How Startups Like Figma, Facebook, and Airbnb Found Sudden Growth Inflections
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What precedes an inflection in growth?
Q: My product is growing, but slowly. I’m wondering if growth will ever take off. What have you found most often precedes an inflection in growth?
I love this question. Though I’ve written about how to kickstart a product’s growth, ways to boost growth, and what it feels like once you’ve found product-market fit, I’ve never looked into what precedes sudden inflections in growth.
To find an answer, I spent the past couple of weeks researching inflection points for two dozen of today’s most successful products, and I found a few surprises:
- The majority of growth inflections sprang from a product improvement
- A surprising number of growth inflections came from an unexpected external event, without the product changing at all
- Many of the most durable inflections came from the company leaning into their primary growth engine (e.g. SEO, virality)
Below, I’ll share stories of growth inflections from Figma, DoorDash, Tinder, YouTube, Snap, Airbnb, and many others. Here’s a quick overview:
It’s important to note that long-term sustainable growth is never as simple as just one thing. Although a single moment can (and often does) ignite growth, to build a durable business you’ll eventually need to get all three pieces right:
- Ongoing product improvements, to build something people want/need
- Ongoing events that get the word out
- A well-oiled growth engine
But it often starts with a single moment. Let’s explore these stories.
Thank you, Badrul Farooqi (Figma), Cem Kansu (Duolingo), ChenLi Wang (Dropbox), Evan Goldin (Lyft), Jeff Chang (Pinterest), Jonathan Badeen (Tinder), Max Mullen (Instacart), Merci Grace (Slack), Micah Moreau (DoorDash), Lauryn Isford (Airtable), and Steve Chen (YouTube) for contributing to this post.
1. Product improvements
Though Andrew Chen popularized the Next Feature Fallacy—the mistaken belief that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product—interestingly, the most common source of growth unlock appears to be adding that one additional feature. This doesn’t mean that you are one feature away from 🚀, but it does tell me that a better product experience is often at the heart of unlocking growth.
Figma (releasing team libraries)
“The biggest inflection began with the public release of Team Libraries in 2017 (about a year after launch). The sheer amount of leverage that it provided to design teams made Figma such an obvious winner against Sketch/Framer/etc. It changed the entire conversation with large teams.”
—Badrul Farooqi, first PM at Figma
Snap (launching ephemeral messaging, Stories, and face filters):
“Initially for Snap, the biggest growth accelerations consistently came from raw, pure, product-innovation-driven growth. Ephemeral messaging in 2011, Stories in 2013, and face filters in 2015—those drove our growth.
When IG copied Stories, it may have curtailed Snap’s growth in some international markets, and maybe with older demos where IG already had penetration, but it didn’t stop us. Snapchat was already dominant with younger users, in the West in particular.
There was also stuff like Bitmoji, Geofilters, Group Chats, etc., but those three above were the hits that everyone wanted to copy.
Later, growth was driven by much more traditional growth tactics, like performance, localization, notifications, and network expansion.”
—Anonymous early Snap employee
Facebook (adding translations, and then mobile)
“This is the timeline of Facebook from 2004 to 2015, their growth story.
Facebook had an excellent data science team, and they came to the conclusion that Facebook would be roughly 400 million users by 2015. Now we know that wasn’t really true, as they actually started growing really fast in 2008-2009. This actually was a result of something that the growth team came up with: translations. You want to make your product available for as many people in the world, and Facebook started hitting the limit on people who spoke English. They assumed that since the content was in the language while Facebook was in English that it would continue to scale, but that wasn’t the case. So they implemented this new platform that automatically translated Facebook into hundreds of languages, and the growth re-accelerated.
The same thing started to happen again in 2010-2011: mobile. The data science team was forecasting Facebook to be about 700 million users, or something like that, and because most of those people were using Facebook on computers, they hadn’t intended this massive shift that was happening in 2010-2011, which is people getting smartphones. Facebook had to switch entire teams to mobile—they even have large training classes for engineers who just are learning mobile. […]
The initial forecast of Facebook’s growth was about 400 million people, but Facebook today is an over-2-billion-user platform. If there’s anything we can learn from this, it’s that if you’re intentional about growth and you’re really trying to sort of break through these forecasts in these ceilings, you can grow really, really fast.”
