Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing My Startup To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million
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Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing My Startup To 100 Million Users & Losing $78 Million

In the online dating world—scratch that—in the dating world, guys are completely irrelevant. They just show up wherever the girls are. However, women want a good experience. Unfortunately, online dating—scratch that—dating can be a brutal experience for women. It’s especially harsh in the online world. Women are constantly bombarded with unwanted
... See more#ExplosiveGrowthTip 59: Small goals lead to small ideas. Double or triple your goals and use a company-wide brainstorming session to solicit ideas.
#ExplosiveGrowthTip 21: Your growth strategy can’t be an afterthought. A great product with a poor or traditional marketing plan will have poor results. Do you have a growth rocket strategy?
Financial resources for the new initiatives must be separated. As our core business continued to decline, it became very difficult to justify spending money on the new initiative. The biggest reason was that the core product had clear and immediate ROIs on any incremental investment, but the new product was an unknown, and thus had no measurable
... See moreThe biggest reason we needed something that was 10x better was because of what’s referred to as switching costs for the user. On dating and social networking sites such as Facebook, users have already invested substantial time in uploading photos, posting content, adding their friends, etc. Therefore, even if a marginally better product comes
... See moreTo provide the necessary reward system, we challenged our users to invite five new friends, and as a reward for their efforts, they would appear higher in search results, which would lead to more matches and messages. Eureka! Almost every user invited five of their friends.
Generally, one, thirty, ninety, and 360-day data should be sufficient to gauge retention rates, but it’s still important to discover why users keep coming back.
#ExplosiveGrowthTip 33: Write down the five people you spend the most time with. If you become the average of them, would you be happy with that outcome? If not, it might be time to upgrade your inner circle.
#ExplosiveGrowthTip 40: Don’t hire someone you wouldn’t want to have a beer with after work. Do you want to enjoy a beer with most of your coworkers?