Before we get to today’s case study, here’s a message from friends of the house - Treford.

It’s a new year, and you probably have a note to improve your skills. If this resonates, I’m happy to share Treford’s Product Marketing Accelerator. It’s designed for folks with 3+ years of marketing experience across digital, product, brand, or traditional marketing who are looking to transition to senior marketing roles or expand their impact in North American and European markets.

The curriculum includes Marketing Analytics and Reporting, Performance Marketing and Measurement, Growth Loops & Referral Marketing, Email & CRM Growth, Marketing Leadership and much more.

There’s no better course on the market, TBH. Global leaders in the field (including me) will teach from their experience at companies such as Microsoft, Uber, and Consensys. We’re very selective about who we admit to this programme, and seats will close in a few days. Learn more here or click the button below to apply to the accelerator. See you in class!

Today’s case study focuses on Preply's onboarding flow and its impact on product and marketing. I will also highlight 2 experiments that could help improve the product experience and Preply’s marketing. As usual, feel free to skip to sections that interest you.

Table of Contents

• But First - What is Preply?

• Anti-Duolingo caught my eye

• Come for Anti-Duolingo, Stay from the Onboarding

• Opportunities for improvement and experiments

• Comparing Preply vs Duolingo vs Babbel

• Conclusion: Using onboarding for a better product …

But First - What is Preply?

Preply is a learning app that matches its users to real tutors. While it started off as a language-learning app (and still primarily focuses on that), it has expanded to teach accounting, mathematics, art, science, and, if you can name it, Preply has a tutor. The company, launched in 2012 during the early consumer app wave, has raised over $100 million in capital and hosts over 100,000 tutors from 160 countries.

Anti-Duolingo caught my eye

After writing Why Is Duolingo So Crazy, A friend shared Preply’s ads with me because he found their anti-Duolingo positioning provocative, funny, and interesting. I thought the ads were interesting, too, because they regularly dunk on Duo (the owl) and Duolingo’s product features. In recent times, I haven’t seen many consumer apps go direct and attack their biggest competitor.

Here’s an example of a Preply Instagram post - you’d notice how it immediately goes after Duolingo by mimicking Duo and mocking streaks.

Instagram post

So, I downloaded Preply after seeing its Instagram posts and more ads everywhere. As I signed up, I put on my technology professional hat🧢. I loved the company’s positioning, core messaging and onboarding. So let’s get into it.

Come for Anti-Duolingo, Stay from the Onboarding

Preply highlights its value proposition in the first screen and pushes new users to get started.

After clicking, users are prompted to answer a few questions. These questions are typical when apps want to understand each user and offer the optimal configuration.

Onboarding surveys like this not only help build user profiles, but also help teams learn more about users and further personalise messaging (ads & owned channels), and the user experience.

I liked the questions that Preply asked. Here they are:

After answering all the questions, Preply then presented me with tutor options to choose from. A listing of all the Spanish teachers on the platform, with my exact parameters selected as filters. This works great - I can see the filters selected and can modify them as I wish. The page also narrows the results from nearly 11,000 to only about 400, with the top 10 results on the first page.

That’s not all. Preply uses this data to reach me via email, push notifications, and ads. It offers 50% off with a deadline and communicates my need for a Spanish tutor. This is a perfect way to personalise a product’s offering via CRM and ads.

Content Break

AI-native CRM

“When I first opened Attio, I instantly got the feeling this was the next generation of CRM.”
— Margaret Shen, Head of GTM at Modal

Attio is the AI-native CRM for modern teams. With automatic enrichment, call intelligence, AI agents, flexible workflows and more, Attio works for any business and only takes minutes to set up.

Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.

👉 Start for free today

Opportunities for improvement and experiments

While Preply’s onboarding and data use are good, there’s an opportunity to improve this experience. Here are 2 tests I’d run to improve this process.

1. A visual indicator of progress during onboarding. Is the user answering 10 questions? 20? I had no idea. A progress bar or an initial message indicating how many questions this survey has or how long it’ll take would be helpful for new users - learning a language & paying teachers is a big commitment.

   

   Note: These are prototypes, so elements might be misplaced. Created with Replit.

   I fed one screenshot into Replit and created a prototype. This is what Preply should look like. Note the progress bar at the bottom. This bar can also be tested at the top or with other elements to improve visibility. The goal here is to see if more users will complete the onboarding survey.

2. Expanded data usage in CRM and ads. This is where the meat and work are. Since Preply knows my intentions and collects data through the onboarding survey, it can customise and further personalise the emails based on the Spanish tutors available (names and prices), my request for English-speaking tutors, and my availability.
   
   An example email subject could be: It’s 12 PM, Julieta is ready to teach you. Such an email could be delivered at exactly 12 PM. Preply could build a similar playbook for ads - personalising them further and displaying them to targeted user segments. With these tests, we would aim to improve open and engagement rates for emails and notifications, click-through rates for ads, and overall sign-ups.

Comparing Preply vs Duolingo vs Babbel

How does Preply’s onboarding stack up against its competitors? In Why Is Duolingo So Crazy, I make a case for Duolingo as a fun learning game. 

Despite this statement, products like Duolingo still have learning outcomes. Their philosophies or theses for achieving that outcome are vastly different, but they’re all trying to get users to the same place through different methods and practices.

I downloaded Duolingo and another learning app, Babbel, to compare onboarding, and while they’re similar to Preply’s, both apps implement the first recommendation.

They communicate the length of the onboarding survey, present a visual indicator as the user progresses through onboarding, and use that data to influence the product itself.

Selected screenshots from Duolingo’s onboarding flow.

Selected screenshots from Babbel’s onboarding flow.

Conclusion: Using onboarding for a better product and marketing experience

For anyone building onboarding experiences, here are some questions to ask.

1. What do we need to know about this user that we can only get during onboarding?

2. How can data from onboarding improve the user experience of the product itself?

3. How can we display visual indicators that situate the user, show progress and guide them through onboarding?

4. Beyond collecting data, how can we use it to influence copy, personalise communications, and further influence the user lifecycle (via CRM or advertising)?

5. Do we need to ask the user all of these questions during onboarding? Can wecollect some data points later in the user journey? In my opinion, Babbel asked too many questions, and I wonder if they could collect some of this data after signing up.

Onboarding experiences and surveys can go beyond data collection and influence how we deliver the product itself. I hope you liked this case study and it made you think about unique ways to use onboarding data at work. Please share with colleagues and friends. If you’ve got 2 minutes, please help take the survey below. See you next time!

Quick question about newsletter ads

We’re running a super short survey to see if our newsletter ads are being noticed. It takes about 20 seconds and there's just a few easy questions.

Your feedback helps us make smarter, better ads.

Take the survey now.

At the beginning of this year, I set some goals for this publication. My goals included writing 12 case studies, improving their distribution, getting more traffic, and starting a YouTube channel. This is a recap of how that went and what’s coming in 2026!

Some numbers from 2025:

• Wrote and published 10 case studies.

• Increased overall publication traffic by 390% to over 6K visitors.

• Increased traffic in target regions by over 500%.

• Subscribers grew to over 1500, open rates steadied around 45%, while the average unsubscribe rate is around 0.2% per newsletter.

• Experimented with short videos on TikTok. Please follow!

• Published our first long-form video essay on YouTube. Please subscribe and share with friends!

I generally don’t wait until the following year to “change things”. By July, it was clear that Growth Case Studies was behind some of these goals, so I had to stretch myself by putting in more effort in distribution, including hiring an assistant and blocking entire days to write, edit, publish, and distribute. I also spent much of H2 studying videos across platforms (short and long form) and figuring out how best to distribute these essays via video. I can confidently say that I much prefer longer formats to shorter formats, but I will continue to experiment in 2026 with different styles.

This year’s top case studies:

1. Why is Duolingo so Crazy?

2. WhatsApp is Meta’s Next Huge Platform Swing.

3. Figma Growth Case Study: From $100K to IPO.

4. Why LinkedIn Has No Competitors. 

5. Slack Vs Microsoft Teams and the battle for the Centre of Work.

Enough about 2025. What’s coming in 2026?

• A much better homepage.

• More experiments for Growth Case Studies - expect some cool new stuff.

• More videos coming to the YouTube channel - please subscribe.

• More case studies. Writing doesn’t get easier, but it is always thrilling. I’m considering boxing myself into a fortnightly cadence to publish more thoughts.

• Some new case study formats.

• Something really special for the summer.

Before I sign off for the year, I must give a big shoutout to a group of people.

Firstly, my local libraries - I wish you would open for much longer, but I will take what I can get until we figure that out. Thank you to the billionaires who donated them, and to governments who made learning important. I have found that situating myself for writing really helps me focus. If anyone’s interested, I've been using the same Deep Work playlist for years.

My second shoutout is to the mocha at Gregg’s and the americano at Waitrose - they keep me going!

My third shoutout is to the volunteers who researched and gathered resources for the final case study of 2025. Thank you to Folasade Sobayo, Mojoyinoluwa Agbonde, and Toluwani Daniel for researching the YouVersion Bible Case Study.

My fourth shoutout is to everyone on the internet who writes about technology and business. Thank you for all that you do

My final shoutout is to YOU - everyone who reads Growth Case Studies and shares with their friends. You literally keep me going, so please keep reading this newsletter, sending feedback and sharing with your friends and colleagues!

I hope you’ve had a great holiday and have an awesome 2026 🥂.

Effortless Tutorial Video Creation with Guidde

Transform your team’s static training materials into dynamic, engaging video guides with Guidde.

Here’s what you’ll love about Guidde:

1️⃣ Easy to Create: Turn PDFs or manuals into stunning video tutorials with a single click.
2️⃣ Easy to Update: Update video content in seconds to keep your training materials relevant.
3️⃣ Easy to Localize: Generate multilingual guides to ensure accessibility for global teams.

Empower your teammates with interactive learning.

And the best part? The browser extension is 100% free.

Check out Guidde

We all live in Gutenberg’s legacy

In the 1400s, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. Although movable-type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg’s press enabled a much faster printing rate. His ideas for the press rapidly spread around the world, leading to the printing of more text-based material such as fliers and books.

Between 1454 and 1455, Gutenberg printed indulgences for the church and in 1455 completed a 42-line Bible called Gutenberg’s Bible. He printed 180 copies, and although they sold for 30 florins each, this Bible was much cheaper than a manuscript Bible, which typically took a scribe a year to write.

A 17th-century copper engraving depiction of Gutenberg. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain in the United States’ Library of Congress, the British Museum, and the University of Texas at Austin's Centre. While only 20 copies of this Bible have survived intact, Gutenberg's invention transformed literature and Europe. By the 18th century, Europe had printed nearly 1 million books.

Philosophers and historians say that the Renaissance, Reformation, and humanist revolutions in Europe would be impossible without Gutenberg's printing press and the resulting proliferation of books and other printed materials.

Although Gutenberg printed fewer than 200 copies of the bible, his invention enabled its spread. The Bible remains the best-selling book of all time. Guinness World Records estimates that between 5 and 7 billion Bibles have been sold since Gutenberg first mass-printed them in the 1400s.

Enter: YouVersion Bible App

The past can inspire the present. YouVersion was founded by technology entrepreneur Bobby Gruenewald and American church Life.church. While in college, Bobby founded two technology companies between the ages of 19 and 23. The first was a web hosting company he sold in 1998, and the second was an online community he sold in 1999 to a company that Goldman Sachs took public in 2000.

In 2006, Bobby was in a long security line at O’Hare Airport. He was thinking about how to leverage technology to help people engage with the Bible. Because he was a busy businessman, he had struggled to read and study the Bible consistently. The idea for a Bible reading website came to him in that moment.

Bobby thought about how Gutenberg's invention changed the distribution of Bibles and wondered if modern technology could achieve something similar.

He then took the idea to his pastor, Craig Groeschel, the senior pastor of Life.church. Bobby had worked on several internet initiatives with the church, including an online forum for anonymously confessing secrets, an Internet Campus called Church Online, and a fully interactive virtual church in Second Life - the online 3D world.

The YouVersion Bible website launched in 2007 and by 2008 became one of the first 200 apps on the Apple App Store. It saw 8,000 downloads in its first weekend. Since then, the app has grown to 1 billion installs globally and is available in over 2,300 languages with users in every country in the world. It is still growing fast with 12 million new installs each month.

Although YouVersion is a not-for-profit product, its impact rivals that of a few big technology companies, such as Meta, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft. In this growth case study, we will observe YouVersion's trajectory over the last 17 years and attempt to reverse-engineer how its features, product, and organisational operations have driven such a massive impact. As usual, feel free to skip to sections that pique your interest.

Table of Contents

• We all live in Gutenberg’s legacy

• Enter: YouVersion Bible App

• YouVersion Bible Product and Thesis

  • YouVersion Organisation and Product Philosophy

    • Resource Constraints

    • Accepting Failures

    • Speed and Flexibility

• Product Features and Walkthrough

  • Availability

  • Signup and Onboarding

  • Accessibility

  • Reading Plans and Devotionals

  • Community

  • Shareability

  • Streaks and Habit Building

  • Social and Video

  • Notes and Highlights

  • Offline Use

  • Dictionary and Meaning

  • User Control

  • Children’s Experience

• YouVersion User Acquisition - How the Bible app ge …

  • Word of Mouth and Referral Traffic

  • Search Engine and App Store Optimisation

  • Internet advertising

  • Campaigns and Partnerships

• YouVersion Bible App Competitive Landscape

  • Olive Tree

  • Bible Gateway

  • Glorify

  • Hallow

  • Bible Chat

  • Bible Study and Research Apps

  • Other Bible apps

• Revenue, Business Model and Success

• Criticisms and Setbacks

• Conclusion

YouVersion Bible Product and Thesis

The proposition of the YouVersion Bible app is simple. Its website states the mission is: “Helping Everyone, Everywhere, Engage With God, Every Day.” The goal of this application is simple but also complex: to enable anyone to engage with the Bible every day.

YouVersion Organisation and Product Philosophy

Resource Constraints

In 2008, YouVersion did not have a large amount of resources like those of a typical venture capital-funded startup or large church project. In an interview with Craig Groeschel, the senior pastor of Life.church, the founder Bobby recalls that the team has remained small despite its outsized impacts, chooses to stay small, and, as an entrepreneur, he loves working within constraints.

One way the organisation has worked with constraints is by building product features that improve word of mouth, community, and social sharing. These features make the product viral while the app quickly adopts new digital paradigms. Another way the organisation leverages constraints and extends its impact is by working with partners who share its values and mission. It partners with thousands of Bible societies around the world, churches, Christian NGOs, international Christian leaders, and a massive team of volunteer translators.

In a 2023 interview, Bobby notes that the company has around 165 employees and plans to double the team in the years ahead. If we take that number at face value, the app has 3 million users per employee, making it one of the most efficient software companies.

Accepting Failures

The Bible app first launched as a website in 2007, and it didn’t achieve the stated goal. Bobby noted that the website didn’t improve his Bible reading. This event led to an acceptance of failure that remains a core part of the team’s philosophy. The team planned to shut it down in 2008 and, while evaluating the site’s failure, discovered that team members used their BlackBerry smartphones more than their laptops or desktop computers. This led to the development of mobile apps, the first sign of success.

The YouVersion organisation has applied these philosophies to build new product features for the Bible app, as well as for other apps such as the Bible App for Kids, Bible App Lite for low-resource users, and Bible Lens, which shut down in 2020.

Speed and Flexibility

As the company and product grow, the organisation gets more complex, which can then hamper growth. The founder notes that the mission drives team members, who constantly fight to remove complexity to keep growing. While YouVersion is not a startup, it has undoubtedly helped the organisation to think and behave like one.

Product Features and Walkthrough

So why is this the most popular Bible app in the world? In this section of this case study, we will share how YouVersion’s features are driving the company and its users toward its mission.

Availability

The YouVersion Bible app is probably one of the most available software applications out there. The application is platform and device-agnostic and available on web browsers, smartphones, feature phones, tablets, Apple TV devices, virtual reality headsets, and desktop computers. The organisation supports older devices as well - up to operating systems launched nearly 10 years ago.

Signup and Onboarding

Signing up for the Bible app is simple. New users can either create an account or skip account creation and get right into reading the Bible. The app offers multiple sign-up options to help new users start reading as quickly as possible.

The app's content isn't locked behind signup or paywalls, so it's accessible nearly immediately. However, some of its community and interactive features require users to sign up fully. These features leverage a user's profile and store details in the cloud for users who hold accounts.

Accessibility

The app supports 76 English translations and over 2,300 languages worldwide. Users can compare translations to understand verses better or switch to their preferred language. The app also has audio and sign language versions. In 2020, it introduced a dyslexic font to improve readability for dyslexic users. YouVersion works with and maintains relationships with global bible societies and thousands of volunteer translators to make the Bible more accessible in these languages.

Reading Plans and Devotionals

The YouVersion Bible app offers over 25,000 Bible reading plans to help people engage with Scripture. Plans are available on a wide variety of topics, including beginner plans, plans focused on specific biblical themes, one-year whole-Bible plans, historical plans, and plans tied to Christian seasons like Advent, Christmas, and Lent. Reading plans range from just a few days to a full year. The reading plans tie directly into its mission - ensuring users engage with the Bible daily.

Working with Christian leaders, ministries and preachers worldwide, the YouVersion Bible app provides access to thousands of free devotionals.

Community

Through the app, users can connect with friends and family to share Bible reading progress, discuss lessons, pray for each other, and encourage one another. YouVersion also partners with churches to create free Bible tools for those congregations, enabling users to build deeper relationships with their local church. Users can find churches near them, events in those churches, and follow links to read the sermon notes or watch the services online.

Shareability

It is easy to share content from the app. Users can quickly create shareable text and images for Bible verses, devotionals, and prayers. The app lets users modify image backgrounds, select quotes, change font, and share them with friends via chat apps and social media.

In December 2010, the company embarked on a Global Share the Bible Day campaign, encouraging its users to share verses from the app. This was an outstanding success, resulting in 1 million new installs in 11 days. By 2021, sharing had become part of the app experience - users shared 535 million verses.

