A collection of 10 classic cases of growth hacking, including To C and To B

Since Sean Ellis proposed the concept of Growth Hacker in 2010, many successful growth hacker practice cases have emerged in Silicon Valley. This article summarizes 10 growth hacking classics, including 6 To C cases and 4 To B cases.

1. To C Growth Hacker Case

1. Instagram: Keep it simple

The globally popular Instagram was not originally a photo social application. Its predecessor was an application that included social networking, photo taking, check-in, and games , namely Burbn. However, with such an awkward product form, even the founder could not explain clearly what it was used for; a few weeks after its release, the number of users barely reached more than 1,000, and the number of users stagnated.

Burbn and Instagram

This is a failed all-around app with so many features that it confuses users, but data analysis found that users seem to like Burbn's photo sharing function. So they studied the apps available at the time: Hip Stamatic filters were cool, but hard to share; Facebook was the king of social, but didn't have a decent photo feature.

At the critical moment of life and death, the two founders made a decision: cut off other functions, leaving only photo, comment, and like functions, and added filters. A few months later, Instagram, a photo-based social networking platform, was officially launched. It gained 25,000 users within one day of its launch, and this number reached 1 million three months later.

2. LinkedIn Magic Number

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional social platform with more than 400 million registered users and has maintained a steady growth momentum. LinkedIn uses "adding five social friends within one week" as a core indicator of user growth. So why do we do this and what is the principle behind it?

LinkedIn's diverse networking mechanisms

When designing LinkedIn’s growth mechanism, the person in charge thought about these three questions:

1. Which channels ’ new users are active?
2. How to improve user activity?
3. How to improve user retention ?

Data analysis found that many users come to LinkedIn by searching for colleagues or other people’s names, and its user activity is three times that of users on the email channel. So the first thing LinkedIn did was to develop a very simple resume editing function, and the engineers behind it optimized 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.

However, not all users who come to LinkedIn through search channels will stay. Only users who accept friend invitations will visit repeatedly. He found that the more friends a user added, the greater the probability of retention. Through continuous experiments, we found that if a new user adds 5 social connections in the first week, this person will settle down on LinkedIn and will not leave.

3. Airbnb uses APIs

Simply put, when Airbnb was first established, the website was built and the earliest listings were available, what was the most lacking? user! Craiglist is like China's 58.com, with tens of millions of users posting and browsing various classified information on it every day, one of which is looking for opportunities to stay overnight at other people's homes.

Airbnb forwards listings to Craigslist with one click

Rather than spending money on advertising, the Airbnb team realized that Craiglist's existing user base was a gold mine. They then integrated Craiglist, so that as long as the homeowner posts information about the house for rent on Airbnb, they can just click a button, and after a few simple confirmations, the information will be automatically posted on Craiglist and pushed to a large number of rent seekers.

This stroke of genius helped Airbnb acquire a large number of early users at almost zero cost, and it was very different from traditional marketing methods: first, it was highly technical, and was a method that almost only engineers could think of and implement; second, attracting users did not rely on external marketing channels, but rather implanting this one-click push function into the product.

4. Facebook is data-driven

Data analysis or data-driven is an important skill for growth hackers. In order to promote data-driven product iteration and business decision-making throughout the company, the most important thing is the support of the CEO and the establishment of clear regulations within the company.

For example: Facebook has made many website redesigns since its establishment. One of the redesigns was very big and the page was very beautiful. It had been online for more than two months and was available to 20% of users. However, due to bad feedback data, users' online time decreased, resulting in a drop in advertising revenue, so we finally rolled back to the original version.

Facebook Page (Original Version)

Facebook Page (Improved)

The version you see on Facebook now has been in place since around 2010. Many people also want to make revisions, because a company has many product managers and various KPIs, and they always want to do something and try various product changes. But afterwards you will find that many product changes are not helpful in improving product activity and developing business.

The rule at Facebook is that you can try various product changes, but if the data feedback is not good, it will be cut off and cannot be put online.

5. Dropbox Viral Marketing

Dropbox is a cloud storage product that gives every new user 16GB of space for free. You can expand your space by paying or by inviting friends to join Dropbox. For every friend you invite, both the inviter and the invitee will receive an additional 500 MB of space.

How Dropbox spreads virality

Through this mechanism, Dropbox's products were spread wildly and achieved an annual growth rate of 500%. In addition to this viral marketing mechanism, Dropbox also conducted a large number of growth experiments on its products.

