The Flyy

[theflyy2]

Referral Program To Get 1 Million Users On The Waitlist Before Launch

How can a referral program get 1 million users on the waiting list to try your app even before launch?. Sounds impossible, right?

Sounds impossible, right? How can a referral program get 1 million users waiting to try your app even before launch? Acquiring users for an app is hard, but it’s even harder when the app doesn’t exist yet. This is the story of Robinhood, a US-based commission-free stock trading and investment app which is now valued at $11.7 billion. As of today, the app is used by 13mn+ users across multiple countries. It was founded in 2013 with the aim to democratize finance for all. The founding story Before staring Robinhood, the founders were running an enterprise startup that used to sell trading software to hedge funds. During this time, they realized that the big Wallstreet firms pay nothing to trade stocks, while most Americans were charged hefty commissions for every trade. This compelled them to do something about it and that’s how the idea of the Robinhood app was born. In every country, anything related to stocks or investments requires a lot of regulatory approvals and they can eat up a lot of time. The founders needed to test the market, so they decided to go ahead with a pre-launch campaign similar to Mailbox.   Read More..

[theflyy2]

Viral Referral Program | AppBrowzer Referral Program - Part 3

The role of Micro-influencers, Payout Challenges, Monetization in going viral with a referral program. Lessons From AppBrowzer Referral Program part - 3

This is the third and final post in the series of three blog posts on the AppBrowzer’s Viral Referral Program. Do you want to see how going viral looks like? Have a look at this. As you can see in the heatmap, users were downloading and using AppBrowzer from all over India. I was especially surprised to see users from Jammu & Kashmir. I was like — “how did we reach there?” The answer to that question lies in understanding the segment of Micro-influencers in India. Micro-influencers as an acquisition strategy I had no idea about micro-influencers and their network until May 2018. While interviewing for the position of marketing manager — I learned how he has helped few popular mobile app companies to reach out to Indian YouTubers (with 10,000 to 1 lac subscribers) and get them to review the apps on their channel. The strategy looked appealing to me. These YouTubers also had telegram channels with a very good subscriber base. However, I was concerned about the quality of users as these were run by school/college students, working professionals from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Read More..

[theflyy2]

Growth Hacking App Downloads | Rise of Bookkeeping Fintech Apps

I explored Khatabook and OkCredit with a growth hacking mindset and found something interesting. Their growth hack is similar to Hotmail's P.S. I Love you

Bookkeeping Apps are growth hacking cleverly in acquiring merchants. There are 70 million small merchants in India and a large part of them run neighborhood stores. They are the first port of call for most Indian households for everything from soaps to pulses and contribute heavily to the sales of large consumer goods companies. More than 40% of sales at these stores are made on credit. These merchants maintain the transaction records in a notebook which they call “bahi khata”. Multi-Million Dollar Digital Bookkeeping Apps                                                                                                           “Hisaab mein likh lena”, which translates to “put it on my tab”, is a very common phrase instead of immediate payment. This has led to the creation of multi-million dollar apps like Khatabook & OkCredit. Yes, Multi-million Dollars! Both these Apps are valued at $300 million & $227 million respectively. Khatabook has got 8 million active merchants in its platform, and OkCredit has more than 5 million merchants. With the rise of Cheap smartphones & low-cost Internet (thanks to Jio) — merchants have turned to apps to manage their bookkeeping and inventory. Data security and trust are the most critical factors for them to start using an app for their business. Word of Mouth or Growth Hacking Read More..

[theflyy2]

How to Use Gpay like Scratch Cards for 100x results in Referral Program?

Groww, a fintech app used Gpay like Scratch Cards to get 100x more signups via their referral program. Read the full case study here.

This is the story of Groww, which increased the performance of its referral program by 100x using Gpay like Scratch Cards. It is an investment platform that wants to make investing simple and accessible for everyone using technology. It was launched in April 2017, just 5 months after Demonetisation by ex-Flipkart employees with a sharp focus on the next generation of investors — read Millenials. You can find a lot of articles on the Internet that talk about — how they started, the vision, funding, roadmap, etc — so I am going to cut the chase and straight get to the exciting stuff. MVP to Product-Market Fit The most important thing before starting any referral program is to “have a product” 😉 and of course Product-Market Fit (PMF). Without PMF, you will just be wasting time & money on the referral program. Unlike most startups, the Groww team did not wait for their perfect native apps to test out the market. They created a progressive web app and launched it with just three mutual funds (their MVP). It took them just 2 months to build the first version. They iterated over the next few months — adding necessary features and removing unhelpful ones — based on users’ feedback to get PMF. They had a clear focus on whom to target — first-time millennial investors. However, they knew that it’s very hard to establish trust among this section of the population. Also, Groww was a small startup and not many had heard about them. To solve the problem, the founders themselves handled customer support — talking to customers & resolving their issues. This won them the trust of the early customer base and who in-turn started recommending Groww to their friends and family. Your customers will only talk about your product and recommend it to their friends/family if it is solving a real problem they have and think their friends/family will also benefit by using it. With this, Groww determined that there is a widespread set of customers that resonates with their product and started focusing on growth. Amplifying Word-of-mouth using a Referral Program Read More..

