5 Successful Cases of Growth Hackers and 4 Growth Stages!

Sean Ellis, the originator of the term “growth hacker,” believes that the only mission of a startup team is growth.

Not only that, growth is a theme that runs through a company. Any company at any stage needs to maintain growth. The difference is that different companies and different stages have different growth goals, which require breaking down into more detailed goals and strategies.

This requires founders to look dialectically at the universality and particularity, and the long-term and stage-by-stage nature of growth. You need to focus on the company's growth tasks and strategies at this stage, but don't forget to prepare for the next stage of growth. Otherwise, explosive growth may end up being short-lived.

You need to grasp the general rules for achieving growth, and you also need specific strategies for your company and products. Don't let yourself fall into the dilemma of "oranges grown in the north of the Huai River become sour." I recommend you to read this article. Maybe you will be the next growth hacker.

Once a startup enters the growth phase, everything changes, for better or worse. At each part of the growth phase, startup teams can practice mastering strategies and ultimately gain confidence through making decisions. If they do this, startups will eventually achieve sustained growth rather than passively worrying about growth.

Five Key Points for Positioning Growth

1. Smart use of subsidies

When PayPal entered the market, mainstream payment methods mainly relied on banks. Most people will obviously be skeptical of new payment methods.

To build trust and expand its user base, PayPal did a bold thing and in just a few months it grew to 5 million people using it every day.

It's simple, PayPal pays users to register.

The bonus dropped from $20 to $10, $5, and then to no bonus at all. But this initial subsidy strategy worked.

Key Points: See how to use subsidies to expand your user base and retain users!

2. Referral Marketing

Dropbox was founded in 2008 and grew from 100,000 users to 4 million in 15 months.

Every time a friend successfully recommends Dropbox, the user's storage space will increase by 500 MB. In those days when storage space was limited, this was a great early incentive.

Key Point: Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful strategies. It can be incorporated into stages like pre-launch, growth, and even user retention.

3. User retention

In 2013, Groove's user churn rate was as high as 4.5%.

Groove then studied the behavior of two groups of customers: those who continued to use the app and those who had abandoned it.

By comparing, they found that users who were still using the app tended to perform key actions, such as creating a widget, during their initial use.

Those who churned didn’t have as much luck with the experience, probably because they didn’t succeed in creating their first widget.

Groove then sent targeted emails to provide necessary assistance when similar situations were discovered, winning back the initial users and reducing the user churn rate to 1.6%.

Key point: Pay attention to how users churn and find ways to retain them.

4. Back to product

Canva is a very eye-catching startup born in Australia (and also a member of Sequoia Capital). Since its launch in 2013, Canva has grown not by using any fancy growth techniques, but by finding a huge pain point.

Existing design software is too difficult for ordinary people to use. Most design software has poor user guidance and requires users to learn from scratch.

Canva’s user guide is connected from beginning to end. It guides users quickly from the beginning until they share their final design. It makes designing easy and it only takes a few minutes for users to create a cool design from scratch.

Canva created such an easy-to-share tool and grew exponentially.

Takeaway: Creating something that users love to share is a huge growth opportunity in itself.

5. Content Marketing

The core functionality of startup Zapier is integration. It's been called a "translator" between various web APIs, allowing a user's tool stack to talk to each other.

There are hundreds of tool integration guides on Zapier’s blog. These guides have titles like “Send a Gmail email with a new deal from Hubspot CRM.” Zapier showed up in searches for these topics, which led users to try the tool, and then it smoothly became the tool that people were querying for.

The best part is that it can search using keywords with long suffix modifiers. Generally speaking, it’s hard to rank for 1 to 3 keywords, so its ability to capture longer search terms is pretty remarkable.

This strategy has grown the blog from zero to over 600,000 users in just three years, and it continues to grow as new tools and integrations are added.

Takeaway: Content marketing is still king if leveraged correctly.

Different stages of growth

1. Start-up – Focus on chaos management

Building a new company or developing a new product is like launching a rocket. It requires a lot of planning and preparation, sometimes years of preparation, and the results of these efforts are realized in the moment when the rocket is sent into space.

At that moment, we lost control of almost everything, whether it was the arc, speed or direction. We can only hope that we are right, or close to being right.

However, even if the rocket deviates from its trajectory, there is enough time to recover. So don't be afraid to make mistakes.

Furthermore, impact is primarily a requirement, not a skill, which means being in control isn’t a must yet. So be bold in the start-up phase and worry about control later.

Finally, when a company launches, it is usually seeking support from various parties, whether it is from the investors leading the round of financing or from a large customer base.

2. Power - Extracting Signal from Noise

Launching a rocket—a blockbuster in the early stages—is simply a way to announce the birth of a company to the public in a way that creates a lot of noise. Just because a rocket is launched into the air doesn't mean it will stay there; to get it into the right orbit, we need some other kind of propulsion.

From the outside, we see a lot of false positives – customers bought our product, but that doesn’t mean they will buy again or more customers will buy our product.

From the inside, everyone is panicking. In the effort to sustain new growth, there will be negative events such as overspending, second-guessing, and rising complaints.

This requires the establishment of a product team dedicated to extracting signals from the "noise" from market feedback. Externally, this has benefits because we now have an independent group that can focus on how to make the product most successful. Internally, this will also free up other members of the organization to focus growth responsibility on a small number of people.

3. Narrow the scope – focus on the big decisions

Once we gain momentum, we can proactively build our goals rather than reactively. This requires some big, high-stakes decisions. For example, deciding to broaden or narrow your market strategy or entering a completely new market.

We will make many decisions without much data and make many assumptions about risk and reward:

1. Do the current market conditions allow us to take some bold steps?
2. If a particular group of customers could potentially control the future of our product or even our company, would we risk tapping into those customers?
3. Chasing brand effect will bring greater growth and huge valuations, but it is a risky path. Will we still take this path?
4. Do we take a step back and raise more funding in hopes of gaining more foothold and market share in the market?

This is the time to streamline the execution process and distinguish who on the team should and should not provide input and who should and should not make decisions about the company's future.

If we select the right people to sit on the advisory committee and board, they will have enough experience to guide us in every decision we make.

4. Goal - Build the best plan

Having goals means we know who we are, and as long as we can see our goals, small actions can have a huge impact. Maintaining accuracy is critical.

Startups should improve their planning, build their own moats, and accelerate the achievement of their ultimate goals.

Build relationships with any organization that will buy our product, invest in our product, or partner with organizations that can make us half the size. These will all contribute to growth.

Related reading:

1. Analysis of 11 cases, 4 logical points of growth hacking!

2. How does APP use growth hacking methods to achieve 400,000 growth?

3. Operational promotion: a low-cost growth hacking experiment from 0 to 1!

4. The top 10 most popular growth hacking strategies in 2018!

5. Growth Hacking in Action: A complete case study explains the core operation methods in detail!

6. Growth hackers are so popular, can we make money from them?

Author: Richard Liu, Joe Procopio

Source: Sequoia Capital (ID: Sequoiacap)