Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 2 - October 22, 2017
A user's profile is automatically public.
A social function can be asymmetric.
Speed is mighty.
Instagram understood this and implemented three site-quickening techniques to ensure their service was lightning fast: Load content based on importance, not order Always be "pretending to work" Anticipate the user's every move
Cross-platform sharing.
They achieved this through a feature on their site that allowed full integration through Craigslist. The classifieds site, like AirBnB, contains ads for sublets, temporary accommodations, and other housing needs. At
used crgslist - airbnb
Another strategy that worked was their focus on attracting users from India; as of May, 2013, Indians constituted over 40% of the site’s user base.
go to where the population is maximum - india
Quora's growth hacking strategy seems to center around skimming the cream off the top of their huge pile of user-generated content. Their new blogging platform, as well as reviews, has been a crucial part of their massive effort to attract and engage users. The blogging platform is the company's offering to those who prefer a lecture over a seminar. According to Quora co-founder Adam D'angelo, "Today,
give a percived advantage t the uswr - quora
Zynga only creates social games, which aren't based on value but on incentive-based play.
Cross Promotion. Zynga worked hard to consistently retool their products and introduce new social games on Facebook in order to cross-promote new games to their existing user base on their other applications.
Facebook eventually had to curb the Zynga spam because it was actively detracting value from their own platform, and Zynga got a bad reputation on Facebook, in effect poisoning its own brand by annoying almost a billion people on a daily basis. This was because it didn't actually offer anything to consumers—its sole purpose was to grow for the sake of growth. There’s only one other form of life on this planet that follows that same principle—a cancer cell. Facebook cut Zynga out before it got too infectious, but the anti-spam measures they put into place as a result basically took Facebook
...more
lessons of success abd failure
Path saw the problem with Zynga and other shallow, far-reaching social services and went in the opposite direction—it's about depth, not breadth.
It's meaning vs. marketing; Victor Frankl vs. Don Draper.
There are some great lessons to be learned from these companies, but the most important takeaway is sustainability.
it was extremely difficult for companies to buy demographically targeted advertising at scale. Groupon used Facebook's then low ad prices to target 18–34 year-old women (their prime demographic) in specific geographic locations and actually managed to get people to click through to their ads (a feat not many companies have pulled off to date—Facebook ads' CTR is notoriously low).
facebook ctr
If you grow quickly and successfully, people are going to take aim at you, and if you can't think of a good reason people should continue using your product rather than switching to an upstart competitor, consumers certainly won't think of one for you. Prime your product for all stages of the funnel or you risk a crash as spectacular as your growth.
You had to request an invitation to join.
There was a waiting period.
They made the site seem friendly, cozy, and small.
The three points they stressed in the e-mail were "Be Nice," "Be Creative," and "Give Credit."
They encouraged people to join Facebook and Twitter.
They used traditional marketing paid acquisition channels like Free App A Day (a marketing service which paid apps use to make their product available for free download for one day only).
The problem with Social Cam’s move is that it looks a lot like plagiarism.
The company began targeting not only the young and middle-aged demographics, but the senior demographic as well (even folks up to 80 years old).
Field of Dreams approach: If you build it, they will come.
In his novel Another Roadside Attraction, the inimitable Tom Robbins said, "The most important thing in life is style…it is content, or rather the consciousness of content, that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us. It is style that makes us care."
why style of content is important
Quality is everything. Fake link juice and useless pages are a thing of the past.
The reason most folks know about it is because of its must-read online marketing blog written by Neil Patel, who made a name for himself as a journalist with such luminary publications as TechCrunch and Gawker Media. The
They use the principles of content marketing to create valuable, relevant content for a target audience with the goal of ultimately driving sales. It's
note on building contgent
It's available in a 40 minute webinar here. Below
need to check the video
Content marketing helps low-budget businesses compete with the big boys.
Content marketing can generate just as many leads as any other form of marketing.
Don't over-rely on text. The strength of the web is its focus on multimedia.
Content has to be unique. You can't just regurgitate information you found elsewhere and expect that your marketing efforts are going to put you over the top—that's the old way of doing things.
The Hustle Stage. This is where you work your butt off to get the initial 1,000 customers.
The Puberty Stage. This is the hormonal, unstable, rebellious, awkward period where you have between 1,001 and 50,000 customers.
The Scale Stage. Now it's time for the hockey stick. This is the phase between 50,001 and 500,000 users.
This is called cohort analysis, and it's all about figuring out how much revenue each customer generates over a specific time period—one week, one month, six months, etc. Once you have those numbers, you know the process: tweak, experiment, retool, analyze, change, grow, grow, grow.
steps to follow for hockey stick growth
Focus on sustainable growth.
Capture as much of the potential market as possible.
Share your expertise. Remember earlier when we said that content marketing is a huge trend right now? 37 Signals is so good at content marketing, they're almost a media company in their own right. Their bestselling books, REWORK, Getting Real, and Sort folio generate between $15,000 and $20,000 a month in revenues and provide incalculable brand reinforcement and lead generation.
The homepage is all about sign-ups… and uses video perfectly.
The sign-up process is as simple as possible.
if you have DropBox and you refer someone else who signs up, you'll both get another 500 megabytes of space.
The little blue Facebook and Twitter buttons on every single blog post on the Internet have gotten so ubiquitous that people are starting to tune them out altogether.
File sharing is incredibly easy.
DropBox runs a contest called Drop quest, in which users perform different activities like photo hunting (something like the old Where's Waldo? books) and win prizes like free storage or merchandise.
YouTube, on the other hand, decidedly did not and thus became the destination for everyone looking for copyrighted content.
PayPal knew that sending money over the Internet would be huge, and that if they moved quickly, they could completely corner the market by establishing a trusted brand. They did this with a very simple incentive: They paid people to use it. You read that right. They paid $10.00 to each new customer and $20.00 to the existing customer who referred them. They
He told the Hotmail development team to put a simple, clickable URL tagline at the bottom of every Hotmail: "P.S. I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail."At first, the founders hated the idea, but they implemented it
