GROWTH HACKING CASESTUDY - DROPBOX RECIPE TO 500 MILLION USERS!
Do everything you were not allowed in school: spy on your competition, plagiarize their work and get to the top without apologizing.
How Can We Hack Our Way to 500 Million Users Like Dropbox Did?
The answer is simple: Copy them.
Why reinvent the wheel when someone else already spent millions of dollars in split testing gamification to perfection? Don't underestimate this post. The screenshots below are worth millions in R&D.
The Secret of Dropbox is Gamification
Every step along the way, the user is reward for his participation in the game. Like a trail of cookie crumbs, the user is lead step by step to his final goal. You can click on the images below to see them full screen
Step 1 - The Homepage of Dropbox
The homepage is amazingly clean, most of the attention is directed toward signing up. There unique selling proposition is clear: "Get to all your files from anywhere, on any device, and share them with anyone."
Textbook perfect.
Step 2 - Download the App
Step 3 - Simple Step by Step Tutorial at the Top of the Screen
Once the email address as been verified, one of the step is to invite your friends to get more space. Steemit.com can plagiarize that 100% with a "invite your friends to get more STEEMPOWER" in the tutorial process.
Step 4 - The Perfect Invite Page
Everything about that page is perfect. Clear value proposition and multiple ways to get the goodies.
Step 5 - The Email Copy For the Person Invited
The amount of time and split testing put into that simple email must be staggering. A different of only 0.5% can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to dropbox. Never underestimate the power of copy and design in email marketing. Steemit can literally steal it and replace a few words to benefit from all of this.
Step 6 - The Most Magical Page in The Whole Wide World
So many ways to get more of what the person is there for to begin with! It's like the ultimate candy shop for the new user!
I am not sure it would be the best landing page for Steemit since the nature of the platform is social media BUT I can see this page being the first notification whenever someone as just finished sign into the platform.
Put that in your pipe and Steemit!
This funnel do cost money to Dropbox just like it would for Steemit but compared to the cost of advertising on Facebook and Twitter, it would be marginal...not even comparable.
I hope you've got value from this post. Please upvote it if you think it should be one of the main focus on the marketing side of the U/I development.
I would say copy Reddit but yes copying success is often a path to repeating it.
I beg to differ. Dropbox has a currency that has value (cloud space) while reddit doesn't. Because Steemit has a currency, we can do things that reddit can't and never will.
But how is Steem supposed to compete with SAFE Network, Storj, and other technologies far better suited to playing the Dropbox game? I just think Reddit is a closer fit and isomorphic design from which to copy.
We don't compete with dropbox...and what I suggest has nothing to do with that. We are in the social media game. But gamification principles applies wherever you can give something of value in exchange for actions. Dropbox and steemit can gamify because it has a currency that has value. Reddit doesn't have that. Also, the branding and design of Dropbox is extremely close to Steemit.com...which make the copying even easier.
I do support the use of gamification and think that is a good idea for psychological reasons. I think it requires studying some of the scholarly papers on gamification though and not merely copying Dropbox. If the goal is to be part of the state of the art then there are academic papers with results on what has the greatest psychological effect with regard to gamification and viral marketing.
It's okay to take a basic model off some other idea but always important to improve on what you borrow.
Step 1 has your (or someones) personal email address in the screenshot.
and? Unless it's an invite you can't resend email unless someone confirm their address after you sign up. That's what legal and that's how you get to 500 million users.
Lol! I mean the actual screenshot has a personal email in there. If you're ok with that nm. Just not sure if you want random strangers emailing you from this post.
oh ah! thanks @hannixx42. I really don't since it's a sockpuppet gmail I created just for this post. :-)
Great idea.
But please, do not hire start hiring government insiders like Condoleeza Rice and start pushing invasive updates that scare your userbase away. http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dropbox-infinite
of course!
Don't hire them but encourage these insiders to use Steem for sure.