Groupon: In the beginning, Groupon coupon deals had a tipping point before they were available meaning a minimum of X people needed to buy before you could get the deal. Thus you were highly motivated to share the deal with your friends so that you could get the deal. Sharing the deal with your friends also made you look good (EGO) and so you were motivated at yet another level to share.
Instagram: When you shared an Instagram image on Facebook or Twitter, you were taken to an Instagram page with the photo and a very strong call to action to download the app. This was especially true if you were on iPhone in the early days before they had an Android app. All you could do is view the image and download the app. Let's also not forget that Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey were among the early users who shared their photos freely on Twitter to their numerous followers.
Hardware Growth Hack:Your Karma - Pay-as-you-go WiFi hotspot
How do you growth hack a hardware product? Is it even possible? These guys prove that you can. So the Wifi hotspot you get from Karma is wide open. Anyone can hop on it and when a new user joins your hotspot, you get more bandwidth and they get to hop on free WiFi - win-win-win. Win for you for getting more free bandwidth, win for the mooch who's getting free WiFi, and win for Karma for acquiring a potential new user for essentially free.
Hotmail - this is old school Web 1.0 growth hacking. Hotmail was a provider of free email. At the end of your email message, they automatically added the signature 'Get your free email at Hotmail [link]'. Within hours of this their growth took the shape of the classic hockey stick growth, going from 3000 users a day to 1 million users in 6 months, to 2 million 5 weeks after and to 12 million users in 1.5 years.
Candy Crush - Top Grossing iPhone game. This sweet iPhone game is absolutelycrushing it right now - pun intended. They are doing over 45 million monthly users. So what happens when you die? You can do one of 3 things:
- wait until the reset timer runs out and you can play again in 30 minutes
- pay and you get to play again right away
- sell out your friends by inviting them to 'help' you
MS-DOS - Microsoft's Disk Operating System. They did a licensing deal with IBM where they would bundle the OS with IBM's PCs which were the dominant computers of the time.
Internet Explorer. At the time of the browser wars, Netscape was clearing leading the market share. Microsoft decided to package IE with XP. Game over.