Growth Hacking Examples

Growth hacking offers a very exciting opportunity for emerging businesses to gain awareness and increase market share through alternative marketing techniques. There are an infinity of growth hacking examples and samples that have been used by many presently celebrated companies and also growth hacking agencies, If you’re not sure about what growth hacking or a growth hacker is, you can check these articles before you start:

1. Dropbox:

Referral Marketing strategies can be very powerful for business growth when done well and Dropbox did it very well. Dropbox started like any other, as a small start-up whose marketing budget was peanuts but this company worth now is more than 10 billion dollars. Yet, they got there without spending any money on advertisement and created the most successful referral program ever.

         It is a cloud file hosting storage that generated viral growth through its ‘Refer a Friend ѕсhеmе. By implementing a referral system, in other words, Dropbox offered 250Mb of extra storage space to any user who invited a friend if said friend created an account. This incentive got the signups to soar by 60% almost overnight.

         Dropbox was able to stimulate a massive amount of traffic as people generally warmed up to referrals as they felt it to be much more credible than advertisements. The company witnessed exponential growth with more than 200,000 businesses on Dropbox. This is personally one of my favorite growth hacking examples as it results in a viral effect.

1. Facebook:

Facebook is the largest social network in the world with approximately 2 billion monthly active users. We cannot deny that Facebook’s growth hacking strategy was a success. While this may come as a surprise to some people, the biggest social network platform Facebook used growth hacking to implement its agenda and currently boasts of the largest traffic with an estimated 2 billion subscribers.

         Through the use of email notification mechanisms, they were able to give rise to a unique level of participation. People started receiving emails that they were tagged on Facebook. This creative approach was able to make Facebook the biggest online success a very big thanks to growth hacking.

3. Hotmail:

Hotmail (Now call Outlook) is a free, personal email service from Microsoft. Hotmail adopted an extraordinarily brilliant growth hacking strategy that utilized existing customers’ sent emails which were embedded with an attractive message and a link that referred recipients of the letter to a page where they get to sign in. Once you send a mail, the email is embedded with a catchy message and a link.

         Hotmail essentially turned every single user into a free advertisement for their services, and soon began receiving 3,000 new signups per day. They achieved an astounding 1 million users in 6 months, and five weeks later, they hit the 2 million mark.

         The secretive marketing and growth hacking technique adopted by Hotmail was very beneficial to expanding the market share over a very short period.

4. Puma:

         Puma is a shoe, clothing, and sportswear company. Puma adopted a forthright strategy that can be applied to many products and services. Puma was worn by the greatest footballer of all time and was brought to the notice of the world when he stopped to tie his shoelace during an important match. They asked Pele to tie his shoes before the kick-off and Pele did it.

         As expected, the cameras focused on Pele and his Puma’s and made people realize the world’s best footballer wore a Puma. This was the defining moment for Puma, as everyone knew that Pele wears Puma. This was leveraged by Puma for company success and profitability.

5. Airbnb:

 Airbnb is now famous for being the best place where you can score affordable accommodation almost anywhere you travel, but in the early days, they needed to build their user base, customer base, and reputation. Airbnb used Growth Hacking to get even bigger and better while they were already big. Airbnb is not the only platform where you can rent your property nowadays. But it is the only one that allows you to get your place photographed by a professional photographer that is also free.

         They encourage their audience to cross-post their listing on Craigslist with a link back to their Airbnb profile. And they made cross-posting as easy as one click for their users. In this way, hosts increased their chance to get rented and Airbnb got new users. Eventually, it got tons of free traffic and generated thousands of users.

         Next, they contacted existing Craigslist hosts and asked them to sign up on Airbnb. These two strategies helped them to grow their customer base and traffic without spending a dime.

         When it comes to renting or buying a house, you know how important pictures are. The founders of Airbnb knew this too. To grow bigger, they started to photograph their hosts’ apartments. After the platform grew big enough, they hired an army of pro photographers to make their customers happy. And make some more $.

6. Gmail:

 Gmail used a similar system to Clubhouse. When Gmail launched, it used an invite-only system to drive growth, and also it worked. The fear of missing out is a powerful marketing technique, and if you have a product people want, they will respond to this type of marketing. The invite-only growth hack worked so well that Gmail invites were auctioned on eBay.

7. Netflix:

         Do you remember when you stopped buying CDs for your favorite movies? And What about episodes you missed from your favorite TV show? I do. It happened the day I found out about Netflix. Netflix made it possible to re-watch series, and movies as well as enable offline watching, which was probably the most significant relief in the entertainment industry. Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with over 209 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages.

Netflix is neither the only nor the cheapest online streaming platform.

But it was the first one to become unquestionable, and it’s doing a very good job when it comes to keeping its watchers loyal.

8. Foundr :

When Foundr decided to publish their first book, they turned to Kickstarter to prove their idea. Their growth hacking strategy involved influencer marketing, social advertising, and competition via a tool called Upviral.

Foundr magazine editor Nathan Chyn says using this tool allowed the company to give incentives for different promotional activities so that the users could get more competition points and move closer to winning one of three great prizes. Foundr managed to attract hundreds of new backers and thousands of email marketing and got 4x their Kickstarter goal.

9. Clubhouse:

When I received an invitation to join Clubhouse, I was bored with the COVID-19 isolation, and I thought anything was worth a shot. And yes, it turned out to be correct.

Clubhouse is an invite-only audio chat and streaming platform, launched in April 2020.April 2020. Only one year ago, For the record, the app now has 2 million users.

You might ask, what made Clubhouse so special?

• It is invite-only. Which makes its participants feel special? People got extremely bored of this whole pandemic situation, and Clubhouse was a perfect idea to socialize without having to socialize (Great for people who fear the virus to death and introverts)• There was an opening in the market in terms of audio-related social media, and almost no one even realized it.

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