Michael Shinzaki's answer to Poker: What is it like to earn a living through poker. The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product. Social products are an interesting bird.
For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear. The only magic I’ve found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people’s time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles. 1. This isn’t touchy feely stuff. To successfully use the fleeting moments you have, you need to orchestrate everything under your control to work together seamlessly under a single brand with a single reason for existence. 2. It’s not always obvious upfront what should be your best in the world focus and enshrining the wrong thing can be a problem.
The 5-50-500 Rule. I spent the morning today visiting with the team at Quantcast, which is up to some pretty exciting stuff, and ended up discussing with co-founder Paul Sutter what Paul calls the “5-50-500″ rule. I found it pretty instructive not just as a lens for evaluating Quantcast’s progress, but more generally as a useful way to think about the phases of a startup. The idea is that startups go through distinct phases that are marked by the number of customers it serves. [Note, this is oriented towards B2B businesses].
The “5″ phase is marked by very high touch relations with the first 5 customers, typically beta customers who are helping inform you of product requirements and product-market fit generally. The “50″ phase is where you more or less have product market fit and you shift focus toward go to market strategy and tactics. Answer to Poker: What are good ways to run an illegal poker room. "Try the product" as a growth strategy. Have you ever heard of the Puppy Dog Close?
Imagine you're the owner of a pet shop and you want to sell a litter of puppies. If you just let people come into the shop and look at the puppies, they may bond with them or they may not. It's all a bit hit and miss. So instead you let them take the puppy home for a week. When you call them a week later to arrange to take the dog back, 90% of people refuse to let it go. Users First, Brands Second. I like simple ways to think about things.
Like mobile first, web second. These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second. When you are building your product and thinking about your go to market strategy, you need to decide who your first users will be and how they will take your product into the market. You can focus on getting everyday internet users first. There are some great businesses that have gone with the Brands First, Users Second approach. Contrast that with Foursquare. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all User First, Brands Second services. Our firm vastly prefers the Users First, Brands Second approach. The 7 Ways Dropbox Hacked Growth to Become a $4 Billion Company. Did you know Dropbox has spent very little on advertising, yet it is worth $4 billion?
What have they done that’s made their business so successful? They’ve implemented many growth hacks that we’ll discuss in this article. What’s a growth hack? Instead of using traditional advertising to “buy” each new customer, it’s possible to use growth hacks to acquire customers in ways that scale. In other words, the cost of acquiring each additional customer is much closer to $0. For example, one growth hack is to incentivize some of your current users to refer others. Dropbox has received many awards, including best overall startup for 2011 & the Webby for Best Services and Practices. Here are some stats regarding Dropbox’s scale: Revenue reached about $116 million in 2012 and was expected to reach $200 million in 2013. Not many SaaS companies can reach that kind of growth in 4 years, with or without advertising. 1. Then: Now: The number of options on the homepage are limited. Takeaway: The 7 Growth Hacks That Led Groupon to a $12.7 Billion IPO.
228% – that’s how much Groupon grew their revenue in one year.
As one of the fastest growing companies around, Groupon employed many growth hacks that helped lead to massive growth. In this article we’ll examine some of them and how you can apply them to your own online business. As you’ll see later in this post, Groupon is based of turning subscribers into marketers by giving them control to spread the Groupon product.