[theflyy2]

Paypal Referral Program | App Referral Program | Growth Hack Referrals

Paypal Referral Program - PayPal was one of the first Internet companies to drive viral growth at such a large scale using a referral campaign.

There is no blog on the Internet that goes without mentioning the PayPal Referral program when talking about viral growth using referrals. I have read most of them. They are informative. However, I couldn’t find an in-depth analysis that could help me plan and execute a referral program. So, in this post, I dive deep into their campaign to help you understand the inner mechanics of how it became such a successful and viral one. “A 10% daily growth rate” to “A $1.5 billion buyout” PayPal was one of the first Internet companies to drive viral growth at such a large scale using a referral campaign. In fact, Dropbox’s Referral program (probably one of the most famous cases of referral marketing on the Internet) was inspired by the PayPal Referral program according to the founder Drew Houston. The unique thing about PayPal Referral Program is that it went viral in an Internet era with no Facebook, Twitter, or Whatsapp! Can you imagine doing that today? I know you can and but you shouldn’t! 🙂 PayPal Mafia (as the founding team of PayPal is called) realized that getting new customers through advertising is too expensive and deals with large banks are time-consuming and most probably useless as old bankers didn’t understand much about digital payments and tech. The team decided that they need organic, viral growth, and the best way to do that was to reward users with money in exchange for referrals. So, they created a simple refer-a-friend campaign – When you refer someone, you would get $20 and the new person signing up would get $20. With this, PayPal started growing exponentially. The growth rate at one point reached 10% daily! They skyrocketed from 1 million users in March 2000 to 5 million users by September 2000. And then in 2002, it was sold to eBay for a whopping sum of $1.5 billion. The referral program played a vital role in such high-velocity growth. However, this wouldn’t have been possible if PayPal’s team didn’t understand the psychology of their users. It is very important that you ask the following questions before you start planning your referral program — what my users want? how do they think? what motivates them? what do they fear? etc… Social risk and two-way rewards in a Referral Program Read More..

[theflyy2]

10 posts!

Dropbox Referral Program is one of the most talked-about referral programs on the Internet. MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox in 2007. The cloud-based file storage and sharing service had built up a good early fan base within a year, concentrated primarily among the tech-savvy community centered in Silicon Valley. However, they were not able to break out beyond the tech-elite. The founders wanted to grow faster as the competition was fierce. One startup, Mozy had a two years head start in the cloud-storage market. Another one Carbonite had already raised $48 million vs $1.2 million raised by Dropbox. Houston tried to raise venture capital. However, in every meeting investors told him that the “cloud-storage market” was crowded with existing products, none of them had made much money, and the problem wasn’t an important one. On top of that, Tech giants —  Microsoft and Google were also gearing up to enter the cloud storage business. Dropbox had to grow really fast to stay relevant. Houston experimented with Search Engine Ads. The outcome was that they had to spend anywhere between $233-$388 on Ads to acquire a new paying customer. This wasn’t sustainable for a $99/year product. Then he reached out to Sean Ellis to explore what he could do to help them grow beyond their not-yet-big-enough pool of early adopters. Sean was moving out from the role of VP-Marketing at Xobni, a startup run by Houston’s friend Adam Smith. He had helped a lot of startups accelerate growth through his high-speed and cross-functional experimentation based approach — which he liked to call Growth Hacking. Yes, he is the one who coined the term! He is also the founder of GrowthHackers.com The underutilized potential of Word of Mouth Read More..

[theflyy2]

Viral Referral Program | AppBrowzer Referral Program - Part 3

The role of Micro-influencers, Payout Challenges, Monetization in going viral with a referral program. Lessons From AppBrowzer Referral Program part - 3

This is the third and final post in the series of three blog posts on the AppBrowzer’s Viral Referral Program. Do you want to see how going viral looks like? Have a look at this. As you can see in the heatmap, users were downloading and using AppBrowzer from all over India. I was especially surprised to see users from Jammu & Kashmir. I was like — “how did we reach there?” The answer to that question lies in understanding the segment of Micro-influencers in India. Micro-influencers as an acquisition strategy I had no idea about micro-influencers and their network until May 2018. While interviewing for the position of marketing manager — I learned how he has helped few popular mobile app companies to reach out to Indian YouTubers (with 10,000 to 1 lac subscribers) and get them to review the apps on their channel. The strategy looked appealing to me. These YouTubers also had telegram channels with a very good subscriber base. However, I was concerned about the quality of users as these were run by school/college students, working professionals from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Read More..