Dropbox’s Growth Experiment

The Upgrade button [Upgrade] indicates that this is their monetization test, the Learn more button [Learn more] is used to test retention, and the Share Link button is used to test the communication effect. Dropbox has conducted a lot of growth tests on such a simple page, and continuous testing and experimentation are the cornerstones of Dropbox's rapid growth.

6. GitHub Network Effect

GitHub is an open source code community developed and managed using Git, where developers can upload, host, share, and collaborate on their own code. Just over a year after launching the product, GitHub had its first 100,000 users. In 2015, GitHub received a $250 million Series B financing , with a valuation of $2 billion; in the same year, Forbes named it one of the top ten technology companies.

GitHub code hosting platform

Network effect is GitHub's biggest growth engine, which has created two huge assets: one is a large number of energetic engineers, and the other is a large code base. The more people on GitHub and the more code they commit, the more valuable it becomes for everyone. With this incentive, a company might decide to bring its entire team on board; conversely, a single person who loves GitHub could bring their entire team to the platform.

The number of GitHub repositories is growing exponentially

As of January 2013, GitHub had grown to 3 million users and 4.9 million repositories (a repository is a history of code shared on the site). By December 2016, the company had 10 million repositories and arguably the most powerful software development tool in the world.

2. To B Growth Hacker Case

1. HubSpot Inbound Marketing

HubSpot is an inbound marketing software provider that had only 3 customers in 2006 and reached annual revenue of $186 million by 2015. How did HubSpot do it in the face of such a competitive market?

In summary, it can be said that it is a one-shot victory! HubSpot actively provides high-quality content and tools to convert a large amount of high-quality traffic into paying customers . Specifically, HubSpot has made the following efforts:

• Provide a large amount of high-quality content in the form of blog articles, special e-books, etc. on the official website;
• Provides a large number of free website and social media analysis tools, and has received millions of requests for these tools;
• Conduct online open courses to teach people professional marketing and sales knowledge.

HubSpot's rich content

Spending more time investing in content, helping, and educating your target audience will help you establish professional authority. This kind of professional authority can help you convert prospects into paying customers with far greater speed and effectiveness than outbound marketing.

2. GrowthHackers.com Test Drive

GrowthHackers.com is a growth hacking community founded by Sean Ellis that also provides a value-added experimentation platform. Without spending any money on advertising or expanding the team, GrowthHackers.com increased its monthly active users from 90,000 to 152,000 in 11 weeks. As a young startup , how did Sean Ellis do it?

Growth Hackers.com’s growth rate

Sean explained that the only thing that changes is the speed of the GrowthHackers.com test. Since January 2015, GrowthHackers.com has accelerated the pace of testing, whether it is channel, user or product testing.

As the originator of the Growth Hacker concept, Sean emphasizes that growth is not a specific strategy, but a process of constantly discovering effective growth strategies. The faster you test, the higher the probability of discovering growth opportunities, and the faster you can grow!

3. Nerdwallet Content Marketing

Nerdwallet is an American financial information website that provides information on credit card selection, college loans, banks, mortgage loans, stock trading, and insurance policies for millennials. In return, the recommended financial product will pay Nerdwallet a fee for each new customer it acquires.

Nerdwallet official website

With a large amount of practical and original financial product information and search engine optimization ( SEO ), the Nerdwallet website has obtained a large amount of free organic traffic. The cost of acquiring customers is extremely low and the average order value is extremely high; through these high-quality contents, Nerdwallet has achieved rapid development.

In 2015, Nerdwallet received $64 million in funding in its Series A round, which is equivalent to taking one foot into the ranks of "unicorns". The speed of its development is shocking.

4. Slack is freemium

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration software that provides a series of functions such as group collaboration, customized conversations, and third-party tool integration. Like many SaaS companies, Slack operates on a freemium model. In less than two years since its founding in 2013, Slack's DAU has reached 500,000, making it currently recognized as the fastest growing SaaS company.

Slack DAU growth trend

As more work happens through Slack, more and more users are starting to subscribe to paid premium features, including email archiving, advanced retrieval, and more. By February 2015, Slack's paying users had grown to 135,000, and it was adding $1 million in revenue every 11 days.

This article is excerpted from GrowingIO’s 2017 No. 1 e-book “Growth Hacker’s Handbook: How to Drive Explosive Growth with Data”.

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