Not only did this make Paypal seem more popular than it was, it got sellers to actually use the service, helping them realize it really was a more convenient payment method.Īnother classic example of platform hacking: YouTube chose to focus on MySpace as a means of reaching its target audience. Seeing the increasing popularity of PayPal for payment, eBay sellers began offering it so they didn’t miss out on sales. When it figured eBay as a vital distribution platform, eBay created a bot that purchased goods on the auction site using only PayPal as a payment method. Half platform hack, half “fake it ‘til you make it,” PayPal, founded in 1998, managed to gain a remarkable degree of traction by manufacturing its own popularity on eBay. As a result, the company userbase not only skyrocketed to 1 million users within 6 month, but the email startup also executed one of of the web’s earliest growth hacks (though the term wouldn’t be coined for another fourteen years). When a Hotmail user sent out an email on his or her account, the recipient could click on the tagline link, which would direct them to a page where they could set up their own account. Hotmail already had about 20,000 users one month after launching in 1996 and it opted to market its service directly to the friends, family and colleagues of those users by employing a simple strategy: It added a tagline, “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail,” at the end of each existing user’s outgoing mail. Rather than blowing its marketing budget on advertising, groundbreaking browser-based email service Hotmail elected to leverage a free resource it already had- existing users. Hotmail’s “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” Tagline
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