

Lessons learned from growing LinkedIn to 175 million users - sandimac
http://quibb.com/links/lessons-learned-from-growing-linkedin-to-175-million-users

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chrisacky
"Control + F"

"password" - Zero Result found

Apparently, after 175 million users, they haven't learnt anything about
correctly storing passwords. _chuckles_

\--------

Control + F "Make it impossible for users to unsubscribe to marketing emails"

I think there was a typo in the paragraph that is titled "Reduce friction vs.
Increase desire", because for a lot of things there is ridiculous friction. I
have email addresses that I have never signed up to LinkedIn receiving
emails... Any time I want to unsubscribe to the emails.. I can't.

In order to unsubscribe, I have to sign in, but guess what, I never actually
created any account so can't sign in.

\--------

LinkedIn offers a lot of value to (nearly?) everyone in business, I don't deny
that, but the article was a little flakey and was more of an advertisement for
Quibb than any substantial lessons you can learn from how LinkedIn has grown.
(Ps. Sandi, I like Quibb, so I'm not bashing you)

~~~
sandimac
sure - totally agree re: passwords/unsubscribe/etc. I'm not saying LinkedIn
has the best product or user experience or retention/engagement - but they
have done a great job growing the userbase.

as for flakey - maybe you're smarter than most of the Growth Hacker Conference
attendees :) when Elliot surveyed the audience about which channel they'd
focus their time/effort on, the vast majority chose the channel with the
lowest conversion rate (i'm assuming they thought it had the most potential
upside?) - which is exactly the opposite approach that Elliot took (focus on
what's working, let engaged users do the work, reduce engaged user friction),
and what actually allowed them to grow.

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onetwothreefour
Also: spam your user base with irrelevant stuff on a daily basis even when
they've opted out of every email possible. Pretend it's an "accident".

~~~
Firehed
I'm nearly to the point with LinkedIn where I want to take them to court. What
they're doing is a clear violation of CAN-SPAM. I generally feel that kind of
thing is a waste of the courts time, but I simultaneously feel that marking
the messages as spam in gmail isn't doing enough to curb their annoying and
illegal behavior.

~~~
onetwothreefour
Indeed.

And you know what annoys me more? There are probably 10s of LinkedIn engineers
on HN who are probably reading this thread and know about this illegal
spamming and should know better then to leave that unchecked.

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julianz
While they're clearly doing some things right, if I get another unwanted email
mentioning the phrase "thought leader" I'm not going to be responsible for the
results.

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benologist
There has to be a lesson somewhere about posting stuff on your company blog
that targets your company's market instead of HN.

~~~
rrhoover
The HN audience has a high overlap with Quibb. Although less technical and
development focused, I discover a lot of good startup and industry-centric
content through the site.

~~~
benologist
HN is a public forum for sharing news with a large group of mostly strangers
around the world. Quibb is for sharing news within a very small and private
group of people that you work with and all the speech and thought restrictions
that implies. That's not very high overlap.

Anyone can convince themselves this is their ideal audience and get some iota
of validation by pooping out articles for us.

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alphanull
"SEO"'ing you're way up to the top helps, too. LinkedIn is cancerous.