Streaks and Habit Building

In 2017, YouVersion launched Streaks to help users build daily, weekly, and yearly Bible-reading habits. Popularised by Snapchat in 2015, Streaks are now a common feature in many apps, but YouVersion was an early pioneer, encouraging users to build the habit of using an app by delivering digital rewards.

In addition to Streaks, the app awards badges based on user activity. Badges can be earned during specific periods of the year, upon completing certain reading plans or other in-app activities. Badges are earned for saving verses, highlighting them, leaving notes, finishing plans, sharing verses with others and reading the whole bible.

Social and Video

The app draws inspiration from non-religious apps and how its users interact with other apps, such as social media. Inspired again by Snapchat and Instagram, it has incorporated an ephemeral feature called “Daily Refresh”, launched in 2022. This feature includes a verse of the day, a video from a Christian leader, a daily prayer, and a devotional section.

When Facebook launched its social graph and social login, the YouVersion app was among the first to adopt the platform. It connected permissioned user activity directly to the Facebook platform and allowed users to share their Bible habits.

It is worth noting that the app does not incorporate concepts such as “Infinite scroll” or other high-engagement tactics used by technology firms. It remains focused on its goal of Bible engagement while taking lessons from others.

Notes and Highlights

The app allows its users to take notes from Bible verses or highlight them. These are saved to the user’s profile and, if toggled on, shared with the user’s community in the app. This feature is pretty robust - users can select several highlight colours, and add labels to verses they read.

Offline Use

Once Bible versions are downloaded to a device, all of YouVersion’s core features can be used offline without an internet connection. This makes it easy for users to engage with the app in regions of low or no internet connectivity.

Going further, YouVersion has a Bible Lite app for feature phones and other devices. Bible Lite has nearly 90 million installs in 192 countries and supports over 300 languages and 300 Bible versions.

Dictionary and Meaning

To help users understand the historical context and meaning of Scripture passages, YouVersion incorporates content from the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. It also partners with organisations such as The Bible Project and Spoken Gospel to provide resources for further study.

User Control

The YouVersion Bible app has some of the most robust controls in any mobile app. Users can manage notification settings across email and push, as well as Bible reading controls. Bible reading controls include Font, footnotes, words of Christ, verse pickers and offline fonts and versions. Users can also manage how their activity is shared with their community and the public. Lastly, the settings section includes a user profile where a user can view their in-app activity.

Children’s Experience

YouVersion offers a tailored experience for children via Bible App for Kids. This app hosts an engaging interface, easy navigation, and interactive content tailored for a younger audience. In partnership with OneHope, Bible App for Kids was created specifically for children. The app has 129 million+ downloads and is available in 70+ languages. The partnership has also produced two physical kids' Bible books. 

The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.

This guide distills 10 AI strategies from industry leaders that are transforming marketing.

• Learn how HubSpot's engineering team achieved 15-20% productivity gains with AI

• Learn how AI-driven emails achieved 94% higher conversion rates

• Discover 7 ways to enhance your marketing strategy with AI.

Outpace your competitors by mastering AI.

Get Your Free Guide

YouVersion User Acquisition - How the Bible app gets new users

This section explores how the YouVersion Bible app acquires new customers via various sources.

Word of Mouth and Referral Traffic

During our research, we found that the YouVersion app received many first-time direct visits to its Bible.com homepage. This is common with websites and apps whose core drivers are word of mouth. Because the app is excellent, users talk about it with their friends and family.

We also found millions of backlinks from various websites, indicating that the app is a valuable resource for people writing or talking about Christian topics online. Our research found that YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and X are significant traffic drivers to the website.

Search Engine and App Store Optimisation

Search engines are a significant driver of traffic to YouVersion’s Bible app. In 2012, it acquired the much-coveted Bible.com domain from BibleResources. In addition, each Bible verse, in every language and version, is indexed by search engines, ensuring the website gets traffic when readers search. Pages from Bible.com show up between numbers 1 and 3 of any Bible verse search.

The YouVersion Bible app is among the top results when people search for “Bible” in their app stores. It maintains prominence and promotes its features appropriately across multiple app stores in different regions of the world.

Internet advertising

While YouVersion doesn’t run consistent internet advertising (thanks to its organic growth funnel), we found a couple of adverts on Meta’s platforms. These adverts are broadly targeted, localised to the audience’s language, and target users aged 18-65+. While this doesn’t make sense for the average app, it makes sense for YouVersion - the organisation wants everyone everywhere to read the Bible, regardless of age or interests.

The ads feature people talking about the Bible, peaceful-themed videos or just images of Bible verses.

Campaigns and Partnerships

YouVersion has run several organic campaigns that leverage its app’s features to improve Bible app acquisition. Examples include Global Share the Bible day, Bible for Everyone, and several annual challenges that run at different times of the year. These campaigns are huge drivers of growth - each time the app is shared, it gains more visibility and installs, creating a consistent growth loop for new users.

In addition to these campaigns, YouVersion partners with organisations that want to increase Bible readership. It occasionally raises funds for Bible translation societies while supporting volunteer translators through mentorship and training programmes.

YouVersion Bible App Competitive Landscape

In this section, we will study YouVersion’s competitors. Modern Bible publishing organisations do not necessarily see themselves as competitors, but we found a few apps that share a similar vision and mission to the YouVersion Bible app. Since these apps share a similar mission but operate differently, it’s challenging to compare them. There are many overlaps in usage because many Bible readers use multiple Bible apps to enhance their study and understanding. Let’s look at some Bible apps.

Olive Tree

Olive Tree is a Christian software publisher responsible for the Olive Tree Bible App. The company’s primary focus is on study and research, and it publishes hundreds of digital Christian materials across Bibles, commentary sets, Dictionaries, Theological guides, Greek and Hebrew translations, Maps & Atlases, and concordances. The Olive Tree Bible app was one of the first bible apps on multiple platforms. The company first launched Bible apps for Palm OS and Pocket PC in the late 90s, then its iOS app in 2008, followed by an Android app in 2009.

Bible Gateway

Launched as a static HTML site in 1993, the Bible Gateway website and app are reminiscent of the first versions of the YouVersion Bible app. Its age places it among some of the oldest websites ever. The BibleGateway website is simple and easy to navigate, focusing on different Bible versions, hosting 150 versions in 50 languages. It offers Bible Gateway Plus, a $ 4-per-month ad-free subscription with premium commentary, advanced translation, and study materials from the HarperCollins Bible portfolio. In 2008, Christian publisher Zondervan acquired Bible Gateway, making it part of the larger HarperCollins family.

Glorify

Launched in September 2019, the Glorify app for Christians has raised around $84M in funding from VC firms such as Andreessen-Horowitz and Softbank Latin America. The app is a subscription-based wellbeing app for Christians offering the Bible, guided meditation, prayers, an audio Bible, and music.

Glorify has used some of its cash to improve user acquisition, becoming one of the top apps in its primary markets with over 25 million downloads in North America, Europe and Latin America. It’s unclear how its value proposition and commercial backing have set it apart from the YouVersion Bible App - most features overlap, and content is aggressively hidden behind a subscription.

Hallow

Hallow is another fast-growing app for Christians, founded in 2018, and focused explicitly on Catholics, one of the largest Christian denominations. The company is a public-benefit corporation and boasts 24 million downloads, having raised over $105 million in funding. Hallow charges subscriptions for Hallow Plus, its premium offering.

Bible Chat

Anchored on artificial intelligence, the Bible Chat app has raised $14M in funding to drive growth across the world. Over 25 million people use the app to study the Bible daily, and it consistently tops app store charts. The app charges a subscription fee for its premium version and operates under the framework of compassionate capitalism.

Bible Study and Research Apps

For in-depth study and research, several Bible study apps are available online. One of them, Logos, features commentary, thousands of books and research data for bible students. Logos is only available via paid subscriptions, while selling other content in its library. Bible Hub is another app featuring Greek and Hebrew translations, concordances, commentary, devotionals, and sermons. The Bible Hub app is entirely free.

Other Bible apps

As stated earlier, the Bible is the most popular book in the world, and several billion people read and study it. We found hundreds of apps hosting different versions of the Bible in multiple languages and for various Christian denominations. Independent teams typically develop and maintain these apps.

Revenue, Business Model and Success

YouVersion is a digital ministry under Life.church, which is a non-profit charitable corporation. The YouVersion Bible app is ad-free and subscription-free. It relies on donations from around 40,000 people globally and has received nearly $60 million in its lifetime. It is not a business and plans to remain a non-profit for the future.

YouVersion makes the most popular bible apps. Across devices, the organisation’s apps have been installed 1 billion times. 2025 was a record year for the family of apps. The apps saw 12% YoY growth in downloads, and daily usage increased by 18% YoY. The YouVersion family of apps sees 1 billion opens every 39 days and is used in every country worldwide.

Across its supported family of apps and platforms, it reaches over 100 million monthly active users, according to Google Play and Apple App Store data from Sensor Tower.

Criticisms and Setbacks

We couldn’t find many criticisms of the YouVersion Bible app or its other apps. In 2013, Slate magazine criticised the Bible app for its data-collection practices. Slate acknowledges that reading the Bible is free, but many features sit behind the sign-up button. Its founder, Bobby Gruenewald, was quick to respond, explaining why YouVersion collects data - to understand its users better and why the application requires specific permissions, e.g checking the phone log to turn off audio playback while the user receives a phone call. The company has written articles explaining why and how it uses and processes data to prevent misuse, breaches, and leaks.

We found several Christians who disliked it for various reasons. Some felt its daily story feature did not provide readers with a deeper context of the Bible, while others complained theologically about the organisation’s relationship with certain preachers. These accusations have not stuck and basically have no impact on the app’s growth.

From Boring to Brilliant: Training Videos Made Simple

Say goodbye to dense, static documents. And say hello to captivating how-to videos for your team using Guidde.

1️⃣ Create in Minutes: Simplify complex tasks into step-by-step guides using AI.
2️⃣ Real-Time Updates: Keep training content fresh and accurate with instant revisions.
3️⃣ Global Accessibility: Share guides in any language effortlessly.

Make training more impactful and inclusive today.

The best part? The browser extension is 100% free.

Check out Guidde

Conclusion

YouVersion’s Bible App is a rare example of an early mover that captures mind share and user expectations. The app is among the first in many app stores globally. Still, unlike other bible apps, it has continued to iterate, improve, and learn from other applications by focusing intently on its mission.

YouVersion still has a long way to go. Around 42% the world still lacks access to digital Bibles in their primary language - the organisation is hoping to cover these languages by 2030.

In addition to focusing on its mission, the app teaches us a lot about the economics of mobile applications. These trade-offs occur when companies raise massive external capital or try to grow revenue for apps like the Bible. A small team of a few hundred people can achieve great things through organic growth and partnerships with others who share similar, outsized visions.

If you liked reading this YouVersion Case Study, please share it with friends. Please subscribe to receive the next tech case study in your inbox.

In "What is an AI-first product," I outlined a brief timeline of computing's software and hardware history and predicted what AI-first products could look like. Since then, I’ve tried dozens of AI software. As you know, everyone is promising AI tools these days, and everything (recommendation engines, image detection, text prediction, data analysis) is being lumped into this catch-all term.

One thing that’s clear to me is that AI features can enable new product-led growth approaches that drive user acquisition, improve onboarding, activate new users, and even boost retention. We can front-load new user experiences and embed them directly within landing pages, speeding time to value and helping users reach the aha moment faster.

Today’s case study is a rundown of some of these approaches from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Canva, Lovable, Replit, Google’s Gemini, Figma, and Eleven Labs. For each product, I’ll embed a Loom video. These short videos will not show in email, so please click here to open this essay in your browser to watch them.

This case study focuses on each product’s landing page. A caveat is that I don’t know which marketing campaigns are driving traffic to these pages, how well they’re performing, or what constraints have led to them.

First, a message from this week’s sponsors.

Make Every Platform Work for Your Ads

You’re running an ad.

The same ad. On different platforms. Getting totally different results.

That’s not random: it’s the platform effect.

So stop guessing what works. Understand the bit-sized science behind it.

Join Neuroscientist & Neurons CEO Dr. Thomas Ramsøy for a free on-demand session on how to optimize ads for different platforms.

Register & watch it whenever it fits you.

👉 Watch the Webinar

Startups get Intercom 90% off and Fin AI agent free for 1 year

Join Intercom’s Startup Program to receive a 90% discount, plus Fin free for 1 year.

Get a direct line to your customers with the only complete AI-first customer service solution.

It’s like having a full-time human support agent free for an entire year.

Apply now

Table of Contents

• So, What is Product-Led Growth?

• 1. OpenAI’s ChatGPT

• 2. Canva AI

• 3. Lovable

• 4. Replit

• 5. Google’s Gemini

• 6. Figma Make

• 7. Eleven Labs

• Conclusion - Showing Features > Telling

So, What is Product-Led Growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) is not a new concept. Put simply, it’s a business growth methodology in which the product itself primarily drives user acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue.

We will look at how AI features are driving product-led growth across user acquisition, activation, and retention.

1. OpenAI’s ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot is responsible for the recent AI boom. Since launch, the service has grown to 800 million weekly active users.

ChatGPT’s website puts its product front and centre, letting it do the talking. The hero message “What can I help with?” positions ChatGPT as an assistant, and the text box tells the user to “Ask anything”. In my research, the hero message sometimes changes to “What’s on the agenda today?” “, Ready when you are” and “What’s on your mind today?”

The user can then attach a file (images only for logged-out users), search, study, or talk to the service. This page leaves too much to the prospective user's imagination. I don’t think many people do well with software that presents as a blank canvas. The constraint here however, is that ChatGPT can present literally anything. With infinite possibilities, how does a marketing team decide what use cases to present?

One advantage is that the user can start engaging with ChatGPT without signing up and can immediately begin to see value.

2. Canva AI

Canva AI does a great job of showcasing Canva’s AI capabilities. While this product is product-led growth for onboarding and retention, its landing page is just a showcase. It feels like something’s missing here.

I’d expect Canva to at least allow users to make one request to showcase its capabilities before signing up. Unfortunately, a prospect can only use Canva AI after signing up.

This landing page has its positives. Its hero section showcases how Canva AI works. The GIF shows a user typing their request, selecting a brand kit, and Canva generating three Instagram image options. The rest of the page shows all the features Canva has built into its AI product.

Still, I’d have loved to try this out without signing up. For Canva’s paying users, this is a great way to drive retention and revenue - I have used this feature countless times.

3. Lovable

Lovable is one of the fastest-growing darlings of the AI era. Currently at a projected ARR of $200M, experimental software developers (called vibe coders) have lifted the Swedish startup into the stratosphere.

The first time I tried Lovable, its homepage caught my eye. It’s simple, straightforward, and the homepage is basically one core hero message - “Build something lovable”

Lovable solves its users’ cold-start problem by animating the text field in its chat box. The text field shows the user all of the different things they could build with Lovable. Web apps, prototypes, internal tools, blogs, landing pages, etc.

This solves the cold start problem. In a world where users can build anything, the product should help guide their decision-making. Of course, users cannot test out Lovable without signing up - that would be a massive cost disaster.

The homepage goes further by showcasing web apps and websites from the Lovable community. These community projects serve as inspiration for new and existing users.

I would take this a step further by allowing users to duplicate or ‘remix’ some of those apps and websites.

4. Replit

Also spurred by the vibe coding revolution, Replit allows its users to build websites and apps. The company is projecting $1 billion by the end of 2026 and is seen as a more capable tool for building applications.

Replit’s homepage has a strong core message: Turn your ideas into apps. As a person who has all kinds of ideas all the time, this hit home for me. The page then goes further and shows an example prompt, immediately getting the user into the product. If the prospective user clicks the “show suggestions” button, the text changes, revealing more possibilities. These ideas are pretty cool!

The rest of the landing page shows case studies from enterprises that use Replit and showcases the product’s security features. Replit does not show what its community is building - this seems like a missed opportunity.

As with Lovable, a user cannot ‘test’ Replit without signing up.

If you’d like to try Replit, please use my unique link here. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’d know that I have been building a few cool things with Replit’s agent.

5. Google’s Gemini

Currently the second-most-popular chatbot after OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini has come a long way from its Bard days.

Its landing page is simple and straight to the point. Showing the user a text field to interact with the chatbot, while also showcasing what Gemini can do. Four clickable prompt suggestions can get the user started without requiring them to sign up.

This page enables product usage almost immediately and guides a first-time user from 0 to the aha moment.

The rest of the page does some heavy lifting. The user can change the page’s theme from a settings icon while clicking menu objects that showcase Gemini’s capabilities. In the chat box, Gemini restricts file attachments and model changes to signed-in users.

6. Figma Make

Figma’s Make is a Replit and Lovable competitor within Figma’s product suite. You can read a full case study of Figma here.

The product promises to “Make your ideas real with Figma Make”. The landing page places a chat box in the hero section and asks, “What do you want to make?” If the user is unsure, three prompt options are available.

The middle section of the page showcases web apps from the Figma community, while the rest of the page touts Figma’s features. The company is known for being community-driven, so it’s great to see what others are building.

There’s a vast difference between Figma and Lovable’s community showcase, though. Figma users are building very unique web applications - like a flower catcher game and a pattern generator while Lovable’s users build a lot of landing pages and websites.

7. Eleven Labs

I came across Eleven Labs while researching to build PLG motions for an AI project. This team absolutely gets Product-Led Growth. The company has products for creators, enterprises and developers. It showcases all of its capabilities within its hero message.

Prospects can test nearly all of its features. Text-to-speech, voice changes, music generation, speech-to-text, and audio dubbing. In just one section of the landing page, ElevenLabs uses PLG to its advantage, showcasing most of its features within constraints while also allowing users to generate speech, text, and music.

The rest of the landing page showcases social proof, use cases, and technical capabilities.

Conclusion - Showing Features > Telling

AI is not a strong enough differentiator for most software companies. Like software tools before them, showing is greater than telling. Enabling users to see how others use each tool or to interact with the tool itself is a far more effective way to drive adoption than simply communicating “AI” on the landing page.

