Best Posts on B2C Growth Hacking
Table of Contents
- Paypal and Dropbox - referral incentives
- Hotmail’s tagline
- Airbnb’s craigslist integration and Instagram’s cross-posting
- Mailbox’s creating and managing waitlist before launching
- Twitter’s suggested followers
- Pinterest’s auto-follow and infinite scroll
- Youtube’s liberal interpretation of dmca
- Mint.com’s personal finance blog and OkCupid’s infographics (Buffer, Wealthfront, Ryan Hoover’s 5 startups that started as blogs)
- Facebook‘s you’ve just been tagged in a photo and LinkedIn’s you’ve just been endorsed
- Groupon’s coupon is only valid if you invite 1000 friends
- Reddit’s and Paypal’s fake users
- Gmail’s invite-only service (same for Pinterest, Quibb)
- YouTube, Kickstarter — users create something that they want to spread
- Facebook — focus on a small market, win it, then expand to adjacent markets (same for Quora, Yelp, Linkedin, OpenTable)
- Yelp’s SEO, Zynga’s Facebook apps, StumbleUpon’s Firefox plug-in — be the first to use new platform/channel
- 3taps, PadMapper — steal customers/data from big incumbent
- Youtube — be embeddable
- OpenTable’s standalone mode (same for Square, Delicious)
- Quora, MailChimp— usage scenario is inherently viral (same for Quibb, Paypal, SurveryMoney, EventBrite, Hotmail)
- Shopkich — provide better mechanism for your suppliers to interact with their customer, so get their customers
- Quora — users generated content SEO (same for Wikipedia, BillGuard)
- Etsy — initially focus on a group which is both consumers and producers for your 2-sided platform
- Twitter’s removing barriers to usage
- Timehop — email-first startup (see 4 others by Ryan Hoover )
Quora Answer by @adambreckler to What are the Top 10 Consumer Internet Growth Hacks? (that have been A/B tested)
#1 Paypal’s friend referral bounty
By paying $10 cash to each new customer and $10 to the customer who referred them, Paypal was able to hack early growth to tens of millions of users before no longer offering the bonus.
Read more here
#2 Hotmail Tagline
In Hotmail whenever a user would email another user, the email would have a message saying something similar to “This email sent with Hotmail, Join Hotmail now” and “Get your free email at Hotmail.”
Read more here
#3 Airbnb’s craigslist integration
By reverse engineering the craigslist posting process and automating it to the point where it became dead simple to cross-post your airbnb listing to craigslist, AirBnb was able to hack early growth to 10′s of millions of users.
Read more here
#4 Mailbox wait list
By creating an incredibly compelling launch video combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list, mailbox created a large amount of social chatter and blog attention. Within six weeks, Mailbox had a million users signed up and eagerly waiting for the service.
Read more here
#5 Dropbox Incentivized Referral Program [see also Scott Dunlap’s post]
Roughly based off of Paypal’s invite system, dropbox allows users to invite their friends for more space. This worked to help dropbox grow from 100,000 users to 4,000,000 in under two years.
Read more here
#6 Twitter’s suggested followers on-boarding
Once Twitter found that users who followed more than 30 people were most likely to become active. They optimized the user experience to encourage this behavior.
Read more here
#7 Instagram cross-posting
By deciding to play nice with other services like twitter and facebook, instagram was able to leverage the distribution of some very large existing platforms to help accelerate the growth of its service in the early days.
Read more here
#8 Pinterest auto-follow [see also Scott Dunlap’s post]
Upon signing up for Pinterest you are automatically following a select group of high quality users. This in turn helps alleviate the cold-start problem, where you have to go looking around the site to find boards and people to follow. Instead they present a sampling of high quality content immediately filling your feed.
Read more here
#9 Youtube’s liberal interpretation of dmca
YouTube tried many tactics to gain differentiation over it’s competitors. In the end, YouTube’s growth hack was the only metric that mattered, conversion of viral buzz into users.
Read more here
#10 Mint.com content/seo strategy
Mint focused on building out a unique personal finance blog, very content-rich, that spoke to a young professional crowd that we felt was being neglected. Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app. The infographics and popular articles became regular hits on Digg, Reddit, etc.
