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The Dropbox Story, Retold It’s time we take back growth hacking By LI-XING CHANG
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despise the words ‘growth hacking.’ What started as a useful term for teaching startups how to scale quickly has turned into one that means running marketing campaigns on a minuscule budget. It’s been tossed around the startup water cooler so often that it’s brought a toxic group of marketers into the industry. Just scroll through your LinkedIn feed, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. These marketers are the self-proclaimed industry influencers who spend more time writing articles or selling themselves as public speakers than executing campaigns. Currently valued at US$12 billion, Dropbox is one of Silicon Valley’s most popular startup tales, and it’s frequently misinterpreted as the ultimate growth hacking success story by those marketers. This article will show how it’s, in fact, a case of applying deep industry knowledge and unit economics to build a scalable user acquisition strategy. 60
JUMPSTART MAGAZINE
April 2019
Before they made marketing history
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hen Dropbox CEO Drew Houston founded the company in 2007, he utilized two different strategies to acquire customers before settling on the now popularized referral marketing campaign. Dropbox first acquired customers through content marketing by leveraging the community on Digg [digg.com], a website that showcases trending topics on the Internet. The team used a private launch video they created specifically for the outreach campaign, filling it with jokes and references only Digg readers would understand. By customizing their content to attract Digg users, Dropbox was able to grow their customer base by 1,400% in one day–from 5,000 to 75,000 users, according to Houston. These numbers are astonishing even by today’s standards, but content marketing proved to be an unsustainable scaling strategy for small
The Dropbox story has always been chalked up as a ragtag team of misfits who did the impossible at almost zero cost to them, which simply isn’t true.
