GROWTH is one of the most desired and elusive functions in crypto marketing. By design, the definition of GROWTH is ambiguous. Why? Because each time “what it takes” to get parabolic expansion is different and varies on the stage your industry is at. How come?
The modern Growth function emerged in Silicon Valley during the 2000s and became a formal discipline across companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Dropbox by the early 2010s.
However, this is not fully correct. From the perspective of a marketer trained as an advertiser first, in the US it all started with Hopkins & Lasker and, later on, Ogilvy, building on the idea of measuring direct customer responses and scaling advertising campaigns to countrywide reach based purely on performance. Empires were built around the usage of coupons to test demand before country-wide scaling.
📖 Coupon Growth Retail Merchandise Playbook
Step 1: Send coupons for a new product in the existing category to all residents of city X at an ultra-low price.
Step 2: BD reaches out to all local merchandisers and announces an unbelievable refund to those who stock the goods and sell them to coupon users. The refund is much larger than a regular product margin and almost covers the product cost.
Step 3: All of a sudden, with 1 month's worth of incentives, not only is the whole city stocked up on your merchandise, but the retail crowd has also gotten a taste for it. And if the product was great…
Well, brands like Palmolive and many others used variations of this playbook decades ago
Many decades later, YouTube rediscovered the same principle through subscriber notifications, sharing loops, and embedded content, allowing creators to distribute videos through existing social networks.
10 years ago, Calendly used the same logic and benefited from a built-in distribution loop: every meeting invitation introduced new users to the product. The model spread particularly well among professionals whose work depended on scheduling, like educating professionals. Pinterest used the same logic as part of their growth engine, as did many, many others.
Facebook upped it a notch, moving away from almost-harmless email activations into the realm of our real attention with real-time notifications on mobile devices. This was the beginning when GROWTH transformed again. It became not only about individualized reach but also about inducing dopamine and creating positive feedback loops to make you go back and open the app again. This gentle nudge you feel when you need to check your socials early in the morning and right in the middle of the night - this is it.
Instagram and TikTok, especially, really perfected the art of sucking you into the feed and not letting you out as long as possible.
Interestingly enough, companies like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, and other apps connecting the supply and demand sides went even further, applying game theory to the hard supply side (drivers, etc.), really optimizing incentives, dispatch systems, and work allocation to influence driver behavior. The play here is to keep you driving as long as possible by using both large and small order sequences, whole numbers in $ or hours, along with many other small cues that affect the psychology of drivers and couriers.
Lastly, the crypto industry has found this almost unfair advantage, when you could build a great product and get integrated into a bigger player with existing distribution, infrastructure, or order flow, etc. Companies like this are usually infrastructure products, and most of them that were able to get in have been profitable for quite some time. GROWTH here was this quick hack to get in.
Sorry to spoil everyone’s excitement, this playbook only works in the industry driven by early adopters. GENIUS Act has changed it - the market has matured almost overnight, although it's been 6 months.
First of all, getting in now will be exponentially harder, since it’s not only crypto bros building now; there is a plethora of TradFi and other industry professionals with clever solutions who are no longer sitting on the sidelines. And the amount of the competition is growing by the day.
In more mature markets, GROWTH is often inseparable from well-executed marketing and branding. Rules have changed. Now, even if you have a great product, but no one knows you, it will be much harder even to convince your partners to rely on your tech. I call this “influencer effect” - If you are not attracting your pipeline, chasing it might be just too tough.
Many decades ago, Hopkins, Lasker, and Ogilvy were driving exponential growth for tens of nationwide companies with simple tools like positioning & messaging, thoughtfully designed, strategically placed, and properly amplified.
Nothing has changed. The only question
- can you execute?