[theflyy2]

Payment Companies Growth Hacking in The Fight to Dominate QR Code Payments

Acquiring merchants is tough for the payment companies. Cashbacks are not going to help them in acquiring or retaining the merchant.

Imagine this – You are damn hungry and walk into a Juice Shop. You order a freshly made juice of Egyptian oranges and multi-grain cheesy grilled sandwich with chopped olives and jalapenos. After finishing up the tasty sandwich & the fresh juice, you take out your phone to pay for the order and point at the QR code. Which app are you using to make the payment? It could be PhonePe, Google Pay or If you are like me then it will be PayTM. You are most likely to see the QR code of PayTM, PhonePe or BharatPe because they are fighting really hard to be there. The Biggest Challege of the Payment companies It is really tiresome and expensive for the payment companies to acquire merchants for offline QR code payments. They have to deploy thousands of people on the street to paste unique QR code for each merchant or convince them to place their QR code stand on the counter. It does not end with the acquisition. They have to reacquire them because their QR code gets frequently replaced by some other payment company’s QR code. Read More...

[theflyy2]

Paypal Referral Program | App Referral Program | Growth Hack Referrals

Paypal Referral Program - PayPal was one of the first Internet companies to drive viral growth at such a large scale using a referral campaign.

There is no blog on the Internet that goes without mentioning the PayPal Referral program when talking about viral growth using referrals. I have read most of them. They are informative. However, I couldn’t find an in-depth analysis that could help me plan and execute a referral program. So, in this post, I dive deep into their campaign to help you understand the inner mechanics of how it became such a successful and viral one. “A 10% daily growth rate” to “A $1.5 billion buyout” PayPal was one of the first Internet companies to drive viral growth at such a large scale using a referral campaign. In fact, Dropbox’s Referral program (probably one of the most famous cases of referral marketing on the Internet) was inspired by the PayPal Referral program according to the founder Drew Houston. The unique thing about PayPal Referral Program is that it went viral in an Internet era with no Facebook, Twitter, or Whatsapp! Can you imagine doing that today? I know you can and but you shouldn’t! 🙂 PayPal Mafia (as the founding team of PayPal is called) realized that getting new customers through advertising is too expensive and deals with large banks are time-consuming and most probably useless as old bankers didn’t understand much about digital payments and tech. The team decided that they need organic, viral growth, and the best way to do that was to reward users with money in exchange for referrals. So, they created a simple refer-a-friend campaign – When you refer someone, you would get $20 and the new person signing up would get $20. With this, PayPal started growing exponentially. The growth rate at one point reached 10% daily! They skyrocketed from 1 million users in March 2000 to 5 million users by September 2000. And then in 2002, it was sold to eBay for a whopping sum of $1.5 billion. The referral program played a vital role in such high-velocity growth. However, this wouldn’t have been possible if PayPal’s team didn’t understand the psychology of their users. It is very important that you ask the following questions before you start planning your referral program — what my users want? how do they think? what motivates them? what do they fear? etc… Social risk and two-way rewards in a Referral Program Read More.. 

[theflyy2]

Viral Referral Program | AppBrowzer Referral Program - Part 3

The role of Micro-influencers, Payout Challenges, Monetization in going viral with a referral program. Lessons From AppBrowzer Referral Program part - 3

This is the third and final post in the series of three blog posts on the AppBrowzer’s Viral Referral Program. Do you want to see how going viral looks like? Have a look at this. As you can see in the heatmap, users were downloading and using AppBrowzer from all over India. I was especially surprised to see users from Jammu & Kashmir. I was like — “how did we reach there?” The answer to that question lies in understanding the segment of Micro-influencers in India. Micro-influencers as an acquisition strategy I had no idea about micro-influencers and their network until May 2018. While interviewing for the position of marketing manager — I learned how he has helped few popular mobile app companies to reach out to Indian YouTubers (with 10,000 to 1 lac subscribers) and get them to review the apps on their channel. The strategy looked appealing to me. These YouTubers also had telegram channels with a very good subscriber base. However, I was concerned about the quality of users as these were run by school/college students, working professionals from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Read More..

