Example sharing: Innovative growth strategies of 12 top teams including Facebook, Airbnb, etc.

The original article lists 21 innovative growth examples from 21 top global teams including Facebook, Airbnb, Slack, etc. This article mainly selects 12 to share with you. Let’s take a look~

Introduction

A growth strategy is not just a set of features you add to your business to grow your product, it’s equally how you communicate and unite as a team.

As Ryan Holiday said:

If growth is “more of a mindset than a collection of tools ,” then it should be a team mindset.

A successful growth strategy is a collaborative product of technology, marketing, operations , design, and products. Whether your team consists of just two founders or a large group of employees, your growth hacking strategy will only be effective if you can empower your team, optimize your existing workflow, and finally make smarter decisions based on the results of continuous experimentation.

Simply put, there is no plug-and-play growth strategy.

To increase your product’s user base and retention , you need to methodically tailor your growth strategy to your product’s features, feedback issues, and target audience.

What is a growth strategy?

To understand the growth of these companies, we need to properly define growth strategy.

A growth strategy is an executable plan of action that will allow you to achieve a higher market share than you currently have. It seems simple, but it is important to note that it cannot only focus on short-term gains. Let us take a simple example to illustrate this point.

Usually there are four types of growth strategies, you can choose one or all of them:

1. Product development strategy: You can expand your market share by developing new products to serve existing markets. These new products should solve new problems, or be able to assist existing products in better solving existing problems.
2. Market development strategy: You can increase market share by expanding into new vertical market segments, expanding your target user base, or increasing the frequency of use of your product by current users.
3. Market penetration strategy: This strategy is often confused with market development strategy, but it is actually more focused on strategies such as bundling products, lowering prices, and even running advertising. These are all things you can do in marketing after creating a product.
4. Diversification strategy: You can increase your market share by entering new markets.

Here, I’ve curated 12 of the top 21 teams that achieved massive growth in their companies. Each growth strategy is closely related to the company's development path. Some of them follow the four classic growth strategies mentioned above, while others seem to be atypical but creative growth hacking strategies.

Through these classic cases, we can put what we have learned into practice and, through understanding the underlying methodology, explore growth strategies that are more suitable for our own products at the current stage.

Growth Examples

1. Clearbit activated 100,000+ potential customers by giving away free tools

Clearbit is a data company that helps clients mine sales leads from email addresses . They can make it clearer and simpler for clients to understand who is behind an email address or company domain name, thereby guiding sales.

Clearbit's API is powerful, but it requires developer help to use it well. So for Clearbit, if developers can use these APIs smoothly and well, it can drive growth in all aspects of the product to a certain extent.

Based on this, their strategy is to create some free tools, APIs and browser extensions by themselves, and give developers the opportunity to participate in the process and get satisfaction quickly, so as to verify PMF. The most successful of these is their free Logo API , which helps companies quickly mark their brand logos on the pages of their websites.

Clearbit launched the API on Product Hunt and spread the word to the developer community and via email within a week. It quickly gained 60,000 views upon its launch, and companies such as Buzzsumo, Inbound.org, and Oracle integrated the Logo API into their products , and word-of-mouth spread allowed the product to grow rapidly.

Early on, Clearbit encouraged development teams to prioritize developing a stripped-down version of the full product, or MVP.

The Logo API is Clearbit’s best example of a flexible and easy-to-implement product that merchants can quickly try out and see how it improves their page views while potentially integrating some of their data into Clearbit.

Strive to create an incredible first impression for your brand, which will validate the work you’ve done and drive awareness of your brand and products among your trial customers, ultimately leading to conversions and continued paying habits.

2. Zapier completes new user registration with content marketing

Zapier is an automation process tool (similar to workflow). It uses tools to build a set of user autonomous workflows, allowing events in one tool to trigger events in another tool.

The charm of Zapier lies in the fact that it is an invisible hero, and all experience processes are not visible on the surface. So how do you market an invisible tool?

Zapier’s strategy is to leverage its multifaceted product features for content marketing, using every new automation flow on Zapier as an opportunity to influence search rankings and attract new users.

Zapier’s blog reads like a collective guide to hundreds of tools, with catchy titles like “ How to quickly attach text to a note in Evernote or OneNote ” and “ How to automatically generate charts and reports in Google Sheets and Docs.”

By searching for these specific titles, Zapier makes itself a destination for fans of these different tools to find content.

This strategy helped the Zapier blog grow from zero to over 600,000 readers in three years, and the blog has continued to grow with each new tool Zapier adds to its portfolio.