Lovable and Figma get this right with community-centred landing pages. ChatGPT and Gemini allow users to test the basic features of the product without signing up. Replit showcases its capabilities via the suggestions button. Eleven Labs blows all of this out of the park by opening its product features to prospective users, showing the depth and breadth of its AI capabilities. Canva showcases its features appropriately via GIFs and images, but leaves much to be desired.

Overall, these platforms demonstrate practical approaches to driving product-led growth through new product features. Each page provides clarity on messaging and positioning to its intended audience, and I’m excited to see how AI features impact PLG.

Thank you for reading this Growth Case Study. If you loved this, please hit the share buttons and share with a friend or colleague. Please subscribe to receive the next case study.

Build smarter, not harder: meet Lindy

Tired of AI that just talks? Lindy actually executes.

Describe your task in plain English, and Lindy handles it—from building booking platforms to managing leads and sending team updates.

AI employees that work 24/7:

• Sales automation

• Customer support

• Operations management

Focus on what matters. Let Lindy handle the rest.

Get $20 Worth of Free Credits

Last month, I taught the Growth Loops class as part of Treford’s Product Marketing Accelerator course. While sharing Zapier’s SEO growth loop with the class, one student mentioned Canva’s Templates as an SEO growth loop. This was interesting, so I looked at Canva’s templates after the class. I realised that Canva’s Templates solve problems beyond SEO and beyond user acquisition.

This case study examines Canva’s templates and the customer and business issues they solve at scale.

But before we get into it, let’s pay some bills from this month’s sponsors, Marketing Millennials, Masters in Marketing and Mindstream.

A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

As usual, feel free to skip to sections that interest you.

Table of Contents

• Canva’s Success

• A Quick Intro to Growth Loops

• How Canva Templates Solve 4 Growth Problems

  • 1. Canva Templates solve user acquisition via Sear …

  • 2. Canva Templates solve a cold start and onboardi …

  • 3. Canva templates enable retention.

  • 4. Canva Templates solve a revenue problem

• Conclusion

Canva’s Success

Founded on January 1st 2013, by Melanie Perkins, Canva is an Australian graphic design software company. The company has 220 million users and an annual recurring revenue of $2.5 billion, while marking its 8th year of profitability. Canva is known for democratising design to non-designers, and its templates are a core part of its value proposition.

A Quick Intro to Growth Loops

Growth Loops are an interesting concept for product, marketing and growth professionals. A growth loop is a self-reinforcing, iterative and circular system that drives specific outcomes. The core principle of a loop is that the output of one cycle — such as a new landing page, a successful referral, or a piece of user-generated content — is systematically reinvested as the input for the next cycle. This creates a compounding effect that drives continuous and sustainable growth.

Here’s what a growth loop looks like:

Typically, growth loops solve one problem or two problems. Canva templates are brilliant because they begin a growth loop that solves multiple problems for the user and the business. These templates are a major growth driver for Canva; several thousand digital creators have built and sold them. In the next section, I’m going to highlight these problems and how templates solve them.

How Canva Templates Solve 4 Growth Problems

1. Canva Templates solve user acquisition via Search Engine Optimisation.

Search engines are the number one channel for direct-response marketing. When a person searches on Google, they are looking for answers to questions, products that solve their problem, or information about a topic or idea.

Canva organises and exposes its templates to search engines to solve for user acquisition. This creates a self-sustaining growth loop. Each template or template category is exposed to and indexed by search engines, improving its visibility and driving new users to Canva.

When I search “birthday card template”, Canva is the first

result. Other design-focused products, such as Adobe Express and Greetings Island, have followed Canva’s pioneering approach by creating templates and exposing them to the web.

Canva has built thousands of templates across its product capabilities. It has templates for emails, presentations, social media, videos, documents, print, whiteboards, spreadsheets, and much more. These templates are neatly organised via their sitemap.

Let’s return to my example of the birthday card. The company features a landing page specifically for birthday card templates, but it also offers much more. The page acts like a marketplace for birthday card templates.

It includes filters for format, style, theme, features, price, and colour. Combining all the possibilities that a user might search for. Each filter or sub-filter is another page exposed to search engines for better SEO.

In addition, the page is appropriately designed for search engines with meta descriptions. Each card and its corresponding image presented is also optimised for search engines, with appropriate file names and alt descriptions.

I peeked under the page to see its HTML code. I found that Canva was duplicating all these pages across 28 languages and regions, ensuring that each page reached prospective users globally.

2. Canva Templates solve a cold start and onboarding problem.

Canva templates solve the cold-start problem. Non-designers need help creating high-quality assets and documents.

In a case study of TikTok’s For You feature, I talk a bit about the cold start problem:

The cold start problem is not limited to social platforms but is also prevalent among various technology products. How do we ensure that a new user becomes familiar with our product and starts using it to get value?

Without templates, a new Canva user sees only a blank canvas. A blank canvas raises the barrier to entry for non-designers who might try out Canva and think, “Where do I get started?”, “How do I design?”, “What can I create?”. Templates accelerate onboarding for new users and help them become familiar with Canva as a design tool. With templates, users reach the Aha moment faster.

For anyone who wants to design anything, there’s a Canva template for that.

Master ChatGPT for Work Success

ChatGPT is revolutionizing how we work, but most people barely scratch the surface. Subscribe to Mindstream for free and unlock 5 essential resources including templates, workflows, and expert strategies for 2025. Whether you're writing emails, analyzing data, or streamlining tasks, this bundle shows you exactly how to save hours every week.

Subscribe for Your Free Bundle

3. Canva templates enable retention.

The templates library spans several types of celebrations, events, social media posts, documents, and whiteboards.

Templates serve the same purpose for existing Canva users. By providing templates for different use cases, Canva ensures its users keep returning. Users can adapt templates to match their brand style or desired design.

Additionally, Canva regularly updates its template library to reflect the latest design trends and user preferences, making it a versatile resource for both personal and professional projects.

This variety helps users find inspiration quickly, streamline their workflow, and create high-quality designs without starting from scratch. The customisable nature of these templates also allows users to add their personal touch, ensuring each project remains unique and tailored to their individual needs.

Finally, Canva's user-friendly interface simplifies browsing, selecting, and editing templates, making design accessible even to those with little to no prior experience.

4. Canva Templates solve a revenue problem

Not all Canva Templates are free. The platform provides premium options from Canva's exclusive collection. These premium templates are available only to users who subscribe to a paid plan, offering more advanced, professionally designed choices.

The variety and quality of premium templates serve as strategic tools that Canva uses to encourage free users to upgrade to paid subscriptions. Users who subscribe to the Canva Pro or Canva Business plans gain access to an extensive library of over 2 million templates, enabling them to create polished, customised designs for presentations, social media, marketing materials, and more.

This tiered system not only enhances the user experience by offering a broader selection of templates but also serves as a key revenue model for Canva, incentivising users to subscribe to premium content and advanced features.

Conclusion

When we think about the pirate framework, growth loops, or the growth funnel, we often envision one outcome. This is a great way to approach marketing campaigns and campaign ideation. But to deliver better value to customers and the business, it helps to consider product features that can drive multiple parts of the AAARRR framework. Canva templates are a perfect example of a multi-touch product feature that drives growth beyond the traditional funnel framework.

Small Budget, Big Impact: Outsmart Your Larger Competitors

Being outspent doesn't mean being outmarketed. Our latest resource showcases 15 small businesses that leveraged creativity instead of cash to achieve remarkable marketing wins against much larger competitors.

• Proven techniques for standing out in crowded markets without massive budgets

• Tactical approaches that turn resource constraints into competitive advantages

• Real-world examples of small teams creating outsized market impact

Ready to level the playing field? Download now to discover the exact frameworks these brands used to compete and win.

Download now for free here.

TikTok is one of this decade’s biggest technology successes. The platform has grown to nearly 2 billion users, adding about 100 million new users in the last year alone. The company is so successful that it is the topic du jour for many governments, which seek to understand how it distributes content, whether to ban it, or the ownership structure of the company.

Several factors make TikTok an intriguing subject for study. It’s mobile-first, video-first, culturally impactful and has solved some challenging engineering problems. Today, I’d like us to examine TikTok’s For You feature and explore why it has been the most impactful aspect of social apps over the last decade.

Also, follow Growth Case Studies on TikTok - we have been posting some awesome stuff!

Before we start, here’s a message from our sponsors. Thank you, Intercom and that startup guy!

Startups who switch to Intercom can save up to $12,000/year

Startups who read beehiiv can receive a 90% discount on Intercom's AI-first customer service platform, plus Fin—the #1 AI agent for customer service—free for a full year.

That's like having a full-time human support agent at no cost.

What’s included?

• 6 Advanced Seats

• Fin Copilot for free

• 300 Fin Resolutions per month

Who’s eligible?

Intercom’s program is for high-growth, high-potential companies that are:

• Up to series A (including A)

• Currently not an Intercom customer

• Up to 15 employees

Apply now

Founders need better information

Get a single daily brief that filters the noise and delivers the signals founders actually use.

All the best stories — curated by a founder who reads everything so you don't have to.

And it’s totally free. We pay to subscribe, you get the good stuff.

Get the brief

Now that bills have been paid, let’s discuss TikTok’s For You feature. As usual, feel free to skip to sections that interest you.

Table of Contents

• Social Media Platforms and the Cold Start Problem

• The Social Graph

• The Interest Graph - TikTok’s For You

• TikTok For You’s Impact

  • Meta Platform Reels

  • YouTube Shorts

  • Meta’s Threads

  • Reddit Video Player

  • Twitter For You Feed

  • OpenAI Sora

  • The Verge

• TikTok’s For You - Drawbacks and Criticisms

• Conclusion - solving more cold start problems

Social Media Platforms and the Cold Start Problem

When a new user joins a social media platform, the platform must surface relevant content to the user. Otherwise, the platform is entirely useless. There is nothing for the user to engage with, and since they’re new, they are unlikely to post or create anything.

The cold start problem is not limited to social platforms but is also prevalent among various technology products. How do we ensure that a new user becomes familiar with our product and starts using it to get value?

The Social Graph

In the early days of the Internet, social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter relied on the social graph. The concept is simple: When a new user joins, they connect with or follow other users, which then exposes new content and increased engagement with the platform. The platform presents content for users to like, comment on, share with friends, or consume.

If you’ve ever used a social network that first recommended accounts for you to connect with or follow, they took advantage of the social graph (who you know or who you might know) to get you started.

The implication of this is that early social platforms used details from the sign-up process to surface new connections to a new user. LinkedIn requested email contacts to connect new users with their friends and colleagues. Facebook is famous for asking where you might have worked, where you went to school, the town you grew up in and some of your interests.

This data is fed into the “People you may know” feature. A list of friends and relatives for users to connect with.

Facebook’s People You May Know helps new and old users make new friends on the platform.

The Interest Graph - TikTok’s For You

TikTok flips this concept on its head.

After acquiring Musically in 2017 and merging it with TikTok, Bytedance (TikTok’s parent company) had an expansive library of content to deliver.

Based on a user’s heuristics (e.g. age, interests, location), TikTok could immediately deliver content to a user’s feed. It did not need to first connect the user with “people you may know”. The For You feed is the default content discovery engine in the application.

For You is deeply rooted in sophisticated, real-time machine learning infrastructure developed by its parent company, ByteDance, notably the Monolith recommendation system and Large Memory Network (LMN) architectures.

These inventions enable TikTok’s engine to understand videos based on several heuristics. The platform can then ‘tag’ or ‘group’ those videos to make sure that they are distributed to its users via the For You feed.

This instant feed gives TikTok a significant advantage over other platforms, with competitors trying to imitate its user experience and short video format. Many have fallen short, unable to understand the context within content, group them appropriately, and distribute them to the relevant users.

The For You feature on the Growth Case Studies TikTok account.

I didn't know this was an ad until I uploaded it.

The For You feed is a continuous, personalised stream of content based entirely on the user's inferred interests, behavioural signals, and engagement patterns. It is adaptive, unique to each user, and is strategically positioned as the default landing page when the application is opened.

While older platforms required explicit user permission (a "Follow" or a “Friend Request”) to deliver content, TikTok bypasses this entirely, using implicit behavioural data to rapidly prototype user identity without the cold-start problem, thereby ensuring instantaneous engagement.

TikTok For You’s Impact

The For You feature has a significant impact on TikTok’s users, internet creators and the larger technology ecosystem. Let’s take a look at its impact.

For TikTok’s users, the platform is a massive engagement machine; seeing videos you’re interested in as soon as you sign up is a game-changer. Watching the platform respond to your interests as they change or as you reject videos is incredible. While TikTok is popular among Gen Z, For You ensures that everyone, regardless of their interests or demographics, is catered to.

For content creators, brands and businesses, TikTok enables instant distribution of content to target audiences. Creators literally only have to post and trust that TikTok will get the videos to the right audience. Many creators claim that their TikTok videos significantly outperform those on other platforms that have adopted the short-form format. While TikTok achieves an average engagement rate of 2.34%, its competitors, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, deliver engagement rates of 1.48% and 0.91%, respectively.

For TikTok and ByteDance, the results are outstanding. TikTok reached 1 billion monthly users in 2021, with US users averaging 52 minutes per day on the platform and average users opening the app approximately 20 times a day.

For TikTok’s competitors, For You poses a threat to their business. Here’s how they have responded with numerous features.

Meta Platform Reels

Meta Platforms, who own Instagram and Facebook, responded to TikTok’s threat with Reels, a short-form video format within both applications. Reels is a successor to Meta’s Lasso - a standalone TikTok clone launched in 2018 and shuttered in 2020.

Meta’s Instagram Reels.

Image source: Meta.

YouTube Shorts

Google, which owns YouTube, has launched YouTube Shorts, a vertical short-form video feed integrated into the larger YouTube ecosystem.

YouTube Shorts within the YouTube app.

Image Source: YouTube.

Shorts are prominently placed within YouTube’s app, ensuring they receive visibility in search results and the user’s feed.

Meta’s Threads

Meta’s Threads, a Twitter clone, prioritises an algorithmic, interest-based feed over connections. Threads launched in 2023 with the For You and Following tabs.

Threads splits content into For You and Following tabs.

Image Source: Meta.

Reddit Video Player

Reddit replicated a vertical video player interface and sequential viewing for video posts on mobile. Swiping left allows the user to watch similar videos. In 2023, Reddit introduced a Watch feed.

Image source: XDA Developers.

Twitter For You Feed

Twitter(now X) defaulted to a “For You” page in January 2023 - taking a page out of TikTok’s playbook. The company made “Following” the optional feed, prioritising algorithmic discovery over social connections.

Image Source: Android Police.

OpenAI Sora

OpenAI’s Sora utilises the vertical video feed format and algorithmic recommendations for its AI-generated videos app.

Image Source: OpenAI

The Verge

Beyond social platforms, tech publication The Verge debuted a “Today’s Stream” vs. “Following” feature. Allowing its readers to decide how they want news delivered.

TikTok’s For You - Drawbacks and Criticisms

TikTok’s For You feed has been criticised by many. Because it’s interest-based and hyperpersonalised, it creates echo chambers - where a user only sees what they are interested in. This is potentially dangerous, given increasing political polarisation and teenage exposure to harmful ideas. 

Others criticise the lack of timestamps. A TikTok user could see a video from 3 months ago and engage with it as if it were recently relevant, because time doesn’t matter to the For You feed; old videos could resurface, potentially damaging a user’s point of view, since the context of time is nonexistent.

The company has responded by adding controls for the For You feed, allowing users to tap "Not Interested," filter keywords, manage topics, and refresh the feed.

Conclusion - solving more cold start problems

While TikTok contains a Following feed and a Friends feed, its For You page was revolutionary for a new social platform - fundamentally changing how social media users discover and engage with content. For You is a successful attempt to solve the cold start problem - how do we get users to take action with new software?

It’s made me think a lot and wonder - how else could we solve this? What can we do, and how can we help new users make the most of software where there’s a blank canvas?

Hello! I took a brief leave of absence in July and August to reconnect with my European roots (this meant taking a holiday!). I am back to work now with my head full of new ideas for this publication, and will be sharing some of them in good time. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about redistributing these essays in different formats. So please follow Growth Case Studies on Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and TikTok - lots of new content coming soon.

If a friend forwarded you this newsletter, you can subscribe on the homepage here. Now let’s get into it!

Figma has become one of the biggest successes of this year's tech IPOs. After regulators dismantled Adobe’s 2022 $20 billion acquisition offer, analysts were unclear about which road Figma would take. Three years later and a $1.2 billion oversubscribed IPO, Figma is worth a case study.

Its story is a notable success in betting on a growing profession, community obsession, enhancing the profession with tools and resources, and becoming the de facto platform for professionals involved in digital design.

This case study will chart Figma’s origins, unique value propositions, community, growth, fundraising, revenue, IPO, and its future. As usual, please feel free to skip to sections that interest you.

Table of Contents

• Figma Origin and Founding Story

  • Before Figma, there was Adobe and others

  • 3 years to build

• Figma Growth - Community for The Internet Design G …

• Figma’s product roadmap

• Figma vs Others: Competitive Landscape

• Figma Revenue and Traction

• Figma Fundraising

• Adobe’s Acquisition of Figma

• Figma’s IPO - Community Style

• Figma’s Future - Product Development Platform

Figma Origin and Founding Story

Before Figma, Dylan Field was an intern at professional social network LinkedIn and online social news platform Flipboard. He had also worked at Microsoft as a research assistant and as an online marketing intern at technology publisher O’Reilly Media. Evan Wallace, his cofounder, was a WebGL prodigy who had worked as an engineer at Pixar and Microsoft.

Dylan and Evan began working on Figma in 2012 during Dylan’s short time as a computer science student at Brown University. Evan was a student of graphics design and a teaching assistant at Brown’s CS department, while Dylan was the chair of the CS Department’s Undergraduate group. Evan was a talented engineer who was working on complex animated graphics on the web. He also built games and apps.

In September 2012, Dylan was accepted into the prestigious Thiel Fellowship - an initiative by venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The fellowship selects 20 creative and ambitious people each year to drop out of college and turn their ideas into startups. Each recipient receives $100,000 for a year to flesh out their idea fully. Other recipients of the Thiel Fellowship are Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, Shahed Kha, the cofounder of Loom, and Lucy Guo, the cofounder of Scale AI.

