5 amazing growth strategies to get your first million users
TRANSCRIPT
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You’ve built your product. You’re proud of it. You want to show it off and engage with users.
But how?
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It’s often a struggle getting from zero to a thousand, or one thousand to ten thousand, or any user
significant growth really.
So, we here at SparkPage, decided to do some research.
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We found the best of the best out there.
The companies that grew big fast.
And we are profiling their growth stories.
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We have squeezed them into 5 actionable growth strategies.
And we are showing you how you can use them in your business’ onboarding strategy.
Let’s get started!
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Everyone enjoys being a VIP.
Someone who is in the inner circle and has something that no one else has.
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Smart apps use this feeling to their advantage, as a reward to encourage the first trove of users to sign
up.
Pinterest, Spotify, Facebook...They all were initially invite only.
And it got them noticed!
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Mailbox are an app that used exclusivity and blew it out of the park.
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At first, they let users download their app before it “launched”.
Users were greeted by a page prompting them to reserve a place in line.
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After registering, Mailbox showed them the number of people
on the waiting list before and after them.
Pretty genius, right?
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People started sharing their number, taking pride in how high up the queue they were.
The buzz was palpable with Mailbox.
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This one simple screen got people excited, got them tweeting, and got the press interested.
They were being talked about pretty much everywhere.
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So how did they take this buzz and turbo charge it?
By adding referrals into the mix!
Users waiting in line were given the opportunity to skip the queue if they tweeted about downloading
Mailbox.
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Double genius!
The number of people signing up and queuing grew by the thousands each hour.
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Within a week, they had 500,000 users signed up and they hadn’t even launched!
It was so successful that Mailbox was quickly snapped up for €100 million within two months of
launching.
Impressive stuff, huh?!!
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Equally clever is About.me’s story.
Just like Mailbox they used exclusivity. However, where Mailbox used it for virality, About.me used it
create a sense of scarcity and urgency.
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They wanted to offer a personal profile page to every user on the web.
But here’s the catch – once one John Smith signed up, about.me/johnsmith was gone.
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Users had to act quick to secure their vanity URL.
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People clamoured to ensure they got their own URL before anyone else.
About Me experienced an amazing reaction as they gained 400,000 users within a few months of
launching.
Amazing results!
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Does your product have a scarce aspect that benefits users on a first come, first serve basis?
If not, can you craft one?
The caveat, of course, is not to use exclusivity excessively.
Be smart about it.
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Like with user onboarding…
With SparkPage, you can send smart messages that use exclusivity to get your user to convert.
Sending messages like “Only one day left on your trial” or sending users special exclusive offers for your app is a perfect and attainable way to use exclusivity!
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As an emerging app, you are likely to be lacking resources.
It takes time, money and people to reach an audience of a million users. All of which you simply don’t have.
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That’s why smart marketers piggyback.
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Started in 2009, Imgur was born out of frustration.
The founder had a problem uploading images to Reddit.
The available options just weren’t up to snuff, so they built their own.
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They announced the tool in a Reddit thread titled
“My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn’t suck. What do you think?
”.
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Well Reddit users thought it was pretty great.
Imgur exploded!
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The first few days it received a few thousand hits.
By the end of the first 5 months it had over a million total pageviews.
And now gets over a billion pageviews a day!
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So what’s the lesson to be learned here?
Like Imgur, you should see if your product can act as a tool for an existing massive community.
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Paypal was the best payments tool for the massive community of eBay sellers.
Instagram was the best cool pictures tool for the massive community of Facebook users.
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These are all on a big scale. But you can also piggyback in smaller ways.
Like social logins for your app.
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Giving users the option to easily login using Twitter and Facebook.
Or sending them onboarding messages that remind them to use social.
This can be an easily hack to piggybacking.
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If you are an app who isn’t doing any form of content marketing, you’re missing out!
There is a community out there just waiting for you.
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Our last strategy talked about providing tools for them.
Content marketing is similar. You’re trying to bring the same value to the community, but with education, information or entertainment instead of a product.
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Blogging, podcasts, video... they all are tools that can help.
It’s just finding what you believe will reach the right people.
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The Buffer case study is a perfect example of just how successful building a community can be.
Their founder Leo Widrich has been outspoken about his use of guest blogging and the success that came
from it.
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Spanning over 9 months Leo wrote over 150 guest posts on a multitude of blogs.
He made content marketing his primary focus and central to Buffer’s marketing strategy.
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He would get published wherever and whenever he could. And the results speak for themselves. As he
said:
“Solely through guest blogging we’ve acquired
around 100,000 users within the first 9 months of
running Buffer”
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That’s 100,000 users all down to tapping into communities and utilizing guest blogging to appeal to
them.
Buffer’s community is online marketers. That’s who their tool helps, but it’s also who their content helps.
It’s a clever growth strategy that worked amazingly well for the business.
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Mint.com’s launch was an amazing success.
And their marketing team credit community building through content for much of this growth.
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They made blogging and content creation a major part of their marketing effort.
And it really paid off.
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They said:
“We 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. Our app didn’t have a
high viral coefficient but we had content that was.
Our infographics and popular articles became regular
hits on Digg, Reddit, etc.”
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The results were amazing and helped them nab
1.5 millions users!
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Every app should be making great content that helps their users.
It’s an easy and attainable growth hack.
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Just make sure your users can find it.
Like sending videos and guides in a user’s onboarding journey.