—Gustaf Alstromer, YC Partner
Netflix (tweaking the combination of offerings)
“The original idea of Netflix didn’t work. But hundreds of failed experiments later, and after many a sleepless night of worrying, we finally tested the unlikely combination of ‘No due dates, no late fees’ and subscription that ultimately was the thing that ended up working. And boy, did it work. Within days of testing it, we knew we had a winner.
Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of sudden we couldn’t keep up. Our previously prodigious amounts of inventory were suddenly not enough. Engagement soared, churn went dramatically down. Everything started working!
If there was a moment when Netflix stopped being a startup and became a real company, it was then.”
ーMarc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO
Tinder (launching their Android app—plus see part 2 below)
“We saw one of our biggest growth spikes when we launched our Android app. We knew there was pent-up demand for it, and we also knew we couldn’t really expand to markets outside of the U.S., U.K., and Australia without Android. This also coincided with localizing the app with translations. We didn’t really bother doing much international marketing and promotion until we had all of that in place. At the same time, we were so plagued by server issues and other issues that I was likely distracted and scared that we were going to lose it all.”
—Jonathan Badeen, co-founder
Duolingo (launching on mobile)
“The first big growth unlock for Duolingo was the launch of the mobile apps, and betting on mobile as our main platform. Duolingo originally launched as a website. In October 2012 we launched the iPhone app, and it quickly became the number-one downloaded app in the education category. We sent traffic from our website to fuel these downloads. We launched the Android app in May 2013, about seven months after the iPhone app launch. At the end of 2013, Apple chose Duolingo as the iPhone app of the year.”
—Cem Kansu, VP of Product
In marketplace businesses, the user product experience is tied directly to the quality and quantity of supply, and so, unsurprisingly, the biggest improvements, and thus inflections, in marketplace businesses usually come from improving supply:
Airbnb (expanding internationally and adding translations)
“No sooner had we learned to build supply than competition came knocking on our door in the form of a European copycat. (And when I say copycat, I mean it. We even found our job reqs on their site—some with Airbnb still listed as employer!) The competitor had just received $90 million in funding and ramped up to 400 employees in two months. Our guests use Airbnb to travel, and if we lost Europe, we really wouldn’t be in the business of travel anymore. Growing on our own timetable was officially out the window.
We needed to change tactics and go on an all-out blitz to capture as much of the European market as we could. First and foremost, that meant we had to be local. It was September 2011, and our site was woefully U.S.-centric. In just over three months, I purchased top-level domains for nine countries, assembled a global translation team, contracted with Akamai to reduce site load time, and restructured the UI on every front-facing interaction to support long text strings (crucial when you go from ‘average’ to ‘durchschnittliche’). We also shifted to a multi-currency payment platform.
Logistics in hand, it was time to build supply and demand. We’d already seen the value of having people on the ground, so we opened offices in eight European cities. [Co-founder and CEO] Brian [Chesky] cared about the types of people we hired, focusing on ‘missionaries’ and not ‘mercenaries.’ Emphasizing culture, we brought in employees who cared about and who wanted to grow the community. We also bought Accoleo and Crashpadder, two smaller players in Europe, to seed supply in Germany and the U.K. On the demand side, we had to think broader, with potential travelers coming from all over Europe. In January 2012, to officially launch in Europe, we did a PR blitz to drum up as much press as possible with campaigns like ‘Rent the country of Liechtenstein on Airbnb.’
This pace might sound too fast—and it was. The night before the international launch, we were still trying to get the homepage translated! And on the home front, we were undeniably neglecting operational challenges. But it was worth it. When competition comes after you, move ridiculously fast. Marketplaces are normally winner-take-all markets. If we had lost ground to European competitors in 2012, we may have never gotten it back.”
—Jonathan Golden, first PM
DoorDash (increasing selection)
“Everything we did was along the vectors of ‘selection, quality, and affordability.’ Which was also what we found to be the order of importance for customers. Meaning, price was actually the least important factor in the early years.
