15 Growth Hacks That Actually Worked

15 Growth Hacks
That Actually
Worked
15 Growth Hacks
That Actually
Worked

15 Best Real-Life Examples of Growth Hacking Executions
15 Best Real-Life Examples of
Growth Hacking Executions
Growth hacking strategies can be endless. One growth hack
doesn’t have to be the only one you use to grow your
company. Knowing that there can be a ton of growth hacks to
implement, here are some examples of what has worked best
for the online media giants that we know of today to give you
an idea of what might work for yours:
1. Facebook
Facebook’s growth hacks have helped the social media
network grow to the billions. While it’s not possible to credit
one growth hack with the humongous growth experienced by
the network, when the company first started, they used a
specific growth hack to reach millions of users.
That growth hack was creating a closed network. When
Facebook began, it closed its network to users outside of
Harvard University. Initially, it was used by students within the
university to communicate to each other. When other students
outside the university or from other schools heard about it, they
wanted to join. But it was closed and they couldn’t. Slowly,
Zuckerberg opened up the network to people outside the
university, but only around their town. By the time the social
network was viral around the United States, Facebook had
created a notion of demand, and people were joining in the

millions soon after. The network now has 1.59 billion people
and is valued at $300 billion.
By creating a feel of the closed network, the company created
the need for it. Limited supply of something great leads to
unlimited demand. Facebook still benefits from this growth
hack to date.
2. Quora
When Quora began, the idea was to be a platform that people
engage in quality conversations. While it might be very easy to
confuse or compare Quora to normal forums that are so many
around, Quora is nothing like any of them. And that was
exactly the point when the founders came up with the website;
to be different. They have employed two growth hacks that I
can think of off the top of my head and these have helped them
to distinguish themselves and grow to the millions.
The first growth hack is the feed. Quora designed a feed that
would generate interesting content based on a user’s interest. I
am a Quora user myself, and if it wasn’t for the feed I get when
I log in to the platform I would probably have considered the
site as just another forum. However, the feed on my profile
takes a different approach from the forum way of doing things.
It presents topics that I’m interested in from most recent
conversations. That growth hack allowed Quora to keep many

users and increase the amount of time that people spend on
their site.
Screenshot of my Quora home feed
The second growth hack was the earning of credits when your
answers get upvoted. You can in turn use these credits to ask
somebody like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to answer a
question that you are following and really need an answer to.
How awesome is that! People therefore struggle to answer

other users’ questions correctly just to earn the credits. If you
have a lot of credits you can ask several leading professionals
to answer your question so that you can get varied opinions to
learn from.
3. Airbnb
Airbnb is a case of a startup that used an already established
business to grow their company. Airbnb realized that a lot of
people were posting their houses for rent on Craigslist.
Knowing that these was their target market, Airbnb approached
the same people and asked them to post the same listings to
their platform. These users knowing that all they needed was
to earn from their vacant houses, were okay with posting the
houses on Airbnb. Within no time, the company was getting
hundreds of new listings every day. As people shared their
listings on social media, the company grew to revenues of upto
hundreds of millions of dollars.
4. Twitter
If you joined twitter when it started you are probably no longer
on the platform. That was the case for the millions of users
who joined twitter in their very first weeks. Twitter realized that
they experienced spikes in traffic when they launched with
many people creating accounts. However, same people
abandoned their accounts after signing up. Twitter had to

devise ways to make the new users stick and continue to use
their accounts.
The growth hack that helped them achieve this was the
suggestions of people to follow after you sign up. By enabling
people to follow at least 10 active accounts of their interests
when they first sign up, the new users got people to interact
with off the bat. This gave them more reasons to return. This
gone hack allowed Twitter to retain a lot of its users growing to
300 million active monthly users to date.
5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn had a lot of difficulty getting new users until they
allowed people to create public profiles which would be
indexed by search engines and shown to users that search for
you online. Today, if you are on LinkedIn and somebody needs
to find you, when they search your name on Google, your
LinkedIn profile shows up.
LinkedIn has something about it that makes it impossible for
people to create fake accounts of themselves. The significance

of the platform to your career is so high that you would never
create an account of you with fake names. By showing the
user’s public profile on search engines, LinkedIn grew it’s
users to hundreds of millions. Before then, finding people was
so difficult unless those people were celebrities. Now thanks to
that LinkedIn hack, when you create a LinkedIn profile and I’m
looking for you, I will find you.
6. YouTube
The embed code on YouTube videos has to be the growth
hack of the century. To put that into perspective, YouTube is
now the second largest search engine after Google, and all of
that credit has to go to the ‘embed’ hack.
When YouTube started they didn’t like the idea of people
watching videos uploaded to their platform from other websites
especially because they needed to keep more users on their
site. Soon after, they realized their growth numbers weren’t
that delicious and decided to test the embed option. A few
days later, everyone who owns a website from bloggers to
publishing companies like The Washington Post were
embedding videos from YouTube onto their posts. People were
able to head over to YouTube to watch more videos or create

accounts as well as upload their own videos. Least to say, the
growth was immense; the growth hack that launched today’s
video monster.
7. Aweber
Aweber had a counter that showed new users the count of
people joining in real time. This email marketing platform is one
of the most known platform in its industry today. That growth
hack has a lot to do with its popularity.
Image of Aweber real-time counter
For new users proof that people are using your service is more
important. That is why testimonials have such a positive effect.
Aweber tweaked this off the testimonials idea. They had a
count showing a new users name and at what time they joined.

