Speaker 1: In 2008, this group of founders had come up with this idea of an air bed and breakfast. It's like a bed and breakfast, but with air mattresses. And they launched their website, but it was too early to drive revenue, and they were

Speaker 2: broke. This is the sales department slash Chris the Oracle's bedroom. Wake him up and say, all right, gotta get out, I gotta work.

Speaker 1: And they live in San Francisco, of all places, one of the most expensive cities to live in. We're going there next week, by the way, we're shooting a new Start a Planet episode and organizing a meetup. Anyway, they're short on cash and it's election year. So they come up with this Obama and John McCain themed zero boxes and sold them for $40 each. It's midnight, we're 1 in the morning, and Joe and I think, we're air bed and breakfast, the air beds aren't working out, maybe we could sell breakfast. And they made $30,000 from this hack. Soon after, they got accepted into Y Combinator, they raised $600K using this pitch deck. And you know the rest. As much as we like to hate on Airbnb for their crazy cleaning fees, the truth is that the founders of Airbnb are an incredible example of growth hacking. Just hustling your way to keep your company afloat. There are stories like this from virtually every startup out there. And I've collected my favorite ones to get you some ideas and get your brain juice pumping. Alright, so let's start with Dropbox. Because when you think about MVPs, you always think of these crappy websites or these bugged mobile apps. And what most entrepreneurs think a minimum valuable product is, is way too big.

Speaker 3: Only two orders of magnitude, too many features. I'm not exaggerating.

Speaker 1: Now, Dropbox's value proposition was this ability to sync your files across all of your devices. That's the whole point of this thing. So you just, you can't just build Dropbox for Windows and call that an MVP because it doesn't really test the value proposition. So instead of building five products for five different operating systems, they made this.

Speaker 4: And then link it to an account. So I typed in my information there, and it brings me to this web interface where I can see recent changes to the files in my Dropbox.