If your product has multiple use cases, try to reach each niche with specific content rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

3. A small problem, LinkedIn helps users connect with other users

The LinkedIn platform is designed to connect users, recommend new jobs, and introduce collaborations. But without any guidance, users often don’t use the product in the way it was designed. They realized that most users' profiles were incomplete and that more help was needed in this area.

LinkedIn's strategy is to attract users to register and keep them more closely connected with the product. They asked new users a question: " What was your most recent company and position? "

Based on the information they had obtained, they designed a list to display information about former colleagues in the previous company . This makes it easier for users to reconnect with old colleagues, sparking new memories and motivation to continue using the product. Once they take this step, they are more likely to make more connections on their own as they use it.

Because of this optimization in the new user process, LinkedIn's page views increased by 41%, searches increased by 33%, while user profiles became richer and job postings increased by 38%.

If you find that users aren’t taking full advantage of your product, help them if the product piques their interest. Try onboarding to help your users get engaged.

4. Finding the “North Star” indicator, Facebook’s seven-day retention rate increased significantly

In 2012, Facebook had more than 1 billion active users worldwide. It is obvious that Facebook's massive growth is a network explosion effect. This is an organic growth event that is difficult to draw conclusions from a single point analysis, but Facebook's growth can be attributed to a few key strategies.

Time and again, Facebook has achieved breakout growth by keeping a keen eye on user behavior data , identifying features that work well for the user experience , mining the data, and using that data as a North Star Metric to guide their decision making. One of the North Star Metrics is “Follow 7 friends in 10 days”.

By analyzing and comparing active users and churned users, Facebook found that the indicator closely linked to active users is finding 7 friends within ten days.

Facebook discovered this key point related to improving retention, and they carefully designed the new user guide to guide users to complete this indicator as much as possible within the given time.

Facebook Email List Push

Facebook Home

By focusing on metrics related to user stickiness, your team can more scientifically focus on increasing engagement and retention , and measure their progress.

5. Slack ensures users continue to use the product by replicating successful business cases

Slack is the world's leading team collaboration and communication tool , similar to domestic enterprise WeChat , DingTalk and other SaaS products.

Slack grew by observing how successful business teams interacted with their product and continually improving it. Even now that they are dealing with 4 million active users, they are always looking for users who are actually using Slack to be successful and use their behavior as a replicable template.

To understand why users stay and churn, Slack dug deep into their user data. They found that enterprise teams that sent 2,000 messages almost never gave up on the product. This is a lot of information, but the key is that you can only achieve growth by actually using the product and finding a set of viable strategies.

Slack knew they had to give new users as many opportunities as possible to send messages, so they began optimizing the user experience to encourage more messaging. For example: Slack’s new user guide simulates the behavior of an experienced Slack user.

Meanwhile, a message from Slackbot showcases message notifications, showing users what private communications look like, while on the other side, a "tree structure" example showcases Slack's multitasking capabilities.

Understand what customer success means for your product by paying close attention to your loyal users.

Replicate successful cases and behaviors for new users until they are successful to ensure their retention.

6. Helping users migrate helped ConvertKit reach $125,000 in monthly revenue

ConvertKit is an email marketing tool that makes email marketing simpler and more powerful for professional bloggers to grow more business.

In early 2013, freelance e-book writer Nathan Barry publicly made an unusual decision for himself. He announced the "Web App Challenge," where he wanted to build an app from scratch and generate $5,000 in recurring revenue per month within six months.

Although he didn’t reach his $5,000 goal initially, he did build a product that now generates $125,000 in monthly revenue. Barry tried a lot of growth strategies during his first three years building ConvertKit, an email marketing tool for bloggers, but the one he stuck with was direct communication with potential customers.

Through personalized emails, Barry discovered that a lot of people liked ConvertKit’s product idea, but it was too much of a hassle for them to switch tools — all of their contacts and drafts were set up in their existing tool. So Barry developed a "concierge migration" service.

ConvertKit accesses your WordPress blog and your Aweber/MailChimp/InfusionSoft account, wherever the blogger is working from, and transfers all of their autoresponders, all of their opt-in menus with the original look and feel, and all of their subscribers over to ConvertKit.

After 15 months of implementing this strategy, ConvertKit grew to $125,000 in MRR.

By proactively reaching out to and listening to your target users, you can see the key issues that are preventing them from signing up.

It could be something small, like having to migrate from an existing tool, but you can help them use the service.