Sometime in 2012, Figma’s CEO briefly considered building a meme generator. We thank God he did not do that.

Figma’s vision expanded to build a creative collaborative experience in a web browser. Just like Google had done with Google Docs. It’s important to think about designers and visual design collaboration before Figma.

Before Figma, there was Adobe and others

Before Figma’s creation, design work was conducted on a desktop application and mostly offline. Design teams and their collaborators would share files in different formats and at different versions. As a marketing professional before Figma, it was pretty standard to receive email attachments with filenames such as website_menu_header_reworked_v3.png. I would then review these files, send feedback to the designer, who would rework them and return them to me via email. This was not ideal, and Figma hoped to change that with inspiration from Google Docs.

Google Docs’ online document creator has completely changed how people create documents and collaborate with colleagues. A Google Docs user could create one document and set permissions for colleagues (view only, comment only, view, edit and comment) or even collaborate in real-time with those colleagues. Users could also view version history, returning to previous versions to copy text, images or review documents. This made it easier to work on documents and improve team productivity.

In 2012, Designers used tools like Sketch to make mockups of software applications or design them in high fidelity. These design applications did not work online, and some of them (like Adobe Photoshop) were not intended for software design, lacking buttons and other software elements.

Figma’s core product thesis is to enable real-time collaboration of design between design teams and collaborators who work within the design process. This is a complex problem to solve. Unlike Google Docs, which is text-heavy and can transmit information over the internet fast and in small data formats, design files are high fidelity and beyond that, it is technically challenging to build an in-browser design tool, even without the complexities of real-time collaboration.

Figma’s multiplayer enables simultaneous collaboration on a design file with near-0 latency.

Figma calls this collaborative feature Multiplayer - the linchpin of Figma’s product. In a 2017 blog post, Co-founder Evan Wallace said:

The tool would need to load design artefacts, respond to user input, and generate output quickly. With real-time collaboration, the tool would need to transmit design artefacts and assets over the internet to another computer, where they would be received for feedback or changes. Failure to do this means that the design tool isn’t fit for purpose and cannot compete with Adobe’s tools or any other tools in its category.

3 years to build

Because of these technical complexities, Figma spent nearly 4 years developing and releasing its design product in beta. Early team members often took the product to software companies for feedback and evaluation. This is because designers not only care about the tools they use, but also find it disappointing when a tool fails to meet expectations.

With funding from the Thiel Fellowship and a $4 million round led by Index Ventures in 2013, the team continued to build.

Figma launched in private beta in December 2015, along with an announcement of an additional $14M fundraise. Speaking to the press, its founder and CEO, Dylan Field, discussed his aim to be the Adobe for the internet design generation.

Two months before Figma’s announcement, Adobe launched XD to focus on the growing software development industry. However, Adobe failed to launch online collaboration and wouldn’t have this feature until 2019. Dylan Field was right on the mark.

Figma Growth - Community for The Internet Design Generation

How do you market a product in stealth mode for 3 years? Figma’s first marketing hire, Claire Butler and its CEO would pitch Figma to software companies in Palo Alto, California. They would demo the product and receive feedback, using that to refine the product or determine if it was ready to be made public. 

Figma’s growth was slow in its early years. Because it hadn’t solved the technical challenge of making a browser design tool that was collaborative in real-time, it couldn’t go to market. Launching a product that didn’t work would have killed the company on day one. Even after launch, the team got comments like “If this is the future of design, I’m changing careers”. 

However, Figma got one thing right by involving designers in its product development process. Since it was built for designers, it maintained close relationships with them, ensuring their feedback was acknowledged, fixing bugs quickly, and using design leaders to drive attention on launch day. 

In an interview with First Round, Claire Butler talks about the launch approach.

Figma continued to build with designers and adopted a bottom-up approach, drawing on playbooks from companies like Atlassian and Slack. Individual contributors in software organisations often introduced these tools, and because they worked so well, they would invite other colleagues and superiors who would adopt them, leading to paid subscriptions.

Clarity on “the internet design generation” drove Figma’s global expansion. The company inadvertently built an international design movement. From inviting designers to its office in California, it started empowering designers around the world through unofficial meetups.

One example is Dylan Field’s visit to Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018. I recall how upset my colleagues were about missing the meetup, and I felt the same way. I worked at a software development jobs matching platform, and it was nearly unheard of that a high-flying Silicon Valley CEO would randomly pop into dinner in an African city to get user feedback.

These meetups would turn into Friends of Figma, a globally connected community of designers. Friends of Figma meet in literally any city you can think of, and in the company’s IPO filing, it highlights this community’s growth to over 200 groups hosting 650 events in 2024.

Figma’s global community. Image source: Figma S1

Taking community engagement further, Figma created Config - the first of its kind event for Figma designers. The first Config, hosted in 2020, drew 1,000 people from around the world, and by its second iteration, 5,000 attendees were present.

Many startups extend their products with external-facing APIs, SDKs and the like. Figma enables its community to build custom features and workflows via its plug-ins and widget functions. This enables software development talent (designers or developers) to leverage Figma’s platform by creating these custom tools for their colleagues. It also directly involves the design community in the future of Figma’s product.

Figma engages with its community in other ways, hosting Office Hours to showcase new products while receiving feedback from its users

As a result of Figma’s global community efforts, more than 50% of its revenue comes from the US, and about 80% of its users are international. 

Figma’s product roadmap

But Figma is not just for designers. As a growth and product marketing professional, I find myself spending hours in Figma. While I don’t design user interfaces or visual assets, I am involved in processes for refining and testing them. Figma has found that 2-thirds of its user base are non-designers. Its CEO wrote about people like me in his 2017 letter.

Figma’s vision is to enable creative visual collaboration online. Fortunately for the company, visual collaboration doesn’t end with software design. The company is aware of this and has developed a suite of tools to support every step of the design journey, including those involving non-designers, within its product. It is rapidly building features to cover the entire design journey. 

Using the adjacent user theory, Figma uses designers as a lever to pull all collaborators into its products. These collaborators then become users as well. They might interact in Figma Design, use Figma Make or work within Figma Dev. The growth loop continues, attracting new Figma users, who attract other users, who collaborate with existing users and then pay for Figma. By successfully converting adjacent users, Figma directly grows usage and revenue.

Typical user acquisition and retention flow for Figma.

Here are some notable product launches from Figma that capture the adjacent user:

1. April 2021: It launched FigJam - a digital whiteboarding tool for whiteboarding, brainstorming and team collaboration. FigJam is a low-fidelity tool for sketches, mockups and low-fidelity design work - used even by non-designers. This was the first time it built a product beyond its primary design tool, Figma Design.

2. June 2023: It launched Dev Mode. Figma Dev Mode is a specialised feature designed to streamline the handoff process by helping developers translate design into code more efficiently. The feature was made generally available in January 2024.

3. June 2024: Figma Slides launched in a public beta. The presentation tool allows users to create and collaborate on slide decks directly within Figma. March 2025: Figma Slides is officially launched and made available to all users.

4. May 2025 (at Config 2025): The company announces a significant expansion of its product suite, positioning itself as an end-to-end platform for digital product development. This feature set includes:

   
   Figma Sites (Open Beta): A website builder that allows designers to publish their designs directly to the web. Figma Sites will soon include a content management system.
   
   Figma Draw: A new vector illustration tool with custom brushes and other features, representing a direct challenge to tools like Adobe Illustrator.
   
   Figma Buzz (Open Beta): A tool for creating marketing content and on-brand assets at scale, positioning the company as a competitor to platforms like Canva.
   
   Figma Make: An AI-driven, prompt-to-code tool that allows users to generate functional prototypes and web apps from their ideas and designs.
   
   Figma AI: New AI features, such as autosuggest text and image editing. With plans to be integrated across all of the company's products.
   
   Grid: A new feature within Auto Layout that makes it easier to create responsive, two-dimensional layouts.

Figma’s product direction has enabled it to take on Adobe. By building tools for general design, web design, illustration and marketing design, Figma shoots directly at Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Its recent roadmap, however, also acquires new competitors like Canva, known for generalist non-designer design, and Webflow, a content management system for websites. Figma also tackles new AI-first design startups such as Lovable, V0, Replit and Base44. Let’s study Figma’s competitive landscape.

Figma vs Others: Competitive Landscape

Figma has spent 9 years broadening its horizons to include everyone involved in any kind of design process. This includes product managers, user experience researchers, developers, marketers, and writers. In its IPO S1 filing, it uses this image to describe its new audiences. All of these professionals can use Figma in their day-to-day work

The diagram below shows that Figma’s competitive landscape is 2-pronged. Designers and non-designers.

Figma Revenue and Traction

As a result of Figma’s customer obsession, community, product and expansion, it has grown successfully from a company with $700,000 in revenue in 2017 to a projected $1 billion in revenue for 2025.

Figma strategically leverages collaboration (its core thesis) to build product offerings that deliver high retention rates but also revenue. As a result of this, it has more than 11,000 business customers who pay over $10,000 annually.

Figma customers paying over $10,000 annually. Source: Figma S1.

Figma’s product is not just valuable, it’s sticky. Its early customers still use it, and, as shown in the chart below, even its newest paid customers continue to use the product long-term.

Figma’s ARR by Annual Cohort through March 31 2025.

Below is a timeline of Figma’s revenue growth from inception to IPO.

Figma - Annual Recurring Revenue from 2017 to 2025. Source: Press Releases, IPO filings.

• 2017: Figma starts monetising its product with the launch of its "Pro" tier and generates approximately $700,000 in revenue for the year.

• 2018: Revenue grows to $4 million.

• 2019: Figma launches its "Team" plan. Its annual revenue reaches $25 million.

• 2020: Revenue reaches $75 million.

• 2021: Revenue reaches $95 million.

• 2022: Revenue reaches $400 million.

• 2023: Revenue reaches $506.08 million.

• 2024: Revenue grows to $749 million.

• 2025: The number of customers with over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) grows to 1,031, representing 37% of the total ARR. Revenue estimates for the year stand at $900 million.
  

Figma Fundraising

Figma’s success is also partly due to successful fundraising efforts and investor backing. In its 13 years preceding its IPO, the company raised a total of $333.1 million from venture capital investors, attracting top firms such as Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Before the IPO, it grew to over $740 million in annual recurring revenue. A testament to its product leadership, but also investor confidence in its business.

Adobe’s Acquisition of Figma

In 2022, software maker Adobe announced its intent to acquire Figma for $20 billion to bolster its design software portfolio. Several market regulators around the world investigated and found Adobe’s offer anticompetitive, alleging that the company’s ownership of Figma would reduce competition for design software and scuttle innovation in the design software industry. In December 2023, Adobe terminated its offer and paid Figma a $1 billion break-up fee.

By 2024, Figma was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer, with existing investors Sequoia and Andreessen-Horowitz (A16Z) and new funders such as Fidelity and Franklin Venture Partners taking part.

Figma’s IPO - Community Style

In April 2025, Figma files its S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering (IPO). The company initially prices its shares between $25 and $28, targeting a valuation of $14.6 billion to $16.4 billion.

Following its debut on the NYSE as $FIG ( ▼ 0.34% ) , Figma's stock soared, closing at $115.50 on its first day. Its market capitalisation briefly hit nearly $68 billion, with retail investors unable to buy shares.

But there’s something unique about this. Before an IPO date, a company’s CEO would typically visit investment bankers, hedge funds, and other asset management stakeholders to secure buyers for the company's stock. This is called a roadshow. Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, embarked on a roadshow like no other, ensuring 25 firms bought $850 million worth of stock - about 70% of the deal.

The Information reports that Dylan and other Figma executives scoured through a list of potential buyers to determine who would get access to purchase stock. Figma preferred long-term partners over quick stock flippers, so it ensured speaking to all major investors individually.

From The Information:

Figma once again extended its culture of community engagement to its investors and, more importantly, listened to their needs.

Figma’s Future - Product Development Platform

Figma’s future is a battle with heavily capitalised entrants and incumbents. Newcomers like Lovable and Replit are raising capital and deploying features at an alarming rate while incumbents like Adobe and Canva go after Figma’s audiences.

The company quickly adopted AI in response to the threat from new AI design and development tools. Figma Make, launched to the public in July 2025, is a direct attack on tools like Replit, Lovable, V0, and Base44. Figma Make is also an expansion of the company’s plan to capture more of the non-designer market, and AI could be a tool to achieve this goal.

Prompt-to-design and click-to-prompt features enable non-designers to deliver graphics, interfaces, and visual assets. While these are not professional designers, AI tools allow them to embody design for new formats - in the same way Figma enabled a new generation of software designers when it launched.

Figma’s strength and advantage lie in its platform features, hinged on collaboration, quick product iteration and deployment, community relationships, and a strong user base of 13 million monthly active users. It’s also well capitalised, having just raised $1.2 billion.

In its S1 filing, Figma describes its future as a product development platform:

Figma has captured the heart of digital designers. Now it must capture everyone else’s heart, too.

Thank you for reading the Figma Growth Case Study. If you loved this, please hit the share buttons and share with a friend or colleague. Please subscribe to receive the next case study.

A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.

That’s what this newsletter delivers.

The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.

Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.

Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.

Sign Up Free

If you work in a startup, you probably know of and use Slack. Slack is a workplace communications tool that enables a company’s employees to collaborate primarily via chat. If you don’t work in a startup or work in an organisation that uses Microsoft’s Office tools, you probably know of and use Teams. Microsoft Teams is software that enables company-wide work collaboration through chat and video or audio calls.

Microsoft Teams has grown from a little-known product in 2019 to over 320 million daily active users today. While its competitor, Slack, has peaked at just around 1.1 million daily active users.

Today, we’re going to study how Microsoft’s distribution and network advantage trumped Slack.

As usual, feel free to skip sections.

Table of Contents

• Slack - Founding & Origin Story

• Microsoft Teams Origin Story

• Can chat replace email?

• Slack’s advantage

  • User Experience

  • Integrations

• The numbers: Microsoft Teams vs Slack.

• Microsoft’s Advantage

  • Microsoft Office

  • Microsoft Edge

  • Microsoft Bing

  • Microsoft Partners and Resellers

  • Integrations

  • Windows OS

• Slack’s rebuttal and ongoing investigation

• Salesforce Acquired Slack

• Conclusion

Slack - Founding & Origin Story

In 2011, Stewart Butterfield’s game development studio, Tiny Speck, was working on an online game called Glitch. The team working on this product needed to collaborate somehow, and since they were a software shop, they built linefeed to enable these collaborations. The first versions were on the IRC protocol and enabled the team to automate and organise file exchanges.

Before Tiny Speck, Stewart co-founded photo and video sharing site Flickr and sold it to Yahoo. Flickr launched in 2004, and by 2005, Yahoo acquired it for between $22 million and $25 million. This was during the hot social craze of the early 2000s.

By 2011, Stewart was a rare example of an exited founder, having successfully sold his startup to a respected tech giant, Yahoo. Glitch was another attempt to build a gaming company. But Glitch didn’t work out and wasn’t going to make money, so in 2012, Stewart pivoted the company to focus on “Slack,” which was derived from the phrase “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. “ The name Slack replaced the internal name linefeed.

A common thread in this story is that both Flickr and Slack emerged from Stewart’s attempts to build gaming companies. Flickr emerged from Stewart building internal tools for his first company, Ludicorp, which wanted to make the online game Neverending. The game never launched, and the company successfully pivoted to Flickr.

Slack launched to the public in August 2013 and had 8000 businesses on its waitlist. In one of its first public appearances, it’s hinted that Slack could replace email. Hold on to that thought for a minute, we will return to email.

Microsoft Teams Origin Story

In March 2016, Microsoft executives considered an $8 billion acquisition of Slack. The company saw a boom in workplace collaboration tools, including Slack, Cisco’s Webex, Atlassian’s Hipchat, and Zoom. Since it had built digital workplace collaboration tools, it was only logical that Microsoft would want to get in on chat.

Internally, its Slack acquisition proposal would be debated for months and ultimately rejected by its founder, Bill Gates, who thought they should improve Skype for Business instead. After all, Microsoft had just acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.

Microsoft unveiled a global preview of Teams in November 2016. Its CEO, Satya Nadella, is quoted in the press release:

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Office, goes further:

Slack responded to Microsoft’s announcement with a press release, which was also published as a full-page ad in The New York Times. The release was reminiscent of Apple’s 1984 ad, following IBM's announcement of its personal computers.

Can chat replace email?

In "Why Is Notion Building Email and Calendar Features?", I posit that email is the center of modern work collaboration.

I go on to list email’s features and why they’re important for work. That section ends with the following quote.

For anyone who worked before chat became commonplace, email was annoying. Email is so overwhelming for work that achieving inbox zero (where you have 0 unread emails) has become a global phenomenon.

Companies like Slack thought they could replace email and build a new centre of work instead. In a 2013 interview with Fast Company, Stewart makes a case for Slack and work chat.

The interview continues with a discussion of Slack’s features and Stewart’s concerns about Microsoft. This was the first time Stewart took a public jab at Microsoft. At this time, Microsoft had not launched Teams.

At this point in the story, Stewart is correct about the annoyance of email. Let’s take a look at Slack for a bit. 

Slack’s advantage

I’ll say it in one sentence. Slack is the best workplace chat application out there. There is nothing that has come close since its public launch. If you’ve never used Slack, you wouldn’t understand until you used it. When I first used Slack in 2015, I came from a world of Skype Business, Hipchat, and Google Hangouts Chat. This new Slack, and its fun interactions, made it much better, less clunky, more useful, and a well-thought-out interface for work. Since then, it has beaten every other workplace chat tool I’ve used in terms of daily usage, functionality, and forward-thinking product features. 

Since Slack originated from a gaming company, it's evident how its user-centric design is reflected in every single element as users interact with its software. Its apps are not tedious to use.

Slack has two significant advantages.

User Experience

Slack’s user experience is best described as smooth. The product simplifies work communication by creating every feature to ease this complexity. By essentially competing with email, Slack realizes that it needs to compress information to be denser yet readable, make it searchable and retrievable, and, most of all, allow multiple types of communication between colleagues, teams, and external parties.

It also chooses a wonderful colour palette that’s easy on the eyes while easing a new user into its philosophy of workplace communications.

