5 growth hacks to learn from Google
Startup entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for growing their user base. You might have come across a jargon called “Growth Hacking”. If you have not then head out to this Neil Patel’s blog to know more about what it is and to read up some examples and how to get started.
Many startups out there are even hiring people for the position of “Growth Hacker”. As the name goes if you can hack your growth then why not? The ideas that you apply to “hack” your growth will obviously have to have a sustained effect, should be cost effective, should have a referral effect (mostly) and should accentuate the value of the service or product that you are offering. If you take an example of Facebook, people put out their photos & views out there with the single purpose of sharing this with other folks to garner likes and comments. By sending out their photos to people, they are automatically reaching out also to folks who did not have a Facebook account in the first place and getting them to signup for a FB account. This is true for any social network or for that matter for any app / service out there that has a social network element to it.
A good example to follow and to understand some tricks on Growth Hacking is the obvious Google. Below I take 4 examples of how Google has implemented growth hacking techniques for some of their apps and services.
Gmail
You can’t talk about Google without talking about one of their most popular service, Gmail. Most of you who got into emailing with Gmail in the early days might remember the frenzy they created around Gmail. Having a Gmail account almost made you part of an elite group and made you look more smarter than the ones that did not have an account. Gmail did two things to create this frenzy. One they gave a near unlimited storage of your emails (at least unlimited in comparison to the other players out there) and two they had an invite feature that limited the number of invites you had to only 5 folks. Having a Gmail invite with you suddenly made you a desirable friend to have in the circle. People were figuring out all possible ways in which they could get themselves a Gmail invite. This frenzy spread the word on Gmail like wildfire and literally everyone on the planet wanted an Gmail account.
Neighbourhood App
Google is trying out a similar technique as they did with Gmail in their latest social network service offering called Neighbourhood. Google has had many a failed attempts to create that Facebook killer service but has failed. Their latest service, Neighbourhood, aims to be the social networking app to have your for your .. dah.. neighbourhood. The interesting growth hack technique they have applied here is that your neighbourhood needs to have enough number of subscribers for it to open up for posting. If you as a person is interested in having a community on Neighbourhood app for your neighbourhood, you will not only sign up but will send the invites in your neighbourhood to sign up.
Too many “neighbourhoods” in the paragraph above!! Lets move on.
Google Pay
Let’s talk about money now! Google Pay has taken on the Indian payment ecosystem and P2P transfers by storm. It had the monicker of Google Tez when it started out as some may remember. Google Pay was not the first to enter the market. We had big players like PayTM, Mobikwik, Freecharge, PhonePe etc already in the market. The UPI revolution had caught on in India. Everyone bank, every wallet, every payment bank had a UPI app through which they were enabling P2P and B2C payments. Google Pay had to do something different to not only have a good entry into the market but to capture market share from entrenched players. They introduced a referral system into the app. You could refer a friend into Google Pay and get Rs 51 as referral bonus. Well, what is new in that you ask. Absolutely nothing! Their master stroke was really the variable rewards systems that they had in their scratch coupon system. How is that a growth hack you ask? For every transaction you stood a chance to win a scratch card that could get you varying reward amounts based on your luck!! Suddenly they made it a conversation topic where friends would share how much they were lucky that day to win Rs 25 through a coupon!!
Google Chrome
If there is one piece of software that is getting omnipresent I think it ought to be Google Chrome. Google Chrome enjoys around 70% market share on desktop browsers as per Statista. In my opinion, Google has done more to make Google Chrome the de-facto browser on every device on the planet than it has done to any other piece of software that they have created so far. Their investments into Android, creating a new desktop OS called Chromium, their investments into further the web standards and helping developers learn web technologies and do cooler and more engaging stuff all has Google Chrome in the center. I take this strategy of Google the last as not all companies can afford to do such an investment into making their product go viral.
Google made it an automatic choice for everyone to have Google Chrome on all their devices irrespective of the operating system with the seamless login across devices, common password vault, shared pre-fill information like addresses and credit card numbers, creating a shared browsing history across all devices and syncing bookmarks. One could save tons of time by having Google Chrome across all devices. It is just so convenient. Right? This may not technically be a growth hack but they have crafted the product in such a way that it makes it impossible for you to leave the Google Chrome ecosystem once you get acclimatised to it.