Read more here
Quora Answer by @scott_dunlap to What is the most ingenious growth hack you have encountered?
1) You’ve just been tagged in a photo on Facebook. I’m sure by just reading this sentence, you are experiencing a number of dopamine-triggering emotions. What just got posted? To whom? Who liked it? From what we’ve found, the CTR on an e-mail notification like this is in excess of 75%, and likely within minutes of receiving it. Clicking through drops you off on a new visual stimuli (the photo), which is also a great dopamine trigger. And if you see people already “liking” it, that is yet again another dopamine trigger (read Nir Ayal’s blog’s Nir and Far for info of these dopamine triggers). In summary, it sets off a cycle of dopamine stimuli that can suck hours away from you before you know it, which is the reason Facebook has such huge engagement numbers. But in the end, nothing gets people back into Facebookdom than getting tagged in a photo, and at 350 Million New Photos Each Day, that is outstanding.
2) XYZ just endorsed you for a skil/expertise (LinkedIn). LinkedIn is the master of using data product to create a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) network. When they moved from “endorsements” (public endorsements of a colleague that goes right on their LinkedIn profile) to allowing others to endorse you for specific skills, it created two amazing growth hacks. First, they found a way for your network to deepen your profile for you, which goes right to their main source of income — recruiter search tools. This not only feeds their business, but means you have to keep coming back to check on how your profile is being built. Second, it creates this reciprocal desire to do the same for others, which increases the creation of this data exponentially. 238 million members and growing, revenue up 37% this year and no signs of slowing…this is growth hacking that creates both user growth and revenue.
3) Invite a friend and get an additional 500MB of storage (Dropbox). Dropbox,Box, and other revolutionaries in the world of cloud storage figured out quickly that free storage (whether used or not) was a great trigger to invite friends. When they started offering 500MB for a referral, what feels like a huge amount (but is really quite cheap to provide), it felt like a ton of value to share and really fed their growth. The built-in network effects of cloud storage (since most storage is used to share files between disparate parties and growing digital storage needs quickly seeded a huge customer base that grew, and outgrew their storage. So even with only 4% going premium at $99/year, Dropbox is building revenue quickly, and growth hacking helped seed a gorilla share of a valuable market quickly.
4) This coupon is only valid if you invite 1000 friends (Groupon). Groupon was one of the fastest growing companies in the world for good reason — their core product required sharing with lots of friends to turn on. The incentive here is to invite EVERYONE who does just about ANYTHING, not just a few who do a niche thing (like Candy Crush to gamers). it’s the same reason merchants are crazy enough to offer 70%+ off even if it’s not good for business — it reaches more users faster than any marketing to date, hands down. An amazing model for growth that was able to quickly grow out of the local market growth problem (the difficulty of taking something that works in San Francisco and recreating it in, say, NYC). Jury is still out on their long-term business model, but there is no doubt growth hacking directly into their product built the empire it is today.
5) The Pinterest infinite scroll. Once Pinterest got their Martha Stewart on with that high quality imagery, people couldn’t get enough. The infinite scroll that allowed people to just keep seeing more and more by scrolling down the screen would not only feed the dopamine with new visual stimuli, but introduce each user to a hundreds of of other pinners, feeds, and ideas in minutes, more so than any “email your friends” hack ever could. The network effect of repinning and following so many other feeds created a cross-pinning flurry that fed their extraordinary growth, and had companies around the globe copying their infinite scroll capabilities. Their new business model of sponsored content now fits directly into this phenomenon.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-social-media-built-okcupid-2012-9#ixzz2oWdAbEVj
OkCupid tries to reach a broad audience with its blog by choosing interesting topics and great graphs that provide information as well as entertainment. Its headlines include: The Best Questions For a First Date, 10 Charts About Sex, The Mathematics of Beauty.
https://medium.com/design-startups/9411fb583205
When Paypal figured that eBay was their key distribution platform, they came up with an ingenious plan to simulate demand. They created a bot that bought goods on eBay and then, insisted on paying for it using PayPal. Not only did sellers come to know about the service, they rushed onto it as it already seemed to be getting popular.
Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman admitted that the link-sharing site was initially seeded with fake profiles posting links to simulate activity. The key was that the links being posted were the kind of content the founders wanted to see on the site over time.
Quora Answer by @sanguit to What are key strategies to acquire first 100K users with zero marketing budget?
1) Create tools of self-expression which are really easy to use: No matter what your platform does, users should be able to create something there which they would want to spread. A user may not want to spread the word about your platform but would definitely want to spread the word about what she created on it. E.g. YouTube grows everytime a video goes viral because users personally invest in marketing it. This is marketing that scales with adoption and super-effective. Kickstarter and Change.org allow users to spread their cause to the whole world. Users are vested in marketing it. Forget gamification, forget viral design… there is no bigger incentive for users than the ability to spread their creations, beliefs and causes in a manner that wasn’t possible before. (More athttp://platformed.info/hacking-y…)
2) Target a micro-market: Facebook’s early users were at Harvard, Yelp’s early users were the tech-savvy crowd of San Francisco, Quora and LinkedIn’s early users were the VCs and startups of Silicon Valley. Find a micro-market which contains your early adopters. (More on how to do that at http://platformed.info/facebook-…)
3) Be the first to get onto a new user acquisition platform: There is a window when a new channel launches when users are still gullible enough to be harvested. Yelp did it with SEO, Zynga did it with Facebook. The same tactics don’t work when both the users and the channel get more sophisticated later on. A detailed analysis of this cycle at: False positives and the cycle of free user acquisition platforms
4) Steal: There are a lot of niche classifieds and ecommerce sites that compete with Craigslist. Quite a few of them started off by posting listings on Craigslist and directing the traffic to their site. This article lays out a detailed process of how to succeed with that: http://platformed.info/yelp-crai…
5) Widgets: Be shareable and embeddable: Facebook sharing was great but users have, over time, become desensitized to what gets shared on Facebook. Instead, ensure that what gets created on your platform can get shared where your savvy users want to share it, namely on blogs and niche forums. YouTube got traction because MySpace users (musicians) needed a way to share videos and YouTube offered them a solution. (More on this at http://platformed.info/destinati…)
6) Fake it till you make it: When users come initially to your platform and there’s nothing there, they see little value in using it. Platform usage requires investment; you set up a profile, you browse around… it takes time. Users won’t invest if they don’t see activity. Well, if there isn’t any activity, create some. Reddit did it. Paypal did it. A lot of marketplaces do it. Once you create some activity, more users start coming over. (More tactics on this athttp://platformed.info/seeding-y…)
7) Piggyback on an existing network: Piggyback on a thriving network as long as your platform is contextual and complementary to that network.
StumbleUpon benefited a lot from being one of the first plug-ins on the Firefox browser. It was a natural complement to a browser which is essentially used to find information. It was one level of abstraction above Google’s “I’m feeling Lucky” if i could put it that way. Source: http://platformed.info/how-paypa…8) Seed the community on standalone mode: Essentially, a user should be able to derive value out of the product even when other users aren’t on it.
A product that has standalone value irrespective of the network is more likely to get traction among at least one set of users.
Source: http://platformed.info/seeding-p…9) Design your product to align growth and engagement: E.g. when I post this answer on Quora, it allows me to broadcast it to my network. Posting the ansewr helps with engagement, the simultaneous broadcast helps grow Quora. A specific hack discussed in detail at http://platformed.info/growth-en…
10) Provide a service for producers that enables them to interact with their consumers: This is so obvious, it’s often ignored. Your producers already have consumers. There, that’s the solution to getting in more users for free. Loyaltystartups like Shopkick also do something similar. Get the producers, get their consumers on the network, cross-promote other producers to these consumers. Rinse. Repeat.
Source: http://platformed.info/how-to-us…11) Content marketing is amazing free marketing: Blog away like the guys at Buffer and Mint, and not about your product, just anything that your target market would want and that would make them want to explore the product.