In terms of increasing selection, the biggest early unlock was geographic expansion to the suburbs with big enterprise merchants like Cheesecake Factory, Chick-fil-A, and Chipotle, as well as local heroes (like Torchy’s Tacos and Jon & Vinny’s).”
—Micah Moreau, early growth leader
Lyft (unlocking supply)
“I recall three big inflections in Lyft’s early growth:
One, Surge pricing. I consider better pricing for ride hailing to be one of Lyft’s great innovations in the market. Before Lyft, there was massive consumer demand going unfulfilled, because taxis (in most cases) had flat pricing 24/7/365. We fixed that, and allowed prices to float up and down as supply/demand ebbed and flowed. Launching Prime Time in late 2013 really helped us start bringing in way more supply to meet the crazy demand we had.
Two, Launching our own driver applicant tracking system. There’s always a buy-vs.-build conversation in startups, and our big one was whether to build our own onboarding system in-house or rely on something else. We’d been relying on Salesforce as the applicant tracking system for drivers, but it was super-leaky and resulting in slow turnarounds, complex workflows, and a slow process. I could be wrong on these numbers, but I think average time to complete the driver application process was 21 days in 2013. So we invested heavily in building our own applicant tracking system. The system did things like automatically run DMV checks, move applicants from one status to another based on triggers, enable access to driver mode automatically once all steps were complete, etc. This helped bring the average application time down to only about seven days! When our biggest need was more drivers, this was a massive unlock.
Three, Remote launches. Early in the process, we micromanaged market launches. We hired a team, opened a local office, and a Lyft staff member interviewed all drivers. This was good for the first few markets, but it meant our ability to launch new markets was slow and constrained. We only had a small number people on our launch team. So by late 2013, our team started working on a mix of operational and product improvements that would allow us to launch remotely. Things like (1) nailing the ops process/playbook for a new market and (2) launching ‘mentoring,’ which allows drivers to train other drivers, through the Lyft Driver App itself—the trainee’s first ‘ping’ would be the mentor requesting to train them, and they’d go through a ride-esque experience to meet up with them. The driver would use their mobile app to go through a checklist. This allowed us to launch 24 markets in a single day, in one fell swoop, something that would have been unimaginable months earlier.
—Evan Goldin, first PM at Lyft
2. External event
On the other end of the spectrum are growth inflections that require no change to the product. Instead, they come from some external event (which are sometimes engineered by the company).
Tinder (Sochi Olympics and return to college)
“There were two moments I really remember as our biggest growth inflections. One was the Sochi Olympics, which coincided with Valentine’s Day. Jamie Anderson (Olympic Gold Medal winning American snowboarder) did an interview that included Tinder at the Sochi Olympics. She was discussing Tinder being ‘next level’ in the Olympic Village, and the need for her to remove it from her phone due to the distraction. It caught us by surprise, but our PR team (led by Rosette Pambakian) went hard on that and pushed to enlarge and maximize that news cycle.
Another inflection was that first return from college holiday break. We really started growing then. I can only assume people in college went home and told their high school friends about Tinder, who then brought that info back to their own colleges.”
—Jonathan Badeen, co-founder
YouTube (SNL and Ronaldinho videos)
“In the first year, back in 2005, two videos achieved virality with millions of views that differentiated them from the vlogging and personal videos at the time. One was a video from Saturday Night Live and another was a video of Ronaldinho juggling a soccer ball off the goalpost.
We learned that the Ronaldinho video was actually uploaded by Nike’s marketing department as an experiment. After they saw how the video performed, it culminated with Nike inviting us up to Oregon to talk about content collaboration. I admire them for continuing to always be pushing the envelope when it comes to exploring content distribution.
The SNL clip was uploaded by a YouTube user for the purpose of only sharing. After NBC saw the upload and saw how it did, they contacted us to put the video under an account that they would create. It was also an informative moment for NBC to consider using YouTube as a distribution platform, because it allowed for SNL’s content to be viewed anytime, anywhere, any number of times; people were no longer restricted to having to watch SNL on only Saturday night.”