This is a great way to walk a user through your product and increase conversions!
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Customers trust other customers.
And when they see a review, or plug for a brand they trust it more than a message from the brand itself.
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Case studies, customer reviews, referral systems... These are all strategies that have clout.
But the fastest growing companies don’t just hope for virality, they engineer it into their core.
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Farmville is a game that have set the standard for engineering viral growth.
They made sharing on Facebook an integral part of their game.
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Users start off playing the game alone.
However, as the game becomes increasingly difficult players have no choice but to reach out for help.
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A request would pop up in their timeline asking others to help.
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Of course players flooded Facebook with requests to friends for help.
Non-players would become curious about what this game is all about and want to join their friends.
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The strategy created spectacular, explosive growth for Farmville.
The game at its height had 81 million active monthly users and won social media game of the
year.
All due to their referral engine!
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Spotify is another awesome example of word of mouth at work.
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In an excellent post, Victoria Young dissected the key Product Features and how they helped Spotify’s
growth.
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Interestingly, 3 of the 4 Product Features are designed to create strong network effects.
Spotify didn’t wait for word of mouth, they engineered it.
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Oh, and have you seen their numbers lately?
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Engineering a referral machine doesn’t have to be a complicated thing.
It can be as simple as prompting your users for a review!
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Sending a quick, laidback email or push notification with SparkPage saying “Hey, want to give us 5 stars?”
is a really easy thing to do.
And it gets you results!
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Within communities there are influencers.
Voices that are listened to, drive word of mouth and get people talking about businesses.
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Seth Godin calls them sneezers, but that’s a bit gross.
They affect people’s actions and drive change.
Find them!
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These people will be essential in fuelling your growth. Smart businesses identify them and get in front of
them.
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Sprout It, a startup gardening app, showed how effective influencers can really be.
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Wanting to build some buzz for their app launch, they ran a social media competition giving fans the chance
to win a backyard makeover.
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Fans just had to post a pic with the company’s
hashtag.
All fairly standard stuff so far...
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The reaction was lukewarm in the early stages.
So they went back to the drawing board.
They compiled a list of influential DIY and gardening bloggers and reached out with a very simple ask
“Want to blog about our cool competition?”
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The results surpassed Sprout It’s
expectations.
Seven of the bloggers they reached out to
promoted the campaign.
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The hashtag reached over 60,000 people, drove 5000 visits to the app and they received 150
submissions to their contest.
The campaign was named in Huffington Post’s 10 Best Influencer Marketing Campaigns of 2013.
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The influencers took a floundering campaign and turbocharged it.
Not bad for $0 and a few hours work!
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It’s not just businesses using influencers.
Even Barack Obama is getting in on the action!
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Obama’s team has been vocal about their desire to find more innovative ways to engage with their
audience, particularly younger voters.
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They wanted to show a more down to earth side to the president.
And also reach a generation who aren’t interested in traditional media and are generally apathetic towards
politics.
So they decided to reach out to influencers.
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They picked three YouTube stars, each with a different audience, and gave them the opportunity to have a one on one interview with
the president.
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The YouTubers were told to ask their followers, over 15 million collectively, for questions to ask the
president.
The hashtag #YouTubeAsksObama was also created to get their fans talking and spreading the word.
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It really did get their audience involved.
Over the course of the interviews the hashtag spiked with 11,000 impacts.
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The interview, which was streamed live on YouTube, has been watched over 3 million times and has
over 65,000 likes.
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Remember though, what Obama and Sprout It did worked because they found the right influencer.
And it’s important you do too.
They don’t need to have a massive reach. They need the right reach.
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You need to identify correctly who your audience actually is.
And then discover the persuasive voice in that community.
They can be bloggers, celebrities, social media influencers or business heavyweights.
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Be clever in using these influencers too.
Make it known to new users in your onboarding messages that these influencers endorse
your product.
It is a big draw for your new users!
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These growth hacks aren’t unattainable or even extremely difficult. They just need some elbow
grease.
And you don’t need to jump in and copy them verbatim.
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You can adapt and adopt them in smaller ways with SparkPage.
Incorporate these growth hacks into your onboarding strategy and get amazing results!
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You don’t need excessive resources and an endless well of cash.
You just need to make the effort, build the connection and reach out to customers, influencers and your
team and find the growth strategies that can really accelerate your growth!
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Resources:
http://www.sparkpage.com/5-amazing-growth-strategies-to-get-your-first-million-users/
http://startupworkout.com/100-million-product-launch/
http://untether.tv/2013/quick-steal-these-strategies-from-the-mailbox-app-launch/
http://mashable.com/2013/03/15/dropbox-buys-mailbox/#EX0IkSFxHmqq
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2010/12/about-me-vanity-url/
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/
http://allthingsd.com/20120515/interview-imgurs-path-to-1-billion-image-views-per-day/
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2194396/how-guest-posting-propelled-one-site-from-0-to-100-000-customers
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-mint-grew/
http://mashable.com/2010/02/19/farmville-social-networking-game-of-the-year/#2GT.eJlOgEqX
http://www.createinteractions.com/designtech/2015/1/13/spotify-growth-analysis-product-strategy
http://www.authorems.com/2012/sneezers/
http://prtini.com/sprout-it-case-study/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-fidelman/the-10-best-influencer-ma_b_4098892.html
http://www.augure.com/blog/influencers-case-study-20150129
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k