7. Serving key users and gaining word -of -mouth growth

Stripe is an online payment solution provider that builds simple and flexible payment channel tools for merchants, similar to domestic ping++, Lianlian Pay, etc.

When founders John and Patrick Collison created Stripe, they were inspired by a niche problem: they urgently needed a payment solution that could adapt to the needs of different merchants and address the convenience and complexity of buyer payments on the page. When they analyzed, they found that the developers within the business were the key users. By prioritizing these key users (developers), they quickly gained 8.6% market share among the top 1 million websites ranked by Alexa.

They do this by prioritizing product elements.

1. The code has been upgraded so far, and in order to promote the product, they have worked hard to create clearly structured and more comprehensive development documentation so that developers can use Stripe products and run them correctly.
2. They created a document library that walks users through each product, such as: Payments, Invoicing, etc. These documents contain introductions that are simpler than the code, providing guidance for new users.
3. There is a “Try It Now” section where users can create a new user and complete the entire payment process in just a few minutes. This visual operation process allows developers to intuitively learn and test APIs without repeated submissions.

By focusing on the users most directly affected by the issue, you can generate word-of-mouth from the most targeted users.

Many merchants began clamoring to start using Stripe as their own developers raved about the product.

8. Groove avoids losing users by sending targeted emails

Groove provides 24/7 customer self-service support and allows customers to contact merchants anytime, anywhere. To put it simply, it is a help center and contact us, similar to domestic cloud customer service systems such as YiChuang Cloud Customer Service and NetEase QiYu. In 2013, their user churn rate was worryingly high at 4.5%.

For some reason, even though they were doing a good job acquiring new users, they eventually lost them. So they decided to start understanding these users better, a strategy that would ultimately reduce their churn rate from 4.5% to 1.6%.

Alex Turnbull, founder and CEO of Groove, said:

“Your customers may not tell you when they’re having a hard time.”

Dig deep into your data to find creative ways to find those customers who are in trouble and help them.

Groove used KISSmetrics to examine customer data, and they determined who was leaving (churn) and who was staying (retention) within the app. They compared user behavior between the two groups and found that staying in the app was strongly correlated with performing certain key actions, such as being able to create a support widget in 2 to 3 minutes.

Uninformed users take longer, which means they can’t master the tool for some reason. Then, before these people completely forget about the app, Groove is able to send them highly targeted emails to bring them back and help them understand the value of Groove.

By using data analytics : You can understand the behaviors that lead to churn , and then proactively reach out to users when you see those behaviors. Prioritize solving the problems of users who are about to churn, and your user engagement will increase.

9. The Golden Rule of Sharing That Helped BuzzFeed Grow to 200 Million Daily Visitors

BuzzFeed (which can be seen as the American version of Toutiao ) is a machine that continuously produces content, publishing hundreds of articles every day and receiving more than 200 million unique visitors per day. BuzzFeed’s key growth strategy is virality , and they pursue it in everything they do.

1. When BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti listened to his readers, he found that readers cared more about their content than their community, and they were disappointed when they couldn't find content to share with their friends. The Buzz Feed team uses social sharing and social traffic as their most important metrics.
2. The BuzzFeed team developed a gold standard of “shareability” to further refine their judging criteria. They analyze all the examples of virality to figure out what is inherently shareable. This was important because it made it possible for the BuzzFeed team to move into new areas.
3. BuzzFeed has been paying attention to its social audience, who are able to adapt to changing reading patterns and platforms. Today, more than 60% of Buzzfeed's traffic comes from mobile devices, mainly because people are using Buzzfeed's instant messaging function. They also beefed up their political-legal departments and invested heavily in branding videos.

If you want to go viral, tap into your users’ deepest pain points and needs.

As Peretti puts it:

“It’s people who spread the media, and that’s a much stronger and better distribution point than a media company.”

10. Airbnb improves its review system and maintains sustained growth

Airbnb’s origin story is one of the most controversial growth hacking stories. At the time, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia learned that their potential users were using Craigslist, so they launched a new feature that allowed users to post information on Airbnb and also post a copy on Craigslist.

Of course, this speculative approach can easily fail, and what really allows them to continue to grow is their evaluation system, because the evaluation enriches the entire Airbnb platform. In 50% of trips, guests visit a host’s profile at least once before booking a trip, and hosts with more than 10 reviews are 10 times more likely to get a booking.

Airbnb grew in several ways by making reviews easy and shareable:

1. First of all, the platform makes the entire evaluation process double-blind. Only after both the guest and the host have completed the evaluation can the feedback from both parties be seen. This can guide users to be more honest in the process of filling out the form.
2. The platform also allows private feedback and shortens the validity period of reviews to 14 days, making reviews more natural and closer to reality.