—Steve Chen, co-founder
Cameo (Ronnie Radke joining)
“[Singer] Ronnie Radke was a particular inflection point. The team went on famousbirthdays.com, and [CEO] Steven Galanis looked up the most famous person on his birthday. It was Ronnie Radke. Steven got Ronnie Radke to respond and buy in. Ronnie said, ‘I’m going to break Cameo.’ This is something they would hear a lot, but Radke actually did it. He came on Cameo for $25 and started getting booked like crazy. It was so fast that after a couple of hours, he was booked a couple of hundred times. The team realized that at the rate he was going, he was going to get booked 2,000 times, and there’s no way a human can fulfill all those Camoes. We thought the startup would fail if we disappoint all these fans with unfulfilled Camoes.
At what point does Cameo break? Ronnie ended up getting booked 500 times. Three days went by and he hadn’t fulfilled any Cameos. Finally, it’s 7 p.m., they’re watching the feed (a Telegram bot of fulfilled orders). A Cameo video gets fulfilled by Ronnie. It’s the worst Cameo ever. It’s seven seconds, bad lighting, and he mispronounces the customer’s name. And then he keeps doing it, with new videos coming in every 30 seconds. The team still thinks the fans are all going to be really upset. The reviews start coming in an hour or two later, and they’re ... positive. They say things like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been a fan of you my whole life, this is amazing.’ They realized the magic of Cameo is about the relationship between the fan and the talent and how special it is to hear your name. And Cameo kept on going.”
ーDevon Townsend, co-founder
Clubhouse (Elon Musk joining for an interview)
Step 1:
Step 2:
Discord (a mention on Reddit)
“When they released the product in 2015, it failed to make a dent. A few dozen people might mosey into the company’s servers on a given day, but it didn’t seem to be gathering real momentum. That might have been in part due to the fact that alternatives existed—TeamSpeak and Skype were both used by gaming communities—but seemingly had more to do with getting the word out and winning early customer trust.
The tipping point arrived via Reddit. The team was connected with a member of the Final Fantasy subreddit and asked them if they’d mention Discord. According to [founder Jason] Citron, they posted something along the lines of ‘Has anyone ever heard of this new voice-over-IP app called Discord?’
That one comment was a miniature inflection point. More users flowed in, and Discord had figured out a grassroots distribution model.
In the years that followed, Discord succeeded in growing rapidly, accumulating hundreds of millions of users and close to $1 billion in funding.”
—Packy McCormick
Notion (press):
“David Pierce—who I think is one of the best working journalists in tech today; he’s at The Verge now—he was covering personal tech for the Wall Street Journal early on at Notion and published a story that said this is the one work-life productivity app that you’ll ever need. And that was Notion’s big break. Truly, if you look back at the graphs, that made a demonstrable difference.”
—Camille Ricketts, on my podcast
Sometimes you get lucky and a whole media narrative forms around you:
Slack (press)
“The biggest growth inflection for Slack was a PR and news media consensus that Slack was ‘the next big thing,’ partly driven by the press’s own use of Slack, which all had magically compounding effects on our user growth
There was a ton of very flattering press about Slack and [co-founder and CEO] Stewart [Butterfield] in fall/winter of 2015 that really helped drive growth. Press was incredible for Slack and definitely helped inflect our growth from startups/SMBs to mainstream awareness. Stewart was on the cover of Forbes in August 2015 and named Inc. Company of the Year in December 2015.
When April Underwood joined us from Twitter in June 2015, our overall numbers were still low enough that I saw distinct spikes on the days that press came out.
It wasn’t one article per se but almost this sense that Slack, and specifically Stewart, had been anointed by the tech press.”
—Merci Grace, first head of growth
BeReal (press)
“The next chapter in BeReal’s growth came at the heels of the ‘next-generation social media’ narrative. Prominent publications became interested in the rise of anti-Instagram social media startups such as Poparazzi, TTYL, Clubhouse, and BeReal.
The venture dollars pouring into the space and the ever-changing consumer behavior brought by the pandemic gave an opening to the rise of a Gen-Z-first cohort of social apps.