12) SEO at scale: Ensure that whenever users create content, the permalinks are search-engine friendly. This is a great way to get users to market your product. Quora does this amazingly. Check the URL above. More at http://platformed.info/permalink…
13) If you’re building for user-generated content, ensure that users create good content and are appropriately motivated: Usually, only about 1-10% of your community actively contribute content. To keep creating value, you need to ensure you cater to their motivations. A primer on motivations: http://platformed.info/creative-…
14) Create organic virality, a product that spreads every time it’s used:
SurveyMonkey, EventBrite, MailChimp, and the original HotMail, are products that just have to be spread to be used. But even if your product doesn’t fall in this category, you can create features that show this property.
http://platformed.info/viral-loo…For organic virality, ensure that there is a non-monetary incentive for users to spread the word. A guide to non-monetary incentives: http://platformed.info/incentive…
15) Focus on superconnectors: Remember, Branchout gained rapid adoption the day Michael Arrington downloaded the app. He had a large following on Facebook.
16) Build an invite list before you join: Nothing is as good as having a Launchrock-powered user base raring to hit your product on day 1. Here are the various ways you can build a market before you build a product: http://platformed.info/mint-stac…
17) Demonstrate immediate value for all users: Often marketplaces never have value when users visit in early days.. Groupon solved this by doing 2 things very well:
Solving for the buyer: Focusing on a specific transaction and attracting buyers to a current and live transaction rather than a (dead) marketplace with a potential for future transactionSolving for the seller: Allowing the seller to back out if a minimum number of buyers were not achieved
Source: http://platformed.info/groupon-c…
18) Make the two-sided network one-sided: Target a specific group which has both the consumers and producers of your service and where the lines between them blur. Even if they are two distinct types of users, the members of this group fulfill both requirements, or at least some of them do. This is important because the WOM required to spread the word among the producers simultaneously spreads the word among the consumers as well since they’re part of the same group.
This is what worked for Etsy. People who make crafts typically like to buy from other craftspeople. This really helped them target exactly one group and spark transactions within that successfully before branching out. Source: http://platformed.info/two-sided…19) Provide access to new production infrastructure that the user would use even if the network was a ghost town: When Youtube started off, users didn’t care if there was a network of potential users, early users were happy enough to have a facility to host a video easily and embed it on their sites.
Source: http://platformed.info/how-to-us…20) Be exclusive but be smart about it: Try starting with an invite-only beta. However, this is not a one size fits all as what worked for gmail didn’t work for google wave. More on how to make this work at http://platformed.info/exclusive…
21) Don’t try to change behavior for both consumers and producers: Consider the strategy of NFC players vs. Square. NFC is trying to change behaviors at both ends by making the user pay with his mobile phone and making the merchant accept payments on a new terminal. In addition to the logistical challenge of proliferating terminals and getting NFC chips out, the chicken and egg problem becomes more difficult to crack as there is a barrier to usage for both parties. Square, on the other hand, introduces new behavior for SMBs (accept payments using your phone) but the consumer behavior remains the same (pay using the credit card). This was one of the reasons Square disrupted retail payments when everyone was expecting NFC to. Source: http://platformed.info/payments-…
22) Get a marquee player or seed your own content: An extension to the above point, sometimes, signing up a top-notch producer can help draw consumers in, especially if you serve as an exclusive channel for that producer. Once consumers come in, other producers can be signed on and the network grows. Source: http://platformed.info/apple-iph…
23) Remove barriers to product usage: Also known as “Build a great product”. Create a product that makes something that people want to do, but currently can’t do, extremely accessible to them. There are 5 different ways of doing this, explained in detail at How To Build A Great Product By Removing Barriers To Usage
24) Convert consumers to creators: Converting consumers to creators creates a nice feedback loop and keeps building value on the product. Here’s one of the ways of doing that: http://platformed.info/stack-ove…
Finally, since this answer is on Quora, here’s a quick look at the various growth hacks that Quora used to gain users for free: Growth Hacks of Q&A Startups
http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups
Timehop — began as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo emailing Foursquare check-ins from exactly one year ago.
iDoneThis — created over a weekend, simply email iDoneThis with the tasks you accomplished that day and the following morning an email will be sent to your team.
Thrillist — created a hand-made, email newsletter on men’s lifestyle.
AngelList — narrowly focused on providing a curated list of angel investors delivered via email weekly.
Sunrise — morning email of your day’s schedule each day. Simple. Useful.