By making it easier and more authentic to review, Airbnb has been able to increase the number of reviews on its site and gradually expand its authority in the industry.

You can do this by figuring out what keeps your users trusting you, how to improve your reputation, and then focusing on making that super easy.

11. Adroll increases feature usage to 60% with pop-up ads

Adroll has a great MailChimp plugin that redirects ads to users’ emails, but they found that few businesses actually use this powerful feature.

Peter Clark, head of growth at AdRoll, wanted to try in-app messaging to better target the right AdRoll users at the right time, but growth experiments like this required rapid iteration. His engineers were better suited to longer development cycles, and he didn't want to disrupt the existing development rhythm.

So Peter and his team started using code-free modal windows (pop-ups) because they are easy to create and customize. These contents do not require developer input, and the growth team can continue to design and try multiple experiments to improve the utilization of their new products.

Here’s how it works for the MailChimp plugin:

1. They first used a tool called Datanyze to list users who used both Adroll and MailChimp.
2. They pasted the filtered list data into Appcues (a new user onboarding tool) and created a modal window, setting it to display only to these two types of users and showing instructions for how the two products can be integrated.
3. They configured this little feature on the homepage dashboard, and a pop-up window would appear when the user arrived. This is the core area of ​​the Adroll tool where users need to operate their advertising marketing campaigns .

This simple experiment generated thousands of conversions and ultimately increased plugin usage to 60%. These kinds of experiments are easy to replicate, so Clark and his team now routinely use pop-ups for a variety of experiments.

12. Yelp gets 145 million unique monthly visitors through gamified interactive reviews

For a review site, Yelp (the American version of Dianping) can easily find groups of users who simply browse.

What sets Yelp apart is that it strategically promotes the social aspects of its site to attract returning visitors and community members. And by building its own services, it eventually achieved 145 million independent monthly active users, far exceeding its competitors. Yelp expands its existing network by rewarding users for certain behaviors.

1. Design a hierarchy of users where they can earn “elite” status by frequently writing good reviews, voting, and commenting on other reviews.
2. Yelp judges reviews based on several key factors, including the level of detail and the number of likes they receive. These factors make Yelp more likely to be spread and shared on the Internet. Basically, they use rewards to increase the quality of Yelp content, and then teach loyal users to become their “growth hackers” and share and spread the content.

By incentivizing users to leave reviews and setting up a corresponding rating system, Yelp turned its site into a community with many active users so that users can feel a sense of belonging.

Summarize

Any effective growth is based on products with proven PMF (product/market fit), exploring the needs and pain points of real users, trying them one by one, constantly experimenting, and striving for data-driven product optimization to achieve the goal of healthy growth.

The North Star indicator is your weather vane for product optimization and the root of growth. Its determination needs to be related to your team's optimization goals or the general direction of the company's overall leap forward. Otherwise, it is easy to lose your way, especially do not let [vanity indicators] affect your judgment. If the wrong indicators are set, the experiment will eventually fail and product optimization will be ineffective.

As social products, Facebook, Tinder, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., their growth strategies all start from finding user relationships, and migrating from establishing stranger relationships to [follow and subscribe] relationships, which will turn silent users into active users and give them reasons to continue to stay and use the product, greatly improving user retention and bringing a healthy path to self-growth.

Top teams including Slack, ConvertKit, and Groove combine products and technologies, dig deep into their user data, define urgent and important things, continuously experiment and verify hypotheses, and work hard to achieve large-scale change and growth.

As a startup team, consistency in team goals is particularly important . For individuals or small teams, it is important to keep pace with the company's overall development and not try to change the company's solid foundation for the sake of growth. Creating a data-driven team that focuses on solving problems for target users, reaching out to users and listening to their needs and pain points, and exploring reasonable solutions for them is a healthy path to self-growth.

Within a reasonable budget, incentivize users in ways that are valuable to the business itself, creating a self-perpetuating viral loop. And in the case of rapid business growth, we will take small steps and boldly try and make mistakes to ensure stable, healthy and sustainable growth of the business.

If you want to achieve rapid viral success, human nature is something you need to delve into. But whether you’ve discovered a feature of your product that’s key to attracting users or you’ve identified a new North Star Metric that allows you to successfully replicate it, pinpoint your growth areas and dig deep.

Your advantage is that you are able to listen and notice what your product and your users are doing, and continuous learning is your next growth strategy.