on them. This hacker tactic eventually became a powerful growth engine for Twitter.

17. YouTube

YouTube was founded in 2005 and focuses on video sharing. Users can upload, watch, share and comment on videos. As of 2015, YouTube has more than 1 billion users and is currently the second largest website after Google.

YouTube's rapid early growth was due to the sharing function it developed. Videos uploaded by users to YouTube can be shared on more than a dozen platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With the help of traffic from other platforms, YouTube's monthly views have increased by billions.

A small website for sharing videos has now become the largest online video website.

18. Facebook

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates. By the end of June 2015, the number of logged-in users who visited Facebook at least once a month had reached 1.49 billion, accounting for about half of the world's 3 billion Internet users. Such an amazing achievement is breathtaking.

In the early days, Facebook found a breakthrough for growth through massive research on user behavior: providing users with Facebook blog widgets with basic personal information. Users can place widgets on their public homepages or other blogs for external display.

It is this small widget that brings billions of impressions, tens of millions of clicks and millions of registrations to Facebook every month; and with the mass effect, more and more people are displaying the widget.

In addition, widgets are not only beautiful decorations, but can also establish backlinks and increase Facebook's weight in search engines.

Growth hackers are a new type of team role between technology and marketing. Their important capabilities are: achieving marketing goals and achieving substantial product growth through "technology-driven" and "data-driven" at low or no cost.

Among the above 18 foreign growth hacking cases, many have been widely used in China and have achieved remarkable results. I hope everyone can gain inspiration from this and find their own growth point.

Author: GrowingIO

Source: GrowingIO