-March 2021: Featured on the iOS App Store in France
-April 2021: Featured on Product Hunt (founders ask for the post to be taken down)
-May 2021: First significant publication piece in the Financial Times gives the nod to BeReal in ‘Lessons for Big Tech from the “anti-social” photo app’
-May 2021: Small-time blog TwentyTwo Digital writes a post explaining how BeReal works
-June 2021: BeReal’s subreddit created
-June 2021: Eric Newcomer scoops BeReal’s $30m A16z-led Series A round
-June 2021: Vogue writes ‘Poparazzi, BeReal: Social media’s new generation’
-June 2021: Investor/creator Rex Woodbury writes ‘The Startups Reinventing Social Media’
—Ali Abouelatta, First 1000
3. Doubling down on the primary growth engine
A final category, which I love seeing, is when large growth inflections come from a company leaning into their primary growth engine (e.g. SEO, virality, paid, or sales). I don’t have the data to prove it, but I suspect these end up being the most durable growth inflections.
Airtable (SEO, templates)
“One of the biggest inflection points in growth for Airtable was adding templates. It kicked off the SEO flywheel and ended up accounting for as much as a third of total site traffic at its peak. One of the most interesting elements of this was that templates were seeded with a lot of the content made by creators in the community. This is generally considered the biggest unlock of all time for Airtable’s growth engine.”
—Lauryn Isford, Head of Growth
Pinterest (SEO)
“The biggest unlock to our growth was doubling down on our entire SEO funnel, including SEO work and signup and login conversions work. I think we were world-class at this, and SEO is Pinterest’s primary acquisition channel and one of two main re-engagement channels (along with notifications). The amount of free traffic coming from Google each day was quite insane. We may have 100x’d or 1,000x’d SEO traffic.”
—Jeff Chang, early growth leader
Dropbox (virality and partnerships)
“In terms of percentage impact, the Dropbox Space Race dramatically elevated signups during the weeks it ran in the summer/fall of 2012. This was a campaign to get college students to all sign up for Dropbox, with the winning schools earning free Dropbox space for everyone at the school. It’s probably the most zeitgeist growth hack I’ve seen—I still meet people who were in college during those years who fondly remember the race. It was our twist on Facebook’s college-by-college growth playbook and the social tipping point effect of Groupon.
In terms of absolute impact (area under the curve), the big growth unlock was the Samsung partnership (and to a lesser extent other PC and mobile partnerships) we did. Samsung alone drove over 100 million new signups because Dropbox was embedded as part of the OOBE (out-of-box experience—essentially new phone onboarding). This was a mixed blessing, as we didn’t fully capitalize on this growth channel by doubling down on an Android, mobile-first product strategy. It also did not align with the later company shift to B2B.”
—ChenLi Wang, early growth leader
PayPal (virality)
“For the people in PayPal, it was clear that the only way to grow was organically and at a viral pace; ‘model it just like bacteria growth in a petri dish,’ as Elon Musk later said in an interview.
The decision was to give 20 dollars to anyone opening a PayPal account, and another 20 dollars for referring another user to open an account. Later they dropped the reward to 10 dollars and eventually to 5 dollars per signup or referral.
Below you can see how PayPal showcased their proto-referral program on their homepage in 2000:
PayPal’s referral incentives landed them a crazy viral growth rate; we’re talking a 7% to 10% daily growth rate. To be more precise, PayPal reached 100 million users.”
—Apostle Mengoulis
Instacart (channel partnerships)
“Our first growth inflection point was signing our first national retailer and beginning our transition from a consumer company to a retailer enablement company. Signing a large national retailer helped us because it was a tipping point for other retailers who weren’t sure if grocery e-commerce was a trend they should invest in. After this, it became clear that delivery wasn’t just a fad. Growth was then driven when retailers marketed our partnerships, which drove consumers to our platform, and through a huge improvement in the quality of our services, since retailers gave us access to accurate catalogs and pricing and deeply integrated us into their stores.”
—Max Mullen, co-founder
I’m sure I missed some stories, and that some of these stories aren’t reflective of the full reality of what sparked growth for every company, but I’m confident in three takeaways:
- That one additional feature can indeed lead to a massive inflection in growth (though it usually won’t)
- While you’re working on improving the product, it’s worth attempting to engineer an “event” that gets your product in front of a lot of people, even before you think your product is ready
- Long-term, the most lasting growth inflections happen when you lean into the primary growth engine
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