For new users, this showed that there were several other
people joining the service and it was good proof to onboard
users with. Aweber was able to grow a lot using this
onboarding growth hack in its early days.
8. Dropbox
Dropbox discovered that the cost of acquiring new users in a
field where both Microsoft and Google were competing was
very high. The only way was to growth hack their way through
the competition. That’s exatctly what they did by deciding to
give 2 GB of cloud space away for free to every user who joins,
but that wasn’t the growth hack. The hack was when they said
that just by inviting new users to join, you get an extra 650 mb
of space per each user who signs up.
This was a great onboarding technique because slowly
Dropbox went from a few users to over a hundred millions
users about two years later. More people invited their friends to
join just so they could get more space, and this worked as a
win-win for both Dropbox and the users.
The second hack was the creation of shared folders. If
anything, they were the first company to create shared folders.
A team in a company can now work off the same folder from
different locations. This growth hack invited more businesses

both large and small to purchase a Dropbox subscription,
leading the company to profitability.
9. Spotify
Spotify was able to grow their platform in the early days by
leveraging the popularity of Facebook. They allowed their early
users to share the music they were listening to on Facebook by
integareting both platforms. Facebook slowly became Spotify’s
new source of new users who joined in millions of numbers
and in turn shared their music back on Facebook to their
friends inviting more users. That is how the company became
a household name in the music industry.
10. Paypal
The genius part about today’s tech is that you can create bots
online to do anything for you. That was the case of Paypal,
launched in 1998. It leveraged Ebay’s puplarity as a distributon
platform to grow into a powerhouse in the finance industry.
Paypal created bots that would buy items on Ebay using only
Paypal as a payment method.
Sellers on Ebay realized that PayPal was appearing so much
as a payment method and decided to add it to the payment
methods on their listings so that they would not miss out on
sales. As they continued to offer this payment method, more

people on Ebay joined PayPal and realized that the platform
was a really easy way of buying goods online.
Eventually, Ebay added PayPal as a payment method and
went on to buy the company for billions of dollars several years
later after it became an important payment method for Ebay
buyers and sellers.
11. Skype
Skype’s hack was to create a viral endless loop of invitations.
When a new user joins Skype they will have to invite their
friends and contacts to the platform in order for them to have
someone to skype with. These invited users also invite their
friends and contacts as well. By creating a viral loop like that,
Skype continued to grow before Microsoft bought the company
for $8.5 billion.
Now the platform is a viral company for video chatting with
friends, family and contacts. Companies are also using the
platform for meetings with team members as well as interviews
during hiring process especially in the freelance market.

12. Hotmail
Hotmail added the following statement at the end of each email
sent by their early users:
PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.
Using that statement, recipients of emails from Hotmail
accounts were able to create an account with Hotmail. As soon
as they adopted that sentence on the end of each email, they
moved from 20,000 users to 20 million active users before
Microsoft acquired the company.
13. Zapier
Zapier’s growth hack is basically an onboarding strategy. On
Zapier’s home page, they show you what applications Zapier
has managed to connect together. This way, if you need Twilio
to connect with Infusionsoft for example, you can see that
these platforms can be connected by creating a zap because
Zapier has listed both Infusionsoft and Twilio as platforms
whose zaps exist. New users usually know before they login if
their accounts from different platforms can be connected using
Zapier.

Screenshot of Zapier apps display on home page
Another growth hack implemented by this company is the
request feature, which allows their users to request for zaps to
connect platforms to each other; platforms that Zapier hasn’t
connected yet. Eventually, through these suggestions, the
company’s reach has grown as a major intermediary
connecting enabling two platforms to communicate. As more
platforms are zapped, the company continues to grow because
the users who requested these zaps come on board.
14. Pinterest
Pinterest’s growth hack copied its idea from Facebook. When
Pinterest started, you couldn’t just create an account if you
wanted to. You had to receive an invitation onto the platform
first. This method got them a lot of press. With that publicity

and the limited supply of invitations, several people were eager
to join the social media network. They created the feeling of
scarcity, raising demand. Eventually when they opened the
platform to everyone, the platform grew so fast, it’s only about
3 years now, but they are already approaching 50 million users
fast.
Another growth hack employed by Pinterest was the infinite
scroll, removing the need for pages to load. That removed the
issues that would include website speed and multiple reloads
as you move from one page to another. Consequently, the time
people spend pinning stuff on Pinterest increased allowing the
company to keep most of its users for long periods of time.
15. Instagram
Instagram allowed its users to share their photos to other
social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr,
Foursquare, etc. They implemented this at a time when
Facebook was growing, and Twitter as well, but both of these
media giants had not quite figured out the handling of people’s
photos. Especially on Facebook, Instagram grew a lot because
people integrated their Facebook and Instagram profiles,
allowing photos to appear on both platforms.

Facebook being the giant it is, it sent a lot of traffic to
Instagram, allowing the company to gunner 300 million monthly
users. Since it was purchased by Facebook, the photo sharing
company has become the second largest social media network
dethroning Twitter from that position.
Books
blog

If You Like the Content, please Share!!
Be the first to know when New Content, Resources and Tools are
updated.
More We Know What Information You Need, the Better We will make Our
Content… Just For You!
Thank You,
Marketing Online Professionals

15 Growth Hacks That Actually Worked

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from authors boards

More from authors boards (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

15 Growth Hacks That Actually Worked