Welcome to this thoroughly interesting lesson of our Growth Hacking Academy!
Today’s subject: growth hacking examples.
As you’ll know from the earlier lessons of the Growth Hacking Academy, growth hacking is an innovative approach to marketing, built on testing various strategies until the winning one emerges.
There are many growth hacking techniques, ranging across digital marketing as well as programming and creativity (which is essential), and a number of tools help with particular jobs.
But who uses growth hacking? What do successful growth hacking strategies look like?
There are plenty of successful examples, and we’ll go through some in this lesson. Every company we cover got enormous results precisely because a growth hacking strategy worked.
Straight to it.
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Airbnb
Airbnb growth hacking: a genuinely remarkable case.
Do you know how Airbnb became a successful business and a reference point for anyone going on holiday who wants an alternative to the usual hotel?
In the early days the two founders of Airbnb took an unusual route rather than the standard marketing channels. They built their home rental startup asking themselves: “where do people look for their holiday accommodation?”
When they realised most people were searching on Craigslist (the best known and most used American classifieds site), they hit on the idea of adding a Craigslist connection to the form every user filled in to list their home on Airbnb.
That made those listings more appealing, because they were posted on Craigslist too, and it created quiet ties between the two platforms that improved the visibility of the listings, and with them of Airbnb.
That’s a classic growth hacking example: using another brand’s existing network to promote yourself.
Beyond that, the two growth hackers decided to bet on photography quality: the added value they offered was a photographer shooting apartments and houses for owners, free of charge. The thinking was that with good photographs the response from users would be higher.
They were right.
Twitter, the social network of information, took off as soon as it launched: masses of sign-ups, more than 300 million registered users.
Twitter’s problem was that users abandoned the platform shortly after signing up, probably because the user experience wasn’t well tuned.
What strategy did Twitter’s growth hackers adopt to make people keep using it?
- They committed to continually improving the platform, analysing user behaviour and improving the experience.
- They decided to suggest people to follow, right from the first login.
That was the winning move: by following someone at the moment of signing up, people could build connections straight away — which is what kept them coming back to Twitter.
Dropbox
Dropbox, as you’ll know, is a file hosting service (it lets you store files you can reach from the platform, and sync files and data).
Dropbox is worth 4 billion dollars, and on the marketing side it took a growth approach built on growth hacking strategies rather than traditional marketing.
What happened at Dropbox, and where did its success come from? Here it is.
Ever heard of referrals? (If you’ve followed our lessons, certainly.) It’s precisely through referrals that Dropbox achieved considerable growth.
After spending a great deal on acquiring customers (the cost of acquiring each new customer exceeded the revenue they’d bring), they realised they had to find other ways of growing quickly without spending much.
The solution? Offering extra free storage to users who invited others to sign up.
The free allowance was only 500 MB — not much — and that fed word of mouth and new sign-ups. This growth hacking strategy took them from 100,000 to 4 million users within a year.
Facebook managed to grow through growth hacking too.
Do you know what the winning idea was? Keeping users engaged and informed — and do you know how? Through email notifications.
Notifications send people an email when someone has tagged them, and that makes users more active and more involved.
This new approach managed to concentrate far more active people on Facebook.
That’s how Facebook kept 1.8 billion people active.
Hotmail
Free to use image from Google Images
As you know, Hotmail is a free email service developed by Microsoft.
Hotmail used an uncommon growth strategy that turned out to be particularly effective. It aimed at self-promotion and consisted of adding, at the end of every email, a catchy message with a link.
The line read: “PS. I Love You. Get Your Free e-mail at Hotmail”.
Thanks to that strategy registered users rose to a million in six months. It left us open-mouthed too.
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Tinder
Free to use image from Google Images
Tinder is a dating app, and it became one of the biggest names in its field thanks to how effective its campaigns were. Tinder used one of the most creative growth strategies available to it and managed to grow exponentially.
What was that inspired strategy?
It decided to throw parties at universities where the only thing students had to do to get in was download the app.
Naturally it was a hit with young people, who had no problem downloading it.
Tinder’s user base grew exponentially. An inspired idea, no question.
YouTube
YouTube is a video platform, and the most used place to watch video, music video especially. It has an enormous number of users, thanks to how flexible and practical it is.
Do you know what growth hacking strategy grew this business?
YouTube made uploading and distributing video on other platforms easy. That way, users watching a video who want to share it with friends, family or colleagues can do so with no trouble at all.
And so YouTube became an online archive open to everyone and shareable with everyone. Interesting, isn’t it?
Let’s look at another.
Spotify
Spotify is a music streaming service offering a free plan or a subscription at €9.90. The platform was born to fight piracy and works with the record labels — 70% of its revenue is split between labels and artists.
Spotify’s great revolution lies in personalisation: through artificial intelligence the app learns your taste and suggests tracks with similar characteristics.
Spotify counts 100 million users — and do you know what its success rests on?
- A gradual launch, inviting a few industry influencers to test the app and suggest improvements.
- Considerable anticipation ahead of its arrival in America after it had spread across Europe: in the meantime everyone was talking about it.
- Thanks to a deal with Facebook, users could share tracks, albums and playlists with friends easily.
Those three marketing choices made Spotify the best music app in the world.
WhatsApp is an instant messaging app (now also on the web) that worked, and keeps working, extremely well.
The strategy WhatsApp used was building a functional product that answered users’ needs. Everything turned on what the people using the service actually wanted, and features and services were built to be efficient and to fit that.
The app got a very positive response and, through word of mouth, established itself firmly in everyone’s life.
Word of mouth is always the most credible form of promotion.
Netflix
Free to use image from Google Images
Netflix is a platform for watching films on demand, but it began as a company renting out DVDs.
How did it become so popular and gather so many users? It managed to reach people without spending on marketing.
It took a human, direct approach: going into online forums and communities interested in films and DVDs, and simply planning a soft launch.
That approach went viral and the company fulfilled 100,000 orders in the first months. No spending was needed, and it was exactly the right strategy for results of that size.
Remarkable, isn’t it? But that’s growth hacking for you.
Conclusion
Growth hacking examples: that’s what this lesson has covered. We’ve walked you through successful growth hacking examples that will certainly have caught your attention.
You’ll have grasped that doing growth hacking is not the same as doing traditional marketing. Growth hackers are sometimes a little mad — they look for solutions nobody else would think of.
Stay tuned to your favourite Growth Hacking Academy to keep discovering more about this world.
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