
Ways to scale user growth - _pius
http://andrewchen.co/2014/07/08/theres-only-a-few-ways-to-scale-user-growth-and-heres-the-list/
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tomblomfield
A few core concepts could probably use a little more clarity;

\- Real "Virality" is very different from "Word of Mouth", and implies that
users bring others users to the product _in the process of using it_ , to some
greater or lesser degree. Photosharing apps are a good example. Uber to a
lesser extent - I first learned about the service when my friend ordered a
black car. Zynga's games were notorious for trying to manufacture virality by
rewarding facebook friend-invites with more coins/gold/whatever.

\- Inbound and outbound sales are very different beasts. The former is _the
result_ of SEO, PR, word-of-mouth, content marketing etc. Trying to "scale
inbound sales" won't get you far. If you have a working outbound sales
process, on the other hand, you can often ramp it up several-fold.

\- "Channel partnerships" can be extremely useful, especially when selling to
SMBs. A recommendation for some accounting software from your bank manager is
very persuasive.

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mandeepj
dropbox's referral case can also be mentioned here along with Zynga

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mandeepj
> Trying to "scale inbound sales" won't get you far.

Sorry, I do not agree with you on this. Could you please elaborate more? Lot
of people do online search before buying anything so if you can rank hire in
search results then that will automatically lead to more sales.

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tomblomfield
Sure, and that's addressed in the article - "3\. SEO" \- which you can scale.

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jfoster
This article more or less is my understanding of user acquisition, but I've
never understood where Atlassian fits in this model. I'm sure that today they
have mostly switched to the "Sales" model. (despite claiming to not have
"salespeople", I understand they just call the role something else)

I don't think it's always been that way for Atlassian, though. They started
out as just a few people and certainly earlier on it seems they didn't do much
sales. I know that they blogged lots and were quite well-known for their
blogging, but I can't imagine that being enough for them to grow the way that
they did.

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dzink
I've seen one senior engineer at a large firm start using Atlassian in 08. He
then recruited his team to use it, then the division (at 4k or so per year),
then he made it his primary "chief developer" role to customize Atlassian
products for the company, until he just left the company because he was making
too much money building widgets for the Atlassian marketplace. It was
impressive. As far as I know he wasn't compensated in the beginning - he just
really liked their products and how well they integrated with each-other to
make deployments safer and developers less likely to need supervision by him.

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webmaven
This article matches up fairly well with the lean startup 'engines of growth',
except that the 'sticky' engine is missing.

That said, I never really understood how 'sticky' was an engine of growth, it
seems more like an 'engine of retention'.

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lbotos
I'm going to assume sticky is an engine of growth because if you aren't
retaining users you need to bring on more to make up for the difference that
aren't staying.

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webmaven
Sure, but that's true of the other engines of growth, it isn't anything that
is unique to sticky.

IOW, the other EoGs are typified by how they acquire new users from the
actions of existing ones. For 'viral' it is the user activity that causes new
users to join, for 'paid' it is that revenues from existing users are used to
purchase new users (typically through advertising), but 'sticky' doesn't say
_anything_ about getting new users from existing users at all, it only says
you get new (or ongoing) _revenue_ from existing users.

While this means that if 'sticky' is your model you have to focus even more on
lowering churn, it still doesn't say anything about how you _grow_.

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joslin01
Hey Andrew!!! :) Nice article