[theflyy2]

AppBrowzer was trending in multiple categories on the play store and were receiving over 500 requests per second! on their server

The day was January 6th 2019. There was nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the fact that we were launching a long drawn rewards campaign on AppBrowzer. We spent over 2 months planning and implementing this campaign. Finally, it was launch day. Before you know it, in comes January 7th and nothing has been quite the same. We got over 1 Lac downloads in just 24 hours! This number was only climbing. The next day, we were placed at the 1st spot on the trending section of the Google Play Store! Nobody in the team was expecting it. AppBrowzer was trending in multiple categories on the play store. We were receiving over 500 requests per second! We have never seen this kind of numbers since inception. It blew so much out of proportion that our servers crashed. The team managed to curb and solve the fixes because of our prior experience with a rewards campaign we ran a couple of years back in 2017. The campaign was a huge success, one that went viral in no time! Now after over 4 months, looking back, here is my learning and thoughts after the experience. About the AppBrowzer Rewards Campaign Previously, we had put in a lot of money in paid marketing and other traditional app marketing approaches. Most of them could only take us so far, eventually fizzling out into oblivion. As we were approaching 2019, we had to do something different, something bold. After much thought, we planned a variable rewards campaign. The objective of the campaign was two-fold. One to drive in user acquisition and the other was to increase engagement in the app itself. Normal Rewards vs Variable Rewards I had mentioned about our previous campaign. However, that campaign was different from this variable rewards campaign. How so? The campaign earlier in 2017 was a simple refer and earn cashback. The user would be given a fixed reward amount on the successful action of inviting a new user in the app. The campaign hit a bump and then fizzled away soon after. What was the difference? There wasn’t any anticipation or variability introduced. There is a contrast between normal rewards and a carefully thought variable rewards system. This campaign is different. It was implemented using the now well-known system of scratch cards. This would enable us to introduce variability to the campaign. The user would be rewarded with a scratch card for a particular action or task on the app. But how does introducing a variable element to the rewards system make it any different? UNDERSTANDING VARIABILITY Read More...

[theflyy2]

How to use Gpay like Scratch Cards for 100x results in Referral Program?

Groww, a fintech app used Gpay like Scratch Cards to get 100x more signups via their referral program. Read the full case study here.

This is the story of Groww, which increased the performance of its referral program by 100x using Gpay like Scratch Cards.

It is an investment platform that wants to make investing simple and accessible for everyone using technology.

It was launched in April 2017, just 5 months after Demonetisation by ex-Flipkart employees with a sharp focus on the next generation of investors — read Millenials.

You can find a lot of articles on the Internet that talk about — how they started, the vision, funding, roadmap, etc — so I am going to cut the chase and straight get to the exciting stuff.

[theflyy2]

Dropbox Referral Program - A story of 3900% Growth in 15 Months

Dropbox Referral Program was born out of founders desperation to grow faster. They were spending almost $400 to acquire a new customer for a $99 product.

Dropbox Referral Program is one of the most talked-about referral programs on the Internet. MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox in 2007.

The cloud-based file storage and sharing service had built up a good early fan base within a year, concentrated primarily among the tech-savvy community centered in Silicon Valley.

However, they were not able to break out beyond the tech-elite. The founders wanted to grow faster as the competition was fierce.

[theflyy2]

Payment Companies Growth Hacking in The Fight to Dominate QR Code Payments

Acquiring merchants is tough for the payment companies. Cashbacks are not going to help them in acquiring or retaining the merchant.

Imagine this –

You are damn hungry and walk into a Juice Shop.

You order a freshly made juice of Egyptian oranges and multi-grain cheesy grilled sandwich with chopped olives and jalapenos.

After finishing up the tasty sandwich & the fresh juice, you take out your phone to pay for the order and point at the QR code.

Which app are you using to make the payment?

It could be PhonePe, Google Pay or If you are like me then it will be PayTM.

You are most likely to see the QR code of PayTM, PhonePe or BharatPe because they are fighting really hard to be there.

[theflyy2]

Growth Hacking App Downloads | Rise of Bookkeeping Fintech Apps

I explored Khatabook and OkCredit with a growth hacking mindset and found something interesting. Their growth hack is similar to Hotmail's P.S. I Love you

Bookkeeping Apps are growth hacking cleverly in acquiring merchants.

There are 70 million small merchants in India and a large part of them run neighborhood stores.

They are the first port of call for most Indian households for everything from soaps to pulses and contribute heavily to the sales of large consumer goods companies.

More than 40% of sales at these stores are made on credit. These merchants maintain the transaction records in a notebook which they call “bahi khata”.

[theflyy2]

Gamification for Growth Hackers | Growth Hacks for Apps - Flyy Blog

A thought process for Growth Hackers to implement gamification in their product . How to decide about game mechanics like Points, Badges, Leaderboards etc.

Gamification for Growth Hackers : Thought Process

What is Gamification?

Simply put, Gamification is the act of making something game-like.

Today, we can see it in every aspect of our lives. Be it education, work, marketing, scientific research, and more –

For instance, A platform for GMAT tests increased the participation of students by 370% using Gamification.

And then 70% of the major employers are already using gamification to enhance performance and training at their companies according to Engagement Software Association.

Also In 2011, Gamification led to a breakthrough in HIV research. Gamers playing a protein-folding game called Foldit have helped unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme within three weeks that the scientists could not do for a decade.