Integrations

Slack’s biggest lever for growth is Slack Integrations. Since Slack aimed to replace email and become the central hub for all work integrations, it developed an Application Programming Interface (API) that enabled connections between the most popular work tools and Slack. Whether these tools were task management, design, document editor, cloud storage, IDE, social media scheduler, calendar, CRM, as long as the software was used at work, Slack wanted to integrate with it.

In practice, this means that Slack can connect (with permission) to a tool like Google Calendar and send its users new notifications about new calendar event invites and upcoming calendar events. Additionally, it enables users to interact via Slack by declining or accepting these events.

Slack’s first integration announcement was Google Calendar in 2015, and by December of the same year, it had enabled over 150 integrations. The company has done this for thousands of work tools and has over 2600 apps in its integrations marketplace.

Integrations, a strong user experience, and a remarkable brand have grown Slack to 42 million Daily Active Users.

Slack’s user experience and integrations marketplace have been huge levers for its growth. Both have given it a strong brand equity among workplace tools, while integrations have driven word of mouth and expanded its platform. It also features enhancements to improve usability, including audio and video calls via Huddle, automated message recaps, transcripts of audio files, advanced search capabilities, cross-company collaboration, and reminders. This is why over 1 million businesses use Slack to work functionally. But a million businesses are not enough.

The numbers: Microsoft Teams vs Slack.

Microsoft considers Slack to be the major competitor for Teams. It takes this so seriously that the first time it shared success numbers in June 2019, it published a graph announcing Teams had surpassed Slack’s daily active users.

Let’s compare daily active user numbers for Slack and Microsoft Teams since inception.

Microsoft Teams vs Slack - Daily Active User Numbers

According to the graph above, Slack’s growth appears to be flattening at around 42 million daily active users by 2024. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is experiencing massive growth, and in 2024, it announced 320 million daily active users. Microsoft Teams has more than 8 times as many users and over 280 million more users than Slack. How is Microsoft able to achieve such success with a new tool?

Microsoft’s Advantage

It’s essential to note that Microsoft had recognized and anticipated the growth of work chat tools as early as 2016, when it attempted to acquire Slack.

Microsoft Teams’ success is due to the advantage of Microsoft’s digital real estate and network it controls across various work applications. In this section, we will look at some of them.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office (now Microsoft 365) is the most popular workplace software bundle in the world. With 345 million users in 2023, its sub-products — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — are key drivers of modern productivity. The company bundled Teams into Office and achieved hockey stick growth.

This bundling advantage is so significant and unfair to Slack that it filed a complaint against Microsoft in the EU. Microsoft has responded by offering two versions of Office: one with Teams and one without.

While unbundling could theoretically slow down Teams’ growth, it will be insufficient. Office remains a massive real estate for advertising Teams. While writing this, I noticed that Teams is prominently featured on the Microsoft 365 webpage.

Microsoft Edge

The joke is that you open the Microsoft Edge browser to download Google Chrome. Still, Edge owns 5.25% of the global browser market and is used by 292 million people. Adding more real estate to Microsoft’s arsenal to push teams.

Microsoft Bing

Bing is one of the world’s most popular search engines with 140 million daily active users. Although it’s one of the less popular search engines, it presents an opportunity for Microsoft to promote Teams.

Microsoft Partners and Resellers

Microsoft’s Partner Network comprises 400,000 global companies that build upon, resell, maintain, and deliver Microsoft’s products and services in every corner of the globe. This partner network, established over 30 years ago, is a key component of Microsoft’s distribution strategy. Partners are incentivised to sell the company’s products, earning commissions and bonuses as a reward. All of these partners sell Microsoft’s new products, including Teams.

Integrations

Thanks to this network of Agent partners and resellers, Microsoft has also built integrations for Teams. There are more than 2,500 apps that integrate with Teams, including HR software, CRM, YouTube, and tax accounting software.

Windows OS

The Windows Operating System is live on over 1.5 billion computing devices. This is Microsoft’s largest product and is crucial to the company’s success since the launch of the first Windows OS in 1985.

An operating system like Windows, Android, or Mac OS is key for the distribution of work applications. Microsoft pre-installs Teams on many Windows machines worldwide and provides Teams buttons in the Windows start menu when Teams is not preinstalled.

Slack’s rebuttal and ongoing investigation

Going against the world’s biggest maker of workplace software will not be easy. After Slack’s splashy newspaper ad and the ensuing battle for the centre of work, it became clear that Microsoft Teams’ distribution advantages outweighed Slack’s.

In July 2020, Slack filed a competition complaint in the EU, accusing Microsoft of using its market dominance illegally.

Here’s a statement from Slack’s press release on that day:

Some more from Slack’s General Counsel:

The EU commission reviewed Slack’s complaint, opened an investigation in 2023, and delivered a statement of objection in June 2024 - nearly 4 years after the complaint was filed. An excerpt from its statement is below:

The commission’s findings so far are a summary of this entire essay. Microsoft is a global leader in workplace software, boasting an impressive distribution network and competitive advantages as a result. This makes it inherently difficult for anyone to compete with Microsoft if the company chooses to build similar software that solves similar problems.

The commission has not yet made a decision, but it continues to investigate this issue.

Salesforce Acquired Slack

Just months after filing a complaint against Microsoft, Slack announced its acquisition. In December 2020, Salesforce announced its intention to acquire Slack for $27 billion. By July 2021, the deal closed, cementing one of the largest exits in Silicon Valley.

There’s an interesting play here. Slack wasn't acquired by just any major company. It got acquired by one of the biggest anti-Microsoft people in the name of Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff.

Marc is known for being vocally against Microsoft, its business, its software, and its practices. He’s taken this to Slack’s side - not just acquiring it but being vocally supportive of the product against Microsoft Teams.

Here’s Marc speaking about Microsoft Teams’ growth in a SaaStr interview:

Marc acquired Slack to take on Microsoft, but it’s unclear what Salesforce’s strategy is. The industry felt Slack was too expensive for Salesforce and couldn’t see how the acquisition would fit. This lack of clarity caused shareholders to sell their stocks en masse, resulting in the company’s share price plummeting.

Nearly five years later, it remains unclear what Salesforce’s strategy is. Slack continues to develop new features and expand its user base, but it is still far behind Microsoft Teams.

Slack continues to grow at a rate of about 10M DAUs per year.

Conclusion

As workplace software teams scale their growth, build new features, and improve revenue, it’s essential to consider the competition. The competition is not just user inertia from trying new things, or getting organisational buy-in to pay for software. The competition is also dominant global leaders in the niche or spaces you choose to operate in.

New philosophy, user experience advantages, and a lovable brand are great advantages for a new startup, but in Slack’s case, they’re not enough to drive growth that owns the category. Growth is about distribution and getting software into the hands of paying customers.

Global technology leaders, such as Microsoft and Google, have established entrenched network and distribution advantages due to their tools, platforms, partnerships, integrations, and longevity. Beating them at this game requires long-term thinking, regulatory support, and creative strategy.

This is the uphill battle that startups like Slack, Notion, and Canva will face as they expand deeper into the workplace productivity software industry. One does not simply scale to 1 billion users, especially when you have a $10 billion valuation staring down the barrel. 

A few days ago, Duolingo CEO Louis von Ahn wrote a letter to his employees stating that he’s refocusing the company to be AI-first, calling it a “platform shift.” In the memo, he highlights betting on the mobile revolution in 2012 and how that era enabled Duolingo to thrive. He also instructed employees to use AI in their work, but I will focus on the “platform shift” in this essay.

You can read Louis’ complete statement below:

What’s interesting about this statement is that in Why Is Duolingo So Crazy, I noted that the education industry and particularly the languages sub-sector benefits from large language models and technologies like OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer(GPT). Here’s an excerpt:

Louis’ letter highlights two significant things. He predicts how AI could change work (and a mandate to use AI) while showing us how AI changes software and software companies, particularly Duolingo. The announcements didn’t stop at his letter - the company announced 148 new language courses, expanding its seven most popular non-English courses to 28 user interface languages.

This is a big deal. If you speak any of the world’s most popular languages, you probably take it for granted that many people do not speak any of those languages. If Yoruba is my first language, how can I learn Spanish? Most Spanish courses are not tailored for Yoruba speakers.

AI enables Duolingo to adapt its courses to as many languages as possible. As long as it (or anyone else) can build a model for a language, multiple courses can be created.

There are 530 spoken languages in my home country, and thousands of languages worldwide.
Source: SIL International.

The productivity gains are also essential to note. The language announcement says:

I snicker at tech hype as much as anyone else, but this is crazy stuff happening here!

In today’s growth case study, I’m a pilot in a time machine attempting to study how different eras of computing hardware and software improvement have impacted the type of software built. They have influenced not just the way software is developed, but also how software is distributed. This isn’t necessarily a historically accurate timeline and does not encompass everything that has happened. Still, I’d love to highlight how different computing improvements have impacted software, hardware, and users’ lives.

This is not supposed to be a history of computers, but I’ll lean into my nerdiness and start with Charles Babbage’s analytical engine in the British Science Museum.

This is a computer!

Let’s take a break before we get deep into the case study. It takes me hours of thinking, researching, writing, editing, and creating to get these case studies published. If you like them and want to support this publication, please buy me a coffee. It would be even better if you made it monthly so I could drag myself to the library with a whole jug of coffee and churn out more case studies like this.

Computing Eras since the 50s.

1. Personal computing era - Intel and Xerox PARC started a revolution with Intel’s work on silicon chips and Xerox PARC’s work on input devices and graphical user interfaces.
   

   

   
   Microsoft, IBM and Apple ran with it. Personal computing changed how people interacted with computers, from punch cards to keyboards, mice and ubiquitous graphic user interfaces in one generation.
   
   

   

   
   This meant new types of software to work with, keyboards and mice as input devices, and new kinds of media. Finally, you could play video, edit work documents or listen to audio if you connected a speaker to the computer. Before personal computing, people used really large mainframe computers like the PDP-10. Software in this pre-Internet personal computing era was distributed via floppy disks and compact disks bought in physical stores.
   
   Before the personal computing era (and even the PDP-10), computer users interacted via punch cards and data was stored in large rolls of magnetic tape. My mother has a fantastic story about seeing this in her university and marvelling in awe.
   

2. Desktop Internet - Thanks to work by DARPA and CERN, these large computers and eventually personal computers started to talk to each other on something called the Internet. The Internet hit consumers and meant new types of software that could talk to other instances of the same software across the Internet. The World Wide Web (invented by Tim Berners-Lee), including protocols like TCP/IP, HTML, FTP and SMTP, meant software had to be built with collaboration and communication in mind. YahooMail (and other services), IRC, AOL, Google Search, Internet Explorer, and Skype are some of the winners from that period.
   

3. Browsers - Once the Internet hit desktop computers, we needed software to visit and interact with websites and web apps. The 90s ended with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slugging it out in court with the upstart Netscape. But they had barely hit the surface. Mozilla’s Firefox became popular in the early 2000s with the option to add new tabs to a browser and improve multitasking. Sometime within this period, Macromedia (eventually owned by Adobe) launched Flash, bringing interactive multimedia to desktop browsers.
   

   The browser era also brought us plug-ins, add-ons, and browser extensions. If you consider desktop browsers an agnostic software platform that works on any compatible device, you could build software to modify webpages or extract data from them. This was a massive boon for some software developers, who made everything from video downloaders to SEO trackers and text editors. Grammarly, one of the most popular tools from this era, launched in 2009!

   

   Plugins were a primary method of software distribution. Today, extensions and add-ons are still a way to distribute software within desktop browsers.

   Before the end of this era, HTML5 and CSS would be developed, resulting in the death of Flash (thanks to Steve Jobs’ letter) and responsive webpages, which allowed developers to build one website for desktop and mobile web.
   

   Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) were also invented in this era, providing even more interactivity for webpages. Without AJAX, we might never have had web apps like MySpace and Hi5, which brought along the social media era. Facebook (and dozens of clones) became popular, allowing us to upload pictures, tag friends, and generally improve interactivity on the web.

4. GSM - Phone calls and SMS predate instant messaging. Many don’t think of the global telecommunications revolution as a computing era. Still, it meant that for the first time, millions of people worldwide had a mobile phone and could carry it anywhere to make phone calls and send messages to friends and colleagues. You could even play games. Nokia’s Symbian would eventually dominate this era and largely dictate how software got built - all of the software had to be designed to fit a tiny screen and work on a mobile internet system called WAP. GSM drastically reduced the cost of global communications and brought the world closer together.
   
   

   

   GSM was also defined as “General Street Madness” in some parts of West Africa.

   
   
   I will slightly skip a little thing called the Telegraph, which sent messages across wires spanning the entire globe. You couldn’t have the internet and GSM without the Telegraph.
   

5. Mobile Internet - As the Internet became more mobile, thanks to improvements in GSM technology (anyone remember EDGE?) and mobile phones, we saw a few interesting things happen.
   
   Research In Motion’s BlackBerry became the dominant professional (and, in some countries, personal) phone while everyone else tried to fit into this mobile-phone-with-full-computer-keyboard paradigm. BlackBerry’s win and Windows Mobile effort meant that, for the first time, professionals could edit work documents right on their phones and email updates to their colleagues, too! I had a Windows Mobile phone as a teenager, and typing full-text messages on a phone was pretty cool!
   

6. Smartphones - While there were notable improvements in mobile phone technologies from Research In Motion, Nokia and Microsoft, none would make a dent like Apple’s iPhone.
   

   

   I had a Moto Q and then a BlackBerry after.

   
   The iPhone ditched the physical keyboard for a virtual one, making the entire mobile phone a screen. Because Apple did not think of its mobile phone as an extension of the desktop computer, it built something completely new, while taking many lessons from the Palm Treo. The iPhone changed how mobile applications were built - developers now had the entire mobile real estate to play with while Apple’s App Store changed how software was distributed. A famous saying from this era is “There’s an app for that”. 
   

   

   Watch Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone here.

   Eventually, Google’s Android Play Store and Apple’s App Store would become the dominant distribution platforms for mobile phone applications.
   
   Smartphones also gave applications new capabilities. Software could now interact directly with a mobile device’s hardware and pull data, including GPS and gyroscopes (running and Maps apps), camera (social, face-tuning, and image editing apps), microphone, and speaker(recording and calling apps). The smartphone made all kinds of new personal computing possible, like Snapchat, Instagram and Google Maps. Duolingo’s CEO is talking about this era when he references “mobile first” in the letter.
   

7. Cloud computing - Improvement in data centre technologies and transmission speeds meant that files could be stored and retrieved from the internet faster and cheaper. Cloud computing brought us everything from Salesforce, Dropbox, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and millions of apps we use today. For users, it meant that we began to rely more on apps that stored data on the Internet and less on apps that stored data on our devices. I haven’t seen or used a USB flash drive in about 7 years. For software development teams, cloud computing meant that new tools like GitHub became even more important, and Figma changed on-cloud design.
   

8. Gaming - While gaming isn’t a particular era, gaming has benefited from every computing era since the personal computer era. Sony and Nintendo are two huge winners here because they make gaming consoles - a specific set of computers dedicated to gaming. Software developers are winners, taking advantage of platforms like PlayStation, Nintendo, Windows OS, Android and iOS to distribute gaming applications. If you’ve ever played a game on your phone and then played the desktop or console version, you would realise that those are two separate games.
   

   

   Many analysts joke that gaming is the perfect way to predict the future of computing and software. It is difficult to argue with these analysts, as NVIDIA started out producing gaming chips, which are good at processing a lot of calculations.
   

9. 4G and 5G—I have to mention these technologies at this point. 4G and 5G dropped the cost of accessing the internet on mobile phones to a fraction of its previous price. They also made data accessibility faster, leading to the pivot to video era of 2015-2018.
   

10. Silicon Chips—Silicon Valley is aptly named after the American computing industry’s association with the silicon transistor in microprocessors. Without Silicon and Moore’s law, these technological breakthroughs would be impossible. The improving power of chips has been a strong factor in every computing era.

    

    Image source: Wikipedia

    
    While Intel brought a personal computing boom, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon powered the mobile computing era, and NVIDIA’s chips and CUDA brought incredible cloud, gaming and research capabilities. Now, they usher us into an era of software with artificially intelligent capabilities.

Artificial Intelligence

When someone studies artificial intelligence, they learn many technical terms like large language models, algorithms, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, and neural networks. These terms are huge fields on their own. However, they have combined and collapsed into one consumer-understandable term: artificial Intelligence.

This makes defining artificial intelligence a bit difficult since it is definitely not a chatbot, but I like how the UK parliament defines what AI is capable of:

• interpreting, processing and generating realistic human-like speech and text.

• interpreting, processing and generating images, videos and other visuals.

• independently performing tasks in the real world, such as when they are paired with machinery such as robots.

These tools have been with us for quite some time. Here are some examples of AI usage in software.

Google’s Pixel smartphone was one of the early adopters of AI features for cameras. Google couldn’t launch flagship smartphones, so it launched mid-range phones with mid-range cameras and built on-device software that improved images, even at night.

Here’s an ad for the Pixel, highlighting its camera features:

Google’s method for improving images caught on, and many phone manufacturers began including camera software to improve photos automatically. In a 2024 Interview, Samsung’s EVP said:

Google isn’t the only company excelling in image recognition thanks to AI. Pinterest has capitalised on this and built a recommendation engine based on the images a user interacts with. While Pinterest is a great platform, it would make only a sizeable dent in social media applications.

On the other side of the world, a company called ByteDance would figure out how to use AI to understand the content and context of videos, group them into an engine, and present them in an app. It succeeded in China with Toutiao and had its sights on the world. After acquiring Musically(a video platform), ByteDance would launch TikTok globally. ByteDance’s understanding of video content meant it could deliver a social media feed without the user following anyone. This had not been done prior - every social media platform required users to follow (or friend) existing accounts before delivering a feed.

It’s important to say that TikTok might never have been successful without the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, the mobile internet, improvements in cloud storage, and 4G and 5G technologies. We can see how different technologies combine so that software developers can build and distribute new stuff.

