The hack that increased users by 3900%

Nina Gordon
October 6, 2019

Dropbox is a $4 billion company that’s spent next to nothing on advertising.

Instead, they’ve implemented numerous growth hacks to acquire customers at scale. Rather than paying per customer with traditional advertising methods they’ve used hacks where the cost is in the execution and the benefits to the company are ongoing at no extra cost.

Their referral scheme grew Dropbox’s registered users by 3900% in 15 months. They doubled their user base every three months between 2008 and 2010. 

And it’s so simple. Dropbox is a storage space in the cloud. People are always gathering more and more files and they need somewhere to save them. So what’s the best thing Dropbox could offer their users in return for inviting their friends? More space, 500mb to be exact. And their friends get an extra 500mb too.

That’s not all they did. There were various other steps that made it a success, just little tweaks to their overall product. They made the referral scheme part of the onboarding process.  Gave users a clear view of the benefits throughout their product. And made the whole referral process super easy to do. They even let their users know which of their friends had and hadn’t taken them up on the offer.

Dropbox used a set of tools, methodologies and behaviours that have allowed them to scale en masse with fewer resources. They’ve fully embraced the startup mindset, and come out on top. Businesses that want to be in the right time and place to take advantage of such opportunities need to know how to move fast. Take risks. Experiment with new things, new products, new audiences. In short, they should act like a startup. 

Jolt. Teaching startup business.  

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