"Growth Hacking" Strategy in 5 World Startups

We often hear about the term growth hacking pada startup done to get acquisition users or visitor. Many startups have succeeded in getting growth awesome by doing strategy growth hacking this. Growth hacks not magic or magic, but a strategy to acquire users.

Nothing magical about it, just creativity.

Here are the user acquisition strategies carried out by 5 big startups in their early days. Hopefully something can be learned from their strategy.

dropbox

dropbox grown to over 200 million users and most recently Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of Dropbox announced that their revenue has exceeded more than $1 billion with a record faster than the company SaaS (software as a service) anywhere in the world. Latest data mentions Dropbox has more than 500 million users worldwide since its launch in 2007.

The strategy used in the early days of its establishment was to provide capacity storage extras for customers who provide referrals to other users, providing added value to users while increasing Dropbox usage.

The lessons to be learned from this Dropbox strategy are by giving incentives to users will make them more dependent on your product, at the same time they will also spread themselves service or your product. Good one Dropbox!

Pinterest

Since its launch in 2010, until now Pinterest have had more than 150 million active users and 176 million registered users. Pinterest, which 85% of its users are women, is doing this strategy growthhacks by recruiting design bloggers and people who have been carefully selected to keep the content inside clean and classy.

Pinterest automatically configures account we are based on interest us and provide recommendations forfollow high quality users. This gives user experience which is great especially in terms of content.

Apart from this strategy, CEO and co-founder Ben Silberman once sent a personal thank you email to 7000 Pinterest users!

The lessons to be learned from this Pinterest strategy are that basically every startup starts with zero users. Thinking of getting potential users by doing networking and group managed to gain respect and create a community where everyone wants to be a part of this community. Don't forget persistence founder in the early days, something every startup should have founder.

Hotmail

Hotmail managed to grow to 30 million users in their early days in just 30 months since its launch in 1996. In 2011 on their 15th anniversary Hotmail claimed their user count was 360 million users.

Their strategy is to turn users into walking advertisers by adding footer“Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” on every email sent.

The lessons that can be drawn from this Hotmail strategy are pay serious attention to every message we want to convey to users, which arouses the curiosity of everyone who sees tagline from our company. Every businessman would be happy when the message he wants to convey is spread virally, which is great even the users are not aware that they are advertising it for free.

Reddit

Reddit, a social media service where people can share link and online content. After sharing link that, other people can provide vote on that link. Link with vote most will be displayed more dominant than the others.

Founded in June 2005 and until now has been has more than 234 million users. During the early days of establishment and get their initial $12,000 in funding only spend $500 to advertise and even already including stickers.

Strategy growthhacks what Reddit does is do posts content from various popular websites and has traffic large ones posted by team-made accounts. This makes Reddit a content-heavy place and adds to the traffic. Content is king folks.. However, recently this tactic was uncovered by and published in Forbes. (read here).

The lesson to be drawn from this Reddit strategy isfake it until you make it. Ask people to talk about you. Ask your relatives, friends, family, and others for help to get to know what you do. If even that still fails, do it yourself until people get to know you. Furthermore, integrity in business is very, very important.

Atlassian

For developers the name Atlassian is not foreign. Almost all developers use Atlassian products as productivity tools for teamwork. With a price that is not too expensive and UI simple to make this as the only option for productivity tools. Our development team at MailTarget also uses Atlassian products namely Jira and bitbucket.

What is astonishing is the fact that Atlassian (now IPO) managed to achieve revenue of $320 million without sales team! terrible. Tomasz Tungus, a SaaS expert, said the average SaaS company spends 50-100% of annual revenue for Sales and marketing. However Atlassian only spent 12–21% on marketing. What's the secret?

Yes, good product.

Atlassian is famous for UIher dan user experienceits simple and easy to use. They spend 40% of their profits on research & development. Something that startups may not think much about because R&D might become cost center where finances are still tight. Atlassian proves this to be useful. We get used to the culture research & development although still on a small scale. Atlassian pays close attention to details from onboarding process up to loading page with strange illustrations.

The lessons that can be drawn from this Atlassian strategy areproduct simplicity. It's not easy to be able to make a product simple and easy to use, a lot of complicated processes behind that need to be done but the results are worth it.

There are still many startups that use unique strategies that I don't discuss here, such as Kaskus, OpenStore, Tokopedia, and so forth. No strategy growth hacking generic ones. In the sense that one strategy can be applied to all. Get to know the product or service You, find out the details about the target market you, define channel what to use. Then mix it with creativity. I believe we will both be able to get exponential growth.

As COO said OpenStore Willix Halim "Fail fast, execute fast..". Don't stop experimenting.

- This guest article was created by Yopie Suryadi, Founder of MailTarget.co.