Growth Hacking - A How To Guide On Becoming A Growth Hacker by Jose Casanova & Joe Casanova

Author:Jose Casanova & Joe Casanova [Casanova, Jose]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-08-12T14:00:00+00:00

Path

Path is a social network that builds on the old Live Journal format; it’s a forum for keeping a personal journal or "path" of your life. It's structured a lot like Facebook’s timeline, but with a deeperfocus on the intimate details of your life—who you're with, where you are, what kind of music you're listening to, and so on. A critical feature of this site is its intuitive nature; it learns about you as you use the service and automatically posts your status when you visit a new neighborhood or city, which means that the people who follow you receive more updates without you having to put in extra effort posting your whereabouts.

As Facebook has grown into the worldwide social networking site, there has been an increased demand for alternatives. Path has emerged as one of the top contenders for the title of "anti-Facebook." In one year, they expanded their user base from three to ten million people. They accomplished this through a particularly savvy combination of product differentiation and growth hacking.

Path’s goal is to capturing the market through user adoption and engagement by focusing on Middle American values. They’re targeting people who want to keep their circle limited to family and close friends, not thousands of strangers. Unlike Facebook, where you may be connected to dozens or hundreds of people who you've never met offline, Path aims to deepen your existing relationships. Of course, this strategy has presented the company with interesting adoption challenges.

To overcome these challenges, Path has focused on making it as easy as possible to integrate its social media platform into users’ existing social regiments. For all the hype about being the "anti-Facebook," the creators of Path are actually pro-Facebook. Path is integrated with Facebook; however, it limits individual users to 150 friends. This is based on research that reveals the individual human brain can only deeply know around150 people—the maximum size of a human tribe back in the hunter-gatherer days. Path also has seamless integration with users' address books, allowing users to easily peruse their phone and e-mail contacts and add them to the service.

With the 150 user limit, you might think that Path has shot itself in the foot. After all the talking we've done about virality, here's a social network that devalues external sharing! It's true that the user limit is a viral barrier, but it's quite clever. Look at Zynga, which was maximally optimized for external sharing but about as shallow as anything "social" can be. Path saw the problem with Zynga and other shallow, far-reaching social services and went in the opposite direction—it's about depth, not breadth. This powerful differentiation gave users such an incentive to try it over the larger, less personal social networks that the site has attracted a mass amount of people. Also, because there is a user limit, people are more careful about who they invite as friends and followers. So, when someone asks you to be part of their Path, it's not just another meaningless friend-spam, it's actually a compliment.

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