Other uses of AI have quickly become commonplace. Financial applications typically have regulated Know Your Customer requirements when onboarding a new app user. Almost every finance app I’ve used in the last five years has successfully captured a picture of my face and matched it to my identity document before giving me access to the application. This feature is only possible with image recognition algorithms, thanks to the improvement in artificial intelligence models.

Another use of artificial intelligence is Google’s Waymo self-driving cars, which use computer vision to understand their surroundings and predict the next step. The company first showcased the cars to the public in 2010 and has begun delivering those cars in multiple cities around the world.

In addition to self-driving cars, many homes now have Google Nest speakers or Amazon’s Alexa speakers. Users interact with both devices by voice control - they can surf the web for information and answer questions, buy things online (in the case of Alexa) and control electronics in the home.

Okay Google, Hey Alexa. Image Source: Google Store.

Something important to note here. Google is probably the most advanced for consumer and business usage among big tech companies that use AI for software features. It uses AI in its search engine, ads network, YouTube, Android operating system, Google Maps, Chrome browser, Google Translate, Google Lens, Pixel smartphone, self-driving cars, and Gmail. It has also successfully figured out how to monetise those products - even though Gemini for Google Workspace sucks.

In November 2022, an AI research organisation called OpenAI, released the first public version of ChatGPT - a generative artificial intelligence chatbot built on large language models. GPT means generative-pretrained transformer and is based on breakthroughs from a Google research team. OpenAI calls this - The Intelligence Age.

This sole event is responsible for the current AI boom. OpenAI’s GPT models and other models like Meta’s LLama, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini are reshaping how software developers build software. I will highlight three ways below.

1. Software developers and teams can now rely on AI assistants to help them design, write, edit, and deploy code. While this isn’t perfect, almost every software engineer I know uses some AI tool in their workflow.

2. Chatbots create a new surface area for software distribution. If you believe that Chatbots are the future of surfing the internet, then Chatbots are a new distribution channel for Internet users to find applications they wish to use.

3. Artificial intelligence models like GPT, Veo2 (for video), or Stable Diffusion (for images) allow new things to be built. We can now build software that understands a user’s input context (image, video, audio, or text) and generates a response via multimedia.

So, what is an AI-first product?

Seeing how each era of computing shapes the type of software we can build and how we can build and distribute software, AI-first could mean multiple things.

1. An application (or device with an application) collects information from the user, understands it and makes this understanding the base of the entire application. Meta’s Rayban glasses are an example of this - they could be used by differently abled people to interact with the world better. Some other good examples are Google Nest, Amazon’s Alexa, voice assistants, and apps that find you clothes when you upload an image.

2. Applications that are more interactive and can present information in multiple media formats, since generative AI allows developers and users to create video, images, audio, and text.

3. A developer could build software on top of chatbots (or other AI applications or models) or use chatbots as a vector for software distribution. There are many jokes about Chatgpt wrappers, but I must remind everyone that Typeform is an HTML and CSS wrapper and a billion-dollar company. 

4. A software developer like Duolingo can create more content across multiple cultures, languages, and geographies, expanding its market and enabling more people to use its products.

5. Software enables personalisation by default, but as we’ve seen with TikTok feeds, we could personalise it even further. As a product and growth marketing manager, I must consider segmenting different users, personas, and demographics, presenting them with the best software feature for their use case, and sending messages at the right time.
   
   Unfortunately, today’s segmentation technologies are limited in terms of intelligence. Ten thousand people signing up for my financial services application don’t need the same onboarding experience if I (the software developer) can figure out who they are and modify my offering.

While there is a lot of hype around chatbots (can’t lie, they’re pretty cool and helpful!), I am more excited to see what will be built in this era beyond bots. As noted above, each computing generation has brought incredible improvements in human and machine interactions. AI opens up new opportunities for creative builders to once again reimagine software interfaces and deliver value to customers.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe or share it with friends and colleagues by hitting the share button.

Note: Please be advised that the business case studies presented in this publication are intended for informational, entertainment and educational purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Except otherwise stated, I own the vintage computer images captured in the British Science Museum.

LinkedIn is not often discussed because it’s a pretty serious place. With over 1 billion users, it is the most important professional network. In today’s growth case study, I’ll examine LinkedIn’s growth, how it became a social media platform, and why no other platform comes to mind when we think about LinkedIn.

Before we start, here’s a word from this month’s sponsor, ListKit.

Cold Email Setup Offer

We started sending 10,000 cold emails per day, and scaled a brand new B2B offer to $108k MRR in 90 days. Now, you can have the same system set up (completely done-for-you) inside your own business - WITHOUT going to spam, spending thousands of dollars, or any manual input. Close your next 20 clients easily. We’ll set up the tech, write your scripts, give you the leads, give you the inboxes, and the sending tool - all starting at $500/mo.

Get Pricing & Details

Now let’s study LinkedIn supremacy. As always, feel free to skip to sections that interest you. 

Table of Contents

• What is LinkedIn?

• LinkedIn - Origin Story and Success

• How does LinkedIn make money - LinkedIn Products and Services.

• LinkedIn As a Social Media Platform

• Metcalfe's Law and Network Effects

• Social first, other services layered

• LinkedIn’s Competitive Landscape

• Why competing with LinkedIn is difficult

• Conclusion - So why does LinkedIn have no competit …

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social media platform tailored for professionals to connect. Professionals use it for career advancement, job hunting, and networking opportunities in business. The platform enables users to highlight their skills, experience, and achievements.

For businesses, LinkedIn provides marketing and sales services, enabling them to create marketing and sales campaigns to reach prospective buyers. Businesses can also use LinkedIn’s recruiting solutions to find and hire talent.

LinkedIn - Origin Story and Success

Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant founded LinkedIn on May 5th, 2003.

In 2011, it went public with over 100 million users, offering its stock on the NYSE at a valuation of $4.5 billion. 

In 2016, Microsoft Acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, bringing the world’s largest professional network with over 300 million users to the world’s largest workplace software provider.

Today, under Jeff Weiner's leadership, LinkedIn leads a diversified business with revenues from membership subscriptions, advertising sales, and recruitment solutions. LinkedIn has more than 6,000 full-time employees and offices in 30 cities worldwide. It has grown to over 1 billion registered users from over 200 countries and territories worldwide. 

How does LinkedIn Make Money? - LinkedIn Products and Services

LinkedIn categorises its products and services into five groups:

1. Talent Solutions - Helping businesses hire the best people and helping the best people find jobs.

2. Marketing Solutions - Helping businesses advertise to professionals who use LinkedIn

3. Sales Solutions - Helping businesses build lead generation activity and introduce their services to LinkedIn users

4. Learning - LinkedIn provides access to over 20,000 courses with professional tests, examinations and certifications.

5. Premium—LinkedIn offers premium features for individual customers and businesses, giving them more data about their connections, followers, and page visitors.

   

The company charges various fees for these features and had revenue of $16.37 billion in fiscal year 2024.

LinkedIn As a Social Media Platform

LinkedIn didn’t always have social media functionality. It started as a jobs and professional networking platform. Sometime in 2010, it copied Twitter and allowed some users to post a short blurb of 140 characters with the option to attach a link. This feature was called “Network Activity”. The feature even supported auto-posting to Twitter itself.

In 2012, LinkedIn allowed specific influencers to create long-form posts. Former American President Barack Obama and Virgin Atlantic Founder Richard Branson were among the few business leaders with access to this feature. Users could follow these leaders' pages to read more posts.

LinkedIn content feed in 2012. Source: Kevin Turner.

In 2013, LinkedIn bought publishing platform Pulse for $90M and said it wanted to be the definitive professional platform. Here’s a quote from Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience at the time:

By 2014, LinkedIn opened publishing to all users, but several people didn’t like it. In this 2015 blog post, a user complains about the new publishing and other features. LinkedIn became like other social media apps (particularly Facebook), allowing users to post, like, comment, and share—these features differentiated it from other professional networks. The product’s home page was now a feed of activity and posts.

In an announcement article, Reuters journalist Gerry Shih compares LinkedIn to Facebook: 

From the quotes above, we can infer that LinkedIn was useful; however, it lacked content to encourage users to return. The key to a sustainable social network is not just users, it’s new content so users can return.

Discover 100 Game-Changing Side Hustles for 2025

In today's economy, relying on a single income stream isn't enough. Our expertly curated database gives you everything you need to launch your perfect side hustle.

• Explore vetted opportunities requiring minimal startup costs

• Get detailed breakdowns of required skills and time investment

• Compare potential earnings across different industries

• Access step-by-step launch guides for each opportunity

• Find side hustles that match your current skills

Ready to transform your income?

Download Now

Metcalfe's Law and Network Effects

At this point, LinkedIn is successful by all definitions, but it has begun to lose page views. This is a bad thing for a business based on attention. Before we study how LinkedIn solves this problem, let’s take a walk back to before social media existed.

In 1980, Robert Metcalfe invented Ethernet - a cable system that connects computers to form a local area network and, by expansion, a wide area network. While presenting this to his colleagues at his firm, 3Com, Metcalfe stated the following:

This statement is now called Metcalfe’s Law, but how does this impact LinkedIn?

When LinkedIn opened its platform to user-generated content in 2015, it already had nearly 400 million users. Each new user who joins any social network contributes value not only to their own experience but also to the experiences of all existing users within that network. This mutual benefit lies at the heart of network effects - a term that describes Metcalfe's Law in businesses and social networks like LinkedIn.

Before including media, LinkedIn hosted one of the most successful social networks in the world. It had a valuable network of professionals globally, and each professional filled out their work profile, updating jobs, titles and employers accordingly. But these professionals did not post content.

Describing LinkedIn pre-2015 as a “social network” and not “social media” might lead to some confusion. The term “network” carries much weight here because LinkedIn was not yet a “social media” platform. Yes, its users could connect, but there was little utility beyond introductions, applying to jobs, and messaging. LinkedIn needed to include the “media” part of “social media” to grow user activity and improve user value.

Becoming a social media company cemented LinkedIn’s status as the top platform for professionals compared to other professional networking and job platforms. Users could now write and share content about their work - anything from managing teams, hiring top performers, and building the best brand. Other users could read them, react, share, and provide feedback. Like Gerry Shih noted above, LinkedIn applied Facebook behaviour to its social network and built new features for professionals.

Social first, other services layered

LinkedIn could build other services and features now that it was more social. After buying Pulse, LinkedIn acquired two more companies, notably Lynda.com for $1.5 billion to include Lynda’s learning content in the social media platform. It also bought Refresh.io to help improve users’ connections based on their profile, events, or the industry.

In June 2016, Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. This was the much-needed firepower that the company needed. Microsoft is the world’s largest workplace software provider. LinkedIn could leverage Microsoft’s knowledge, skills, expertise, network, and resources.

After Microsoft’s acquisition, LinkedIn acquired more companies to bolster its technology and offerings. It acquired Fliptop and PointDrive to improve LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Connectifier to improve recruitment offerings for recruiters and companies, Glint, an employee survey and retention tool, Drawbridge to build better marketing tools for professional networks, and Oribi for better marketing analytics.

LinkedIn has also acquired SlideShare, ESaya, Rapportive, IndexTank, Connected and Cardmunch.

LinkedIn’s Competitive Landscape

LinkedIn’s acquisitions and new features broaden its competitive landscape. If a software or business connects businesses to professionals in any way or form, it’s probably a LinkedIn competitor. This includes but is not limited to professional marketing analytics, sales tools, recruiting platforms, and professional communities. 

This section is awkward because this case study seeks to explain why LinkedIn has no competitors. The short answer is that it depends on how you define competition; the long answer is this case study.

In the image below, I’ve divided LinkedIn competition into two broad groups: jobs platforms (like Monster.com, Indeed, and Welcome to the Jungle) and professional networks or communities (like Superpath, Blind, and any other professional community you can think of). 

The diagram shows how LinkedIn stacks up against these two broad groups.

Learn how to make AI work for you

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 1,000,000+ professionals read The Rundown AI – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to use it in just 5 minutes a day.

Sign up to start learning.

Why competing with LinkedIn is difficult

LinkedIn’s feature set and social network make it difficult to compete with. It provides its users a wide range of services and has the largest network of professional users worldwide, covering every social demographic and industry.

Going against a social media behemoth like LinkedIn is not only resource-intensive, it is cost-intensive. 

TikTok’s rise is one example of a new player competing against established social media platforms (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook) to increase its user base. However, TikTok’s growth is driven by its unique approach to social media and its over $ 1 billion annual advertising expenditure between 2018 and 2022. It spent as much as $3 million in the US daily to acquire new users. 

To quote media strategist Eric Seufert:

Before TikTok, Google+ was another unique social media platform with a wealthy backer and an absurd acquisition budget. In 2011, Google+ was everywhere online and offline—its parent company, Google, increased advertising spending for the year to $213 million, which wasn’t enough. Google+ eventually failed and shut down in April 2019.

Conclusion - So why does LinkedIn have no competitors?

To battle social media incumbents, a company needs a new media or networking format, a lot of cash, and perfect timing.

LinkedIn has a significant first mover advantage, having launched in 2003 as one of the early professional networks on the web. It follows Metcalfe's law, effectively leveraging this network, which has allowed it to grow to 1 billion users in over 20 years. The platform has built various utilities on top of its network, further entrenching its dominance with features such as Jobs, Recruiting, Social Feed, Sales, Marketing & Advertising, Learning Solutions, and Games. Additionally, creating anything comparable to LinkedIn is prohibitively expensive and even more costly to acquire users.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you enjoyed it, please share it with friends and colleagues by hitting the share button.

Humanity is multilingual

The mythical story of the Tower of Babel explains the origin of a multilingual earth. In this story, humanity unites to construct a tower that reaches the heavens so they are not scattered across the planet. Yahweh (the creator) looks down upon humanity and realises they would achieve this feat and everything else they aspire to do. Yahweh believes this desire to be like gods is bad for humans and confuses their language. As a result of these language differences, there was conflict during the tower's construction, leading to their dispersion from Babel and scattering across the earth.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of Babel (Vienna) - Wikimedia Commons.

Numerous languages present a seemingly endless opportunity for language-learning providers in various forms. When I was growing up, there were many ways to learn languages that your parents didn’t speak - you had a teacher at school, you enrolled in a language class at a place like Alliance Française, watched a TV show like Dora the Explorer, or used a compact disc from a company like Rosetta Stone. Some students would combine multiple methods. For instance, I learned French through my teachers at school, watching a lot of TV5, and attending classes at Alliance Française.

The rise of the Internet began to change things as translation and language learning sites sprang up. When we completed our French assignments at school, I recall that we would input the answers into Babelfish and, later, Google Translate. Today, there are various ways to translate languages—tools like Google Lens, Google Translate, and Zoom make it easy to understand others. Yet, the fundamental human desire to listen, comprehend, and authentically connect remains strong.

Fun fact: Despite spending much of my life learning French, I visited a francophone country 7 years ago and struggled to speak the language.

Enter: Duolingo

Duolingo is one of several solutions for language learners. It is a popular gamified language-learning app that provides bite-sized lessons in various languages. It focuses on developing vocabulary and grammar skills through interactive exercises, including reading, writing, listening, and speaking. 

This growth case study will examine Duolingo’s successful attempt to dominate language learning and education. In recent years, the company has become associated with the most outrageous and eccentric marketing stunts, embedding itself into culture as it spreads its influence wherever you go. I aim to answer the question: Why is Duolingo doing this? 

As always, feel free to skip to sections that interest you. 

Table of Contents

• Humanity is multilingual

• Enter: Duolingo

• Duolingo - Origin and Success

• Duolingo is a Game

• Duolingo is crazy

  • Here are some of Duolingo’s crazy stunts.

• Duolingo’s business model

• Duolingo’s revenue success

  • Duolingo’s gamification models are the source of r …

  • Prediction 1: Beyond Languages: Music, Math and Ot …

  • Prediction 2: More Apps 

  • Prediction 3: More Features

  • Prediction 4: More Mascots, More Media, More Reven …

• Wrapping this up: So Why Is Duolingo Crazy?

Duolingo - Origin and Success

L-R: Duolingo Founders Louis von Ahn and Severin Hacker. Image: The Independent.

Founded in 2012 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo is one of the most successful freemium apps globally. In 2021, Duolingo went public on the US-based NASDAQ stock exchange with 40 million active users. By the third quarter of 2024, it boasted over 110 million monthly active users (an impressive growth of 30M compared to the previous year) and annual revenue of over $500 million. Duolingo is the most popular app in the education category of apps, outshining language learning rivals like Babbel, Memrise and Busuu.

Duolingo is a Game

It’s important to shift Duolingo’s perception from a learning app in the edtech industry’ to a learning game’. The company has successfully built language learning into an endless game. The app features a tight retention loop with its gamified features - streaks, weekly competitions, and earning systems like gems, medals and experience points.

For this case study, it’s better to think about Duolingo as a game than to think about Duolingo as a learning product. The app has even built multiple character arcs into learning with main characters like Duo, Lily, Zari, Lin and Falstaff. These are typical features of a game.

However, this case study does not focus on Duolingo’s gamification tactics. You can read a detailed analysis of that here.

Duolingo is crazy

Because Duolingo is a game, it needs to be creative in its marketing tactics. Duolingo infuses its gamified app with a remarkably bold, astonishing global campaign featuring Duo, its prominent mascot. Duo began as an app companion designed to nudge users to complete lessons, engage in daily practice, or remember to maintain their streak. However, it has now become a tangible mascot that can appear anywhere. The mascot is the brand persona and is funny, annoying, sarcastic, silly, weird and creepy - Duo is so unique to the brand that it’s difficult to replicate by other learning apps. 

Duolingo’s mascot exists because creativity is necessary - it needs to stand out. Duolingo is pushing the traditional boundaries of learning apps and expanding to become a gamified entertainment app.

The company is approaching this by commercialising its app and infusing it into everyday culture. It then ensures people keep using its apps—with gamification and retention features—while earning revenue via a paid product with even more features.

Here are some of Duolingo’s crazy stunts.

Duolingo at a Charli xcx concert.

@duolingo

charli said “talk to me in french” and we listened 🗣️ #brat #sweattour credit: @Julia 💚 #charlixcx #troyesivan

Duolingo and Squid Game - this is their own song!

Duolingo is crazy on LinkedIn, too!

Duolingo on LinkedIn: #duolingo #tech | 21 comments

Can you believe this guy? Some coworker… #duolingo #tech | 21 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/duolingo_duolingo-tech-activity-7290773294197166080-lzHN?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

By creating a crazy brand and mascot, Duo, the company can appropriately insert itself into any conversation on the Internet, expanding its reach and acquiring more users for the app. The company has expanded its target audience from language learners to people who want to have fun in a game. Its entire online persona, mascot persona, and brand voice are geared towards entertaining the public and achieving maximum reach. There is a reason and method to its madness.

Duolingo’s business model

Now, let’s talk money. Duolingo is one of the apps operating in a freemium model. The app is free but has Super and Super Family modes. Duolingo monetises free users via ads, while its premium features contain no ads. These premium modes offer benefits like unlimited hearts when users make mistakes, skills practice tests, challenges, and no ads. Duolingo also earns income via translation services and standardised testing.

Duolingo’s revenue success

Duo is sitting on a massive pile of cash—source: TechCrunch.

The company’s business model brings us to Duolingo’s money. It is a publicly listed enterprise that is mandated to publish its numbers.

In 2023, Duolingo increased its revenue by 44% to $531.1 million and was profitable, with a net income of $16.1 million. It ended 2022 with a loss of $59.6 million, so 2023 was a massive win for the company. While Duolingo hasn’t announced its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for 2024, it’s posted an outlook and has released results for Q1-Q3 2024.

Duolingo total annual revenue in million dollars. Source: Duolingo.

Duolingo’s gamification models are the source of revenue

Gamification is the core reason for Duolingo’s wild success. In an article in Lenny’s Newsletter, Duolingo’s Head of Product, Jorge Mazal (ex-Zynga), discusses increasing gamification to improve retention. 

Duolingo loops users’ data into the app as feedback, showing their progress, enabling them to compete with each other, or directing them to purchase a premium feature.

Here’s Jorge again talking about lessons from working on Zynga’s Farmville. 

This leaderboard tactic would prove successful with Duolingo’s learners, improving retention and increasing time spent. If people keep signing up and learning, that can turn into billions of dollars in revenue.

Modernize Out Of Home with AdQuick

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers and creatives with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

You can learn more at www.AdQuick.com

The future of Duolingo - Duo is alive!

We’ve discussed money and how Duolingo solves retention with gamified loops; let’s discuss the future and wrap this up.

While drafting this piece, Duolingo killed its mascot and launched ‘Bring Back Duo’, an in-app campaign to ‘revive’ its mascot. It successfully achieved that goal - with millions of users playing to earn over 50 billion experience points. Now that Duo is back, we can discuss the company’s future. 

Twitter tweet

As a publicly listed company on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, Duolingo has a $17BN market cap and a P/E ratio of over 200. However, it’s nowhere near where its investors think it should be. While Duolingo is a great company, its market cap and P/E ratio are far higher than those of comparable pure-play software companies in public markets. Its stock has also risen rapidly in the last year, showing signs of investor interest.

Duolingo must generate billions of dollars in annual revenue to justify its stock price and market cap. Here are my predictions for the company's future and its path to billions of dollars in yearly revenue.

Prediction 1: Beyond Languages: Music, Math and Others

In October 2023, Duolingo announced the addition of Math and Music learning to its app. As I mentioned earlier, there are only so many people willing to learn languages—there are numerous subjects and topics that Duolingo could develop. I predict that Duolingo will introduce more subjects, such as Science, Biology, Physics, Art, and History. Duolingo has the potential to teach anything it chooses. In my survey of Duolingo users, around 80% were unaware that the app hosts Math and Music lessons - so there’s a lot of revenue and usage opportunity here.

Prediction 2: More Apps 

Duolingo has the opportunity to broaden its strategy and create more apps. Considering Duolingo as a gaming company suggests it could benefit from maintaining a diverse array of learning games apps in its catalogue. This approach would align Duolingo more closely with companies like King, Zynga, Ubisoft, Konami, and EA rather than with other educational app developers like Babbel, Busuu, and Memrise.

Prediction 3: More Features

Education is one industry where AI drives productivity and new product features. Duolingo has long relied on AI tools to build content for its users, and with the launch of OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model, it’s begun to do more.

AI drives new capabilities for learning products like Duolingo.

Several Duolingo users have long expressed frustration about their inability to speak languages beyond the app’s content. Among actual language learners, this is a recognised issue with Duolingo that the company aims to rectify. In March 2023, it introduced new AI features in a subscription tier known as Duolingo Max. Built with OpenAI's GPT-4, Duolingo Max subscribers can engage in real-life conversations within the app while receiving real-time feedback on their language progress. By September 2024, it added another layer - video calls with Lily, one of the app's main characters.

Prediction 4: More Mascots, More Media, More Revenue

The Duolingo app features numerous characters, which the company has transformed into mascots with unique backgrounds and personas. While these characters are enjoyable for users, they represent intellectual property owned by the company, which can develop media based on this IP. By creating these characters, Duolingo now possesses intellectual property that could extend beyond its app; it could produce a film series, a television series—anything involving a cartoon character.

Duolingo has already begun implementing this idea by launching a plushie store where fans can purchase Duo, Zari, Falstaff, and Lily plush toys. Media is at the heart of Duolingo’s collaborative efforts—it’s partnered with Squid Game, The Teletubbies, and Barbie. This strategy is not unusual; gaming is a form of media, and Nintendo, the maker of Super Mario, has amassed $10 billion from licensing its characters.

Wrapping this up: So Why Is Duolingo Crazy?

Duolingo needs to set itself apart in a world with competing learning methods. It is on a different path from other education and learning providers by rethinking its app as a game, building characters with content, and rolling out consecutive marketing stunts. The company has expanded its addressable market and set its sights on total world domination, and its features, crazy tactics, and storytelling will get it there.

Because Duolingo has designed itself as a game and has become a media company, it needs to entertain the public. Many SaaS or commercial apps are not media companies and do not need to entertain this much. Sure, multiple brands could sponsor a Charli xcx concert or interact with Dua Lipa on Twitter, but the vibe will always be different.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you enjoyed it, please hit the share button to share it with friends and colleagues.

Private messaging app WhatsApp is Meta (formerly Facebook) Platform’s largest acquisition. For nearly $20BN, Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014, and since then, the product has made $0, while the company has spent the last 10 years building one of the most incredible social and messaging platforms.

While Meta Platform has launched many buzzy products, such as smart glasses, a metaverse (whatever that means), and an AI bot, WhatsApp will be the company's next huge revenue driver.

In this case study, we will examine Meta’s feature ramp-up within WhatsApp and how it hopes to monetize this product successfully.

Sidenote: I’d use Facebook and Meta interchangeably, depending on the timeline. Before we start, here is a word from our sponsor, Authory.

Writers, don’t let your work disappear!

Imagine losing years of articles because a site shut down. What would you do if all your work samples disappeared?

With Authory, that’s a nightmare you’ll never have to face. Authory automatically creates a portfolio that backs up everything you’ve ever written and will write, so your work is always safe.

That’s right: Authory finds and backs up all your past work and saves every new piece you publish, wherever they appear.

Join thousands of writers who already trust Authory to protect their work and never lose a piece again.

Get your free portfolio today

Let’s dive into it! Please feel free to jump sections.

• What is WhatsApp?

• What’s special about WhatsApp?

• How does WhatsApp make money?

• Enter: Meta.

• WhatsApp’s New Features.

• Tying These Together.

• WhatsApp Ads.

First, What is WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is a social messaging platform that enables primarily text-based communications between users of its apps. These texts could happen 1:1 for personal messaging or in private groups. This definition is crucial because WhatsApp differs from other apps in this category that favour public sharing of messages or content.

What’s so special about WhatsApp?

When smartphones really took off in the 2010s, WhatsApp (founded by Jan Koum) was one of the few apps that took advantage of the contact graph (by importing contacts to the app), enabled messaging with friends and family around the world and was fast, secure, and reliable. It also worked on literally any phone that connected to the Internet. These features created a strong network effect - while every other app was confusing to use, was slow, or didn’t work for the phones I had, WhatsApp worked and was just plain simple. Anyone could sign up and text their contacts without needing friend requests, adding or following people or much friction. If a contact had WhatsApp, you could message them immediately.

How does WhatsApp make money?

WhatsApp has never made much money. In its early days, it charged users about $1 per year, largely optional because several users reported never paying this fee. Running a global messaging app costs a lot of money, though. In 2013, it ended the year with $148 million in expenses and $138 million in losses. Thus, despite having 400 million users, WhatsApp made only $10 million in revenue.

Enter: Meta. 

In February 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock. By 2016, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced the company would no longer charge the $1 fee to remove the barrier to access for users without cards. Two years after acquiring WhatsApp, the company effectively decided to drive revenue to $0. 

Under Meta’s leadership, WhatsApp grew to over 2.95 billion monthly active users in over 180 countries, making it one of the most important free apps. Period.

Let’s take a look at how Meta has prepared WhatsApp to be its next-generation social platform. I’d review new product features and explain how they tie into Meta’s vision: building the future of human connection.

WhatsApp’s New Features

1. WhatsApp Messaging API
   
   Meta first opened the WhatsApp platform to developers and businesses that wanted to reach their customers via WhatsApp messaging. These tools enable developers to build rich and interactive messaging experiences for customers who opt-in to their service. WhatsApp then charges developers a fee to access the platform and send messages to WhatsApp users.
   
   Several businesses have used this platform to engage their customers, governments have used it to share public information during health crises like COVID-19, and several thousand startups have built customer relationship software on the WhatsApp messaging API.
   

2. WhatsApp Business
   

   WhatsApp Business is a robust application that allows businesses to manage customer relationships. This tool helps companies showcase products, respond to customers (in chat) when they make inquiries, and get paid. WhatsApp Business is free for any business, and WhatsApp doesn’t charge for this service.
   

3. WhatsApp Chats
   
   WhatsApp has improved its chat feature set in the last two years, rapidly shipping new features out of beta and constantly updating the app. Some new features include typing indicators, interactive replies, chat categorisation, transcription, an AI bot, and more. It also has features that allow WhatsApp to work seamlessly across devices.
   

4. WhatsApp Payments
   
   WhatsApp Payments enables peer-to-peer and consumer-to-business payments. It is currently being piloted​​ in India, Brazil, and Singapore; the service allows WhatsApp users to link their bank accounts (or other payment methods) and send money to businesses and family members.
   
   WhatsApp Pay has taken off in India, and hundreds of thousands of businesses now receive money from millions of customers. We couldn’t find proof that Meta charged businesses a fee for this feature.
   

5. WhatsApp Status
   
   Meta Platforms is not new to incorporating social media features across its platforms. In 2017, Meta integrated the disappearing story format into WhatsApp Status, following its incorporation into Instagram and Facebook. WhatsApp Status works like Instagram and Facebook Stories, enabling users to broadcast videos, photos or text messages to a select group of contacts.
   

6. WhatsApp Communities
   
   WhatsApp Communities leverages the group chat social paradigm and enables people to build large-scale communities inside WhatsApp. Previously, community managers and conveners created simple group chats. The Communities feature goes much further, allowing managers to create several groups in one community and manage messaging, administration, and access levels.
   

7. WhatsApp Channels
   
   So far, all the features we’ve discussed have involved closed communications and contact sharing between one party or the other. But what if one wanted to broadcast publicly via WhatsApp without having the target’s contact? Meta has launched WhatsApp Channels - a feature for brands, businesses, celebrities, and anyone to talk to the public on WhatsApp.
   

   

   A WhatsApp Channel is like a regular chat within the “Updates” section. While users cannot reply to the chat, they can interact by leaving emojis, copying a link or forwarding the post.

   WhatsApp highlights popular channels that users can follow. Users see channels to follow based on their location (phone numbers drive this), channels already followed, and other heuristics. The company has also successfully seeded this by ensuring the most prominent brands, celebrities, creators, and sports teams are well represented in this new format.

Tying these together…

By connecting individuals - friends, colleagues, associations, communities, etc, WhatsApp has built one of the stickiest and most important social apps. In the last few years, we’ve seen WhatsApp build more features (Status, Communities, Business) that expand the real estate(more places to swipe to and more things to do) in its apps while connecting businesses to customers via WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Payment.

Connecting businesses to consumers is a goldmine for social apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. At current growth rates, social media ad spending was $219bn in 2024, and projections are near $255bn by 2028.

Every time social media users interact with an ad, companies get paid. Source: Statista.

By building features like Channels, WhatsApp has seeded a private and localised interest graph for each user. It can deduce a user’s interests based on the channels they follow and the businesses they interact with, and create a profile for each user. Then, it will charge other companies for access to the user via paid advertising and promotions in different formats.

WhatsApp Ads

In a 2023 interview with the New York Times, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed WhatsApp as the company's "next major pillar.”

He said: 

To corroborate this product roadmap and vision, a recent report by Rest of World talks about WhatsApp’s advertising plans and quotes Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s Vice-President of Product: 

WhatsApp Ads is a welcome announcement for businesses already spending on Instagram and Facebook. When Meta launches ads, it’ll again deliver another marketing channel and more marketing tools to drive business growth. For users, the company is bringing promotional material into WhatsApp, a place largely devoid of ads and promotional material. Given the success of Facebook and Instagram, Meta already knows how to build ad tools and formats that make users and businesses happy. 

As previously stated, by leveraging phone numbers, locations, and various heuristics, WhatsApp could establish a robust interest graph to enhance its ad-selling and data-targeting operations. It could also integrate user behaviour with their Instagram and Facebook information—something previously attempted and reversed in 2016—thereby significantly enhancing WhatsApp's advertising functions. While drafting this case study, Meta revealed a new feature enabling users to automatically share their WhatsApp Status on Instagram and Facebook. 

Before Meta’s big futuristic bets begin to pay off (or not), it must earn more income and return value to shareholders. WhatsApp presents a perfect opportunity but also brings risks. Chat is a unique application interface that doesn’t allow for many interruptions. The company seems to have figured this out by expanding WhatsApp’s features to increase real estate and time spent. Following Instagram and Facebook, Whatsapp’s monetization efforts are likely to be successful.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you enjoyed it, please hit the share button to share it with friends and colleagues.

Learn how to make AI work for you

AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI might. That’s why 1,000,000+ professionals read The Rundown AI – the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news and teaches you how to use it in just 5 minutes a day.

Sign up to start learning.

Hello readers 👋🏾. While we work on the next growth case study, I’ll be writing a few mini-case studies like the one below - they’ll be studies on concepts, ideas and a few opinions. Today’s mini case study is on Notion’s product roadmap and how it hopes to spark a workplace revolution.

In October this year, workplace productivity app Notion announced its email product, following an acquisition of email service Skiff in February. Prior to Skiff’s acquisition, Notion acquired Cron in 2022 and launched its calendar features shortly after. While Notion’s email app isn’t available to the public yet, it’s only rational that Notion is expanding its feature set with these products. I’ll explain why Notion needs calendar and email features to scale its workplace and personal productivity platform. 

Twitter tweet

What is Notion?

Notion is a work productivity tool. Yes, you could use it for personal stuff, too, but Notion is designed and built with a unique work philosophy - the company believes that modern, digital documents should be composable and interactive like Lego blocks. Notion has done this by introducing ‘blocks’ - a block in a Notion document could be any element and link to or embed another element easily. This element could also be a separate document. 

This Lego philosophy drives Notion; its users love it, and it’s the most unique and significant change to digital documents since Google Docs launched in 2006.

Notion believes that work should be like Legos. 

Notion is growing fast!

Notion’s user growth was initially slow until a breakout hit in 2020 (when it surpassed 1 million users), and it has soared since then. In September 2024, Founder and CEO Ivan Zhao announced that the company had reached 100 million users. Its user numbers have grown 100X in 4 years and is incredible.

He said:

Coming off that announcement, we see that Notion’s vision to redefine work is bold and disruptive. Competitors like Google Workspace (formerly called Google Suite) and Microsoft Office are not composable - the documents do not act like legos. Composability is why Notion users love it, and investors have driven it to a $10BN valuation. 

A disruptive feature like composability is disruptive to the workspace market, but it’s not enough to tackle the incumbents. Notion must grow revenue to defend its $10bn valuation by making itself the centre of all work.

The Centre of Work

The Internet has completely changed how we work. Work is more collaborative than ever, with many more tools and options. What’s clear to industry players and to me is that email and calendar are the centre of modern work.

Take my workday as an example. I start my regular day every morning by checking my email and calendar. Checking these helps me think of tasks I need to complete and plan the day. When I reach my desk and turn on my work computer, I check three tools: email, calendar, and Slack. These three apps set the tone for my entire workday. Let’s take a deeper look at why email is core to work. 

• Email is an identity vector. 

  Email is the identity vector of the internet. Every app, website, newsletter, or product I’ve ever signed up for has my email address. It is how I log in to the internet. Every internet user needs an email address, and every company employee needs an email address to access work tools. When I receive any email, the domain confirms whether the email is real or fake. 

• Email is a communication vector. 

  Companies email me whenever I interact with them. Whether I sign up, purchase a product or use a service. These emails could be shipping notifications, order completion notifications, JIRA ticket notifications, newsletters, or discount codes; email is where all the comms go. 

• Email is a collaborative vector. 

  When I click “share” or “invite” on any modern work tool, an email address is required to share documents, videos, and boards with friends and colleagues. Of course, I could always create a link, but an email address is how friends sign up for referrals to get their juicy discounts. 

• Email is the external thing.
  An email address is the sure thing you know an external partner would have. They might not use the same task management tool or have Slack or Teams, but they’d have an email address. So you can communicate with vendors, merchants, agencies, and suppliers. Whatever external party you need to work with, an email address is often where the conversation starts and ends - email is where you sign a contract. 

These email features are why Slack tried to replace email and become the centre of work. 

The Calendar is also important.

Now, let’s take a quick look at why the calendar is important.

For anyone who’s worked in the last 10 years, digital calls are a crucial driver of work efficiency. Calendars mean I do not need to travel thousands of miles (except where necessary) to have a call and discuss important work things with somebody else.  Whether this is a meeting with an external partner or a meeting with a colleague in Pacific time, tools like Zoom and Teams enable us to do this. Here’s the caveat: because so many meetings could happen on any given workday, workers need to plan meetings, and you can only set the time if multiple parties have a calendar tool. In addition to helping plan meetings, calendar tools help modern workers plan their day, allocate time to tasks and communicate their availability to meet with others. 

Putting all this together….

Notion hopes that by bringing these features into its work tool, it can attract new users - who might not care for composability and Lego, retain its existing users - who are paying for other email tools and grow its revenue to tackle Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. 

While we don’t know how many active users Notion has, we can see from Microsoft and Google numbers that the market is huge. 

Google Workspace has 3 billion active monthly users and 6 million paying businesses. On the other hand, Microsoft announced in January 2024 that it had 400 million paid seats for Office 365. Both companies control over 90% of the office productivity software market. Notion is chasing huge ambitions here and remains a small player when all things are considered - 100 million total users is barely a dent in Microsoft and Google’s numbers. 

What’s Notion trying to achieve? 

One word: growth. Notion is trying to grow, and these features help it do two things:

1. Increased retention: By introducing Mail and Calendar, Notion’s users can bring more of their work to the app and spend more time using it. 

2. Increased revenue: Notion could increase its revenue by charging for these features as add-ons or onboarding new customers who don’t want the rest of Notion but would like email and a calendar.

Where have we seen this attempt before? 

Notion isn’t the first startup to tackle the Microsoft and Google duopoly of workplace tools. Dropbox attempted this a few years ago and is still on the journey to dethrone the duopoly. In 2013, Dropbox acquired the email app Mailbox for $100M, shut it down after 2 years and launched its collaborative document-editor Paper. It also acquired other companies - a photo organiser called Snapjoy, a music app Audiogalaxy and more recently, a calendar app Reclaim AI. 

Reading Dropbox’s financial statements, the company has about 18 million paid users out of 700 million registered users. This is a massive gap between Google and Microsoft’s billions of users.

What is the future of Notion?

Notion could build presentation features like Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint; graphic design features like Canva and Figma; online video conferencing like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams; chat like Slack and Microsoft Teams; and CRM like Salesforce and Hubspot. There’s an existing playbook for centre-of-work tools, and Notion could follow this roadmap as it takes on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace to be the ultimate workspace app.

The company is just getting started on its path to dominating and changing digital work, and its journey would be interesting to watch.

Did you love reading this case study? Please forward and share with friends. If this was forwarded to you, please subscribe using this link.

I am very excited about the first edition of Growth Case Studies. Flo is the first company we’ll be studying in this series. I picked Flo as the first case study for the following reasons:

1. A lot of people asked for it.

   

2. It’s a truly unique company and no other product in its category comes close. Women’s health features are often add-ons to health apps and none of them come close to Flo in terms of capabilities, user milestones, and revenue numbers.

For each company I cover in this series, I will delve into its founding narrative, product concept, revenue model, acquisition journey, product strategy, retention model, achievements, critiques, and future outlook. I couldn’t have done this without a wonderful team of volunteer researchers. Ayomide Ogunsiakan, Toluwani Daniel, Yusuf Olatoye, Esohe Obaseki and William Abrefa. I refer to this team and myself when I use ‘We’ in this series.

So let’s get to it! Feel free to jump to any section in this case study.

• What is Flo?

• Origin Story - How was Flo founded?

• Flo - Product and Thesis

  • Flo Onboarding

  • Flo Time to Value

  • Understanding Flo’s user retention loop

  • Flo - Product Strategy - A super app for women

  • Evolution of the Flo app and launch strategy

• Flo - Business Model and Monetisation

• Flo - Competitive Landscape

• Acquisition - How Flo gets new users

• Revenue and Success

• Fundraising and Valuation

• Drawbacks and criticisms

• Flo’s Future

What is Flo?

Flo is an all-in-one application for women's health and hormone tracking. It helps women track their period, predicts fertility windows, and even offers pregnancy and early motherhood info. Women can log symptoms, moods, and activities to see how their cycle affects them. It's like a personalized health calendar for everything going on in their bodies.

Flo uses data and predictive machine learning to learn cycle patterns and predict women’s next period. In addition to this, it has a team of health experts to provide reliable information to improve women’s health.

Flo - Origin Story - How was Flo Founded?

Flo was founded in 2015 by Belarusian twin brothers Dmitry and Yuri Gurski. Both brothers began working together at 16, launching an educational book publishing company Ideanomix, and another women’s health app Only Women - which eventually shut down. Ideanomix is still an active publisher with over 1500 books in its catalogue.

Yuri Gurski graduated from Belarusian State University with a master's degree in journalism and bagged an Executive MBA in 2010 from the Kozminski University program at the IPM Business School in Warsaw, Poland. Dmitry Gurski on the other hand had his first degree in Pharmaceutics and Drug design from Belarusians University, MBA from Kozminski University, and eventually bagged an Executive MBA from Stanford University in 2019.

Dmitry and Yuri launched the Flo app 11 years after Only Women, having figured out a better way to build a user-friendly, health-tech solution for women. The brothers infused their learnings from publishing, technology, and healthcare into Flo. They were early on artificial intelligence and machine learning as tools to drive behavioural change for people who cared about their health.

Flo’s founders are complementary. Dmitry had spent many years publishing content on the internet as a freelancer. Combined with his brother, Yuri’s ability to build tech products, the two are a digital development and distribution powerhouse. In the coming sections, we will study how Flo creates content that drives tens of millions of visits monthly.

Flo’s Product and Thesis

Flo’s raison d’être is simple. It’s an app that uses predictive technology and artificial intelligence to help women measure and improve their reproductive health. The app provides personalized Period Tracking and Cycle Predictions, Health Assistant, Health Insights, Community, and Health Reports. Flo supports women throughout their entire sexual and reproductive journey. In this section, we will thoroughly break down the Flo product.

Flo Onboarding

Flo is likely one of the most personalized apps available. It begins by asking users a few questions to collect relevant data (including height, weight, and year of birth) and immediately provides valuable utilities for women who use it. Here’s a walkthrough of its onboarding screen.

After collecting this data, Flo uses it to predict specific events in a woman's hormonal cycle with reasonable accuracy. The app then suggests actions based on the user's goals. Unlike most apps that require signup upfront, Flo encourages users to save their progress by signing up at the end of the data collection process.

Time to Value - How do Flo’s users get value? How long does it take to get value?

Software products must get time to value right. Flo’s users get value immediately after they log their periods to make accurate predictions. However, long-term users are more likely to gain improved knowledge about pregnancy and their menstrual cycle. 

Flo empowers women to understand their bodies' language, equipping them with the knowledge to manage their overall health and well-being proactively. The app provides users with near-accurate cycle predictions, insights, and a wealth of science-backed, user-friendly content. It also helps women achieve their goals: to understand their bodies better, adjust their lifestyle, get pregnant, or keep from getting pregnant.

In addition, the communities on the app provide a safe space for women to share their struggles and speak on ‘taboo’ topics which allow them to make informed decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health.

So far, its been successful at delivering value. Flo’s users become more knowledgeable about their menstrual cycle (89.0%) and pregnancy (84.6%) within 30 days of use according to a 2022 study carried out by the company in conjunction with a researcher at the University of London and Technische Universitaet Berlin.

Flo - Retention Loop

Retention is key for apps - key signals for success are the period within which a user is expected to return and a solid retention rate. There are key components to Flo’s retention loop - this keeps its users returning to the app.

1. Personalized User Data
   
   Flo has built a loop that is self-sustaining for each user. The more a woman uses Flo, the more it can accurately guide her and the more value it provides to her.

   Because Flo requires women to log their periods, tick off accuracy times, and enter events like sex or how they feel, retention is immediately baked into its model. Each time a user corrects period dates on Flo, adds that they’ve had sex, or logs their feelings, they send data to Flo’s decision engines, which personalizes the service. The only way to get the best value from Flo is to use it. The service has created the perfect loop of usage for its customers.

2. Notifications
   
   Flo’s notifications are central to the user experience. The company has built several notification and email flows by segmenting millions of users and nudging them to take appropriate action. These notifications help Flo users remember to do certain things like logging their period, updating their profile, or explaining why they might be feeling a certain way. The notifications are quirky, helping the company to deliver its brand to users

   

   Based on user actions or behavior, the company has launched an infinite loop of push notifications (with a rate limit) which could be turned off at any point.

   

   
   According to Ivan Zhamoidzin, a software engineer at Flo, The notification loop is based on two major settings: scheduling horizon and ping interval.

   The scheduling horizon describes how many days ahead we pick and schedule reengagement notifications.

   Ping interval controls how often we emit a dummy user profile update for stale users and the pace of newly published notifications.
   

3. Content - Flo Stories
   
   In addition to these tickers and activities, Flo has included media content in a story format similar to Whatsapp Status, Instagram Story, and Snapchat. With this feature, Flo creates daily content to help women better understand their bodies.
   

   In an interview with The Drum, Annie O’Leary, the Chief Editor at Flo, says the company created content for pregnant women based on search engine insights on questions women ask throughout their pregnancy cycle. It then tested the feature by rolling it out to 30,000 users and saw incredible results. For freemium users, it saw a 30%+ increase in app opens. The content was designed in multiple different formats and the format with the highest engagement was then deployed to over 480,000+ pregnant women with a 61.42% watch rate and 0.75% of user trials after watching.
   

4. Flo Secret Chats

   

   
   Flo developed secret chats as a place for women to anonymously discuss several topics and receive responses from other women worldwide. The app is the perfect place for women to learn from other’s experiences and share their own experiences. Each chat is categorized by topic and users can filter between Top, Newest, My, and Expert. Secret Chats is also algorithmically powered and delivers content to women based on their age and goals. Flo ensures this chat section is actively pre-moderated - this creates a filter for chats, and their responses and protects women from harassment or bullying.

5. Flo with Partners

   

   
   Flo has built a brilliant feature that allows women to share their cycles with their partners. This has extended Flo’s usage beyond women and now includes men (who would typically not use such apps) in the conversation about women’s cycles. This feature includes data about a user’s partner’s cycle, how their partner might feel, and even tips to make their partner feel better. It also holds loads of text and video content under its insights sub-feature. These insights deeply explain topics and issues around a woman’s period including topics like What is a period and What affects sex drive?
   
   For couples trying to conceive a baby, this makes Flo the essential companion in the reproductive process. 

Flo - Product Strategy - A super app for women

Flo’s CEO Dmitry Gurski considers Flo - a super app for women. The company started as a period or cycle tracker and has added features to keep growing in the women’s health sector.

In an interview with Unicorns Lithuania, Dmitry says, 

On competition, Dmitry also added

Women’s health (and beauty) is a largely unexplored sector for application developers and venture capitalists. Because most of these people are men (only around 2% of startup founders and 15% of co-founders are women), they are completely oblivious and have largely ignored this sector. This has led to less competition for apps focused on women or promoted towards women’s needs. Inadvertently, the market is wide open for apps that work, improve women’s health, and deliver value. Many technology sector analysts and industries forget some simple facts - Women are the economic engine of the internet - responsible for 82% of fashion ecommerce shopping, and over 78% of Amazon Prime Day purchases.

Evolution of the Flo app and Product Launch Strategy

This section will discuss Flo’s product strategy and core thesis, how it creates hypotheses that build new features, and its testing methodology.

Flo 0: An application to track periods and view future cycles, sending daily notifications to users about the symptoms they could experience.
Flo Today: A super-health app for women to track everything about their body and how it impacts their lives.

This super-health-app for women thesis drives everything at Flo and informs how it decides what new features to build for its over 300 million user base. 

The company builds and tests features by creating a hypothesis, defining a user segment to test the hypothesis, and then defining metrics to benchmark against. In this blog post, Flo CEO, Dmitry explains Flo’s thinking and highlights that tests don’t always show immediate impact. We can infer that Flo runs A/B tests for new features or changes and unlike most companies, focuses on how these changes impact long-term revenue instead of short-term impacts. 

In the same post, he explains that the company's OKRs drive the metrics it benchmarks and then selects multiple levels of product metrics that impact the overarching OKRs. To improve these lower-level metrics, hypotheses are brought to the forefront, designed in Figma or Miro, and then built to be tested. 

The image below shows how Flo’s product team thinks about the impact of the features they build. 

In the image, we can see how Notifications directly impact opened cards and impressions but also indirectly impact the number of active days per user and lengthen the retention curve. We can also see how daily content, the knowledge base, and content quality impact the same retention curve metric. The Flo team recognizes that there’s hardly one thing that affects retention and the ‘problem’ can be tackled on multiple fronts. 

Flo tracks the retention impact of all its experiments in Looker

Flo is an app that gives users data-driven results and its product decisions are heavily data-driven. You can read deeper into Flo’s experimentation strategy from the CEO, Quantitative User Researcher, and, Data Platform Product Owner.

Flo - Business Model and Monetisation

How does the company make money? Flo is one of the millions of apps that employ the freemium model: while it is free for all users, it also offers added features for paid subscribers. These features include a daily well-being plan, video courses and content, and unlimited access to Flo’s health assistant, a chatbot designed to answer questions and improve understanding of menstrual health.

Flo’s pricing pushes users to opt for the optimal annual option as a price-sensitive lock-in. The difference between $15 and $40 is just $25 - a significant discount compared to a monthly payment of up to $180 annually.

We also found some add-ons and plans like the Flo Pregnancy Tracker, Flo Birth Control Reminder, and Fertility Tracker Premium. Flo doesn’t list its pricing on its website (only in the app) which suggests that Flo uses dynamic and probably location-based pricing depending on each user’s location. This pricing strategy isn’t uncommon; many global services adjust pricing based on the user’s affordability.

Here’s a breakdown of the differences between Flo Free and Flo Premium.

By 2024, Flo Premium had over 16 million users and opened up its Pass it On program to 1 billion women - this means women in participating countries have free access to Flo Premium. More on this below.

Flo - Competitive Landscape

Flo isn’t without competition. It's surrounded by a bevy of services like Grace Health, Glow, Noula, Clue, and, Aavia. Clue and Noula primarily target women looking to track their fertility cycle and birthing parents. Grace Health on the other hand extends its services to general health and wellness. Glow also goes beyond tracking and offers deeper support for women undergoing fertility treatments, including IVF and IUI, connecting them with fertility experts. Noula shut down in May this year.

Flo also competes with generalized health apps like Google Fit, Apple Health, Mi Fit, Zepp Life, Fitbit, and Samsung Health, providing cycle tracking for women. These services integrate directly with smartwatches and other health trackers, picking up on data like heart rate, sleep quality, and fitness activity. The table below compares Flo with indirect competitors.

Smartphone native apps and fitness trackers are no match for Flo’s personalisation and extensive capabilities.

Acquisition - How does Flo get new users to discover its product?

According to website traffic platform Similarweb, Flo gets a huge chunk of website traffic from Search Engines, followed by direct visits to its website and, social media. Currently, it doesn’t seem to run many ads, so as a traffic driver, those come in a distant fourth. Fifth is referrals from other websites such as women’s health and generalist websites.

The Flo website sees about 6 million visitors each month driven by its content efforts on the Flo Health Library. The library is a massive content repository for women’s health and includes all topics from puberty to motherhood and menopause. The purpose of these articles is to drive search engine traffic to the website. There are over 100 articles within the library and it’s updated weekly. 

In addition to these articles, Flo backs up its SEO sauce with free calculators. These are simple free tools on the web that help women calculate certain dates. Its website has about 9 calculators which are all free.

When you build a great product, people talk about it. Flo isn’t different. Its largest acquisition source is Word of Mouth

Flo’s largest driver of traffic is word of mouth. Every woman I talked to for this case study said they learned about Flo through a friend, cousin, or sister or saw a post about it on social media. The app is so valuable that women talk about it naturally. We found that of all referral traffic, Flo gets the most traffic from Whatsapp, the largest chat app in the world. This is consistent with apps that grow via word of mouth. Friends and family share them in messaging apps.

While Flo currently doesn’t run large ad campaigns, here are some campaigns in the company’s history.

Let’s Talk About It. Period

In this video series, supermodel Natalia Vodanovia interviewed celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski, Maria Borges, and Soo Joo Park. The series talks about womanhood, their expectations of being a woman compared to their experiences, and how their periods change their lives. This campaign generated over 250K views on YouTube and was promoted on other social platforms.

Flo-for-Business Referral Campaign

Second is Flo’s Business Campaign. We found the Flo-for-Business Referral Campaign which enabled businesses, their human resources department or other department to offer One year of Flo Premium to all their employees. Flo took this seriously and assessed each business by hosting meetings with the business representatives. This campaign launched in February 2022 and has now shut down.

Flo Pass it On

This is the company’s largest and most impactful campaign to date. In October 2022, Flo’s Pass It On started by giving women in 22 countries free & unlimited access to Flo Premium. In November 2023, just after the anniversary of this project, the app added 66 countries to this list. According to an announcement blog post, this opens up Flo Premium to 1 billion women worldwide who can access the service for free - including women in some of the largest countries in the world like India, Indonesia, and Nigeria. At the time of release, over 10 million women worldwide used Flo Premium. There’s just one caveat: the program is available to Android users only. Flo’s assumption here is interesting - because iPhones cost far more money than the average Android in these countries, the company assumes iPhone users are richer and can afford to subscribe to Flo. 

Flo - Revenue and Success

This case study wouldn’t be complete without talking about money. Flo is one of the most successful stand-alone apps in the world. This year, its CEO Dmitry Gurski, said it had 70 million monthly active users. In the health and fitness category, Flo is the biggest app. Period.

Flo’s 2023 Annual Recurring Revenue was $192 million (40% annual increase) and since 2018, Flo has maintained the lead as the largest global health app by downloads and active users.

In August 2024, Flo’s CEO announced 5 million paying subscribers, an increase of over 55% year-on-year. We couldn’t find revenue for all of Flo’s existence but with a total of $429M in estimated revenue in the last 3 years, Flo has earned over 5.72x on its pre-2024 capital raises.

Flo Health Inc - Fundraising and Valuation

The company is on a path to mega-app success and investors are in line. Flo has raised $275.5M