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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sean Ellis
If you’re a marketer, the imperative is clear. Your job is to move beyond traditional promotion and get deeply integrated with your product and engineering teams to find the best growth levers for your business—many of which are not currently in your hands or under your control.
Yet another area in which Yelp has tried, failed, and moved on is paying for content. Early on, the company experimented with paying for reviews to help encourage activity in cities other than San Francisco, emulating competitors like InsiderPages and Judysbook by offering small compensation like $5 Starbucks or gas cards. Stoppelman says the result was, “relatively low quality participation from people that didn’t care all that much about Yelp.” [3]Thus, the company no longer pays “for reviews directly anywhere anymore” [3], choosing to focus on review quality over quantity, and letting the
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GitHub is driven by both network effects and marketplace dynamics. The company benefits from two distinct and multiplicative growth drivers: network effects to pull in more people and their code, and an ever growing code repository acts as a marketplace for people seeking out code for their projects.
Wanstrath describes GitHub as “the company of the compelling argument—every decision needs to stand on its own merit.” He continues, “That someone successful (or unsuccessful) tried something before might matter in a discussion, but what matters more is how the idea itself applies in the situation.” [8]
In fact, GitHub will send any employee and a fellow GitHubber to conferences where they’re invited to speak—all on the company dime.
LinkedIn was able to grow in four months almost the same number of signups from homepage improvements as they did over two years of email invite optimizations. Of course a near doubling of the effectiveness of email invites is nothing to look down your nose at; but these numbers do indicate that when looking for big gains in a relatively small timeframe, focusing on improving strengths presents a more powerful opportunity for growth.