Speaker 1: Now, at this time, Dropbox didn't really work. It wasn't live. Most of the stuff that you're seeing was poorly built or not built at all. But the video worked. It went viral with hundreds of thousands of visits and a waitlist that went from 5,000 to 75,000 people after the video released. You could call this the effect of a viral video, but this is not an intentionally viral video, if there even is such a thing. Maybe you could argue the Dollar Shave Club video is intentionally viral. But for Dropbox, it was just a really, really useful product that didn't exist that people needed. Most importantly, the point here is validation before going out and spending millions of dollars building a platform. Again, I wouldn't call viral videos a growth hack. I mean, that Dollar Shave Club video is legendary, but that is something you can't really control. So you just shouldn't rely on that as your way to grow. The moral of that story is that you shouldn't assume that an MVP is a product. It can be something much quicker, much simpler, much faster, and, therefore, much cheaper. Another great example here is generating scarcity. Exclusivity is cool. It makes you feel special. And when done right, it just works wonders. When Gmail launched, you could only get a Gmail account if you got invited by someone else. And, you know, this is, of course, Google or Alphabet that we're talking about, so that doesn't really count as a growth hack. They're already a huge company. But that's the same tactic that Clubhouse used back in 2020. Clubhouse became the poster startup of the pandemic that launched in May with a solid product with good funding, but this gated community. You only had five invites to give, so you needed someone to invite you. And some people even got to selling these invites on eBay. This had them grow from 0 to 10 million active users in under a year, which is pretty freaking insane by any growth standards. Of course, the bubble popped when the pandemic ended. They're down 60% in monthly active users, as of the last report that we found. But that's stuff for a whole Company Forensics episode. Now, the thing with these growth hacks is tracking if they actually worked. That's a combination of Google Analytics, performance tracking, budget tracking. And for that, you're also going to need a spreadsheet. And that brings me to today's sponsor. Spreadsheets can make your life easier, but today they are just complicated and some people just won't touch a spreadsheet. And the guys from Rose.com, they're literally called R-O-W-S.com, have reinvented spreadsheets for the generation that runs on Slack and Notion. It's slick, it looks amazing, and it integrates with a bunch of tools like Analytics, Twitter, Facebook ads, Instagram, Salesforce, and Stripe. So you can just pull data instead of downloading, converting, and pasting. You can even connect your own custom APIs, all without add-ons, or scripts, or code. You can share your spreadsheets as a website for others to use, so any spreadsheet can become this interactive dashboard or a collaborative financial model. You can even embed them in your Notion docs. They also have a ton of great templates for various tasks, from blog analytics reports to social media follower tracking, and spreadsheets to plan your product launches, build UTM tracking campaigns, and a lot more. Thousands of teams are already using Rose, and you can get started for free by using the link in the description at rose.com. Okay, so next hack, I am not a fan of PayPal. Worst customer service experience ever. We have a business account, and it's not different from what you get as an individual. It just really sucks when you have to email these people. But you have to give them credit for the first internet give $20, get $20 referral growth That's really the first one in internet history. You see that every day now, but they were the first ones to do it. It brought them to 10% daily growth. As much as a frustrating product as PayPal is today, it graduated some of the most successful entrepreneurs from our generation, from Elon to the founders of YouTube and LinkedIn. And we, of course, already made a video about it. Okay, so next one is from one of my favorite brands out there, which is Peak Design. Startup, yes, though not your classic tech company kind. And yet, they have raised over $15 million on Kickstarter. Peak Design makes really cool, really greatly built camera products. Now, as a photographer, videographer, you can easily end up carrying $10,000 worth of camera bodies and lenses and filters and audio. So this is obviously an audience that is willing to pay good money for things that need to be organized and packed and well protected. So Peak Design has been coming up with these really well built, mostly well thought out products for photographers. And whenever they design something new, they just launch it on Kickstarter. They have built their entire business on the back of Kickstarter product launches. At this point, they could build a product of their own. They can just launch it. They have the money to do it and distribute it without needing Kickstarter. But the platform just makes a lot of sense for them. It lets them pitch a product and see if the audience actually wants it and is willing to buy it. It lets them collect the money up front. So there goes the risk of manufacturing. And people who back the project suddenly feel like they help, like they become brand evangelists. You feel like you've supported these guys. There's a direct connection with people. You can probably email them as well. It's very clear that they're using crowdfunding as a pre-sale, not because they truly need the money. And I frankly think it's a genius strategy, as well as most of their products that I just keep advertising for free all the time. Now that I mentioned connecting with a brand, that feeling that you helped these guys achieve their dream. This is really derived from a topic of gamification. I'm actually getting this from a book called Actional Gamification, which sort of divides gamification to these eight axes. The first one of which is called Epic Meaning and Calling. And it's this idea used in games that what you're doing helps serve this bigger purpose. That's the motivation to do it. And a lot of companies have leveraged this concept for growth. Why do you think people spend their free time just editing Wikipedia articles or fixing roads on Waze? Waze, which is now owned by Google, is a pretty remarkable driving app that won by conquering the world that Google hadn't, by enlisting people to do the work for them. If you live in the US or Europe, this has probably never been a real problem for you. Ever since Google Maps exists, it works where you live. And you get the best version of it because your city is covered there. That's not the case in the rest of the world. Remember, I'm from Costa Rica. This may be 2012, maybe 2015. For years, we had iPhones, we had smartphones, we had Google Maps and Apple Maps, I suppose. But they just didn't work at all. Maps were inaccurate or incomplete. There were no driving directions and certainly no traffic features. Waze became the default driving platform in the country, not because they managed to map Costa Rica before Google did, but because we did it for them. I was an early adopter, and the fun with Waze was that whenever I drove on a road that nobody had driven through before, you would pave it. Your car literally changed into this little paving truck, and this road was essentially added to the map by you, created by you. Maybe this is a shortcut that nobody knew about, and then you'd get points or credit for doing it, some sort of virtual nonsense that still makes you feel so good about yourself. I paved miles and miles of roads, I got a certified map editor badge, and the privilege of naming the road that I just paved. And me feeling good about this even today means that gamification worked. I served that bigger purpose. There's lots of stuff to learn from Waze, not just the gamification itself, which is by all means easier said than done, but their vision to target countries not yet served correctly by Google, or to figure out this way to do the work without having to add the data themselves. When you're trying to find a place that doesn't exist in Google Business, you're prompted to adding that place, but that's it for me. There's no pretty animation, there's no crown, or badge, or mayorship. Press F for foursquare. Anyway, to wrap this up, I'm going to talk about Airbnb again. After Airbnb raised some capital, they started struggling to get people on the platform. They're a marketplace, after all, so you need a supply side, which are the renters, and a demand side, which are the tourists. When the supply side goes in a platform and they don't get any activity, they quickly get turned off and they leave. So the challenge with marketplaces is that you have to have these two things happen at the same time, which is extremely difficult. In the startup industry, we would call this a chicken-egg problem because, obviously, the egg came first. So, to get the egg, they started manually reaching out to anybody that was creating posts for short-term rentals on Craigslist, and offering them to list it on their platform as well. This eventually turned into this automated bot, obviously not authorized by Craigslist. Then, one step further, they eventually started auto-posting every single Airbnb listing on Craigslist. The post would emulate Craigslist's style and link back to the Airbnb website. These hacks don't scale. They can't be the backbone of your company's growth. But remember, growth is trial and error. Not all marketing channels last forever, so you always need to be exploring new ones. More importantly, building a business is more about thinking on the spot and moving quickly. In the context of a startup, this is really a small win in a series of hundreds of wins and losses that you'll have to go through over the years. Hope these all serve as inspiration for you guys. Thanks a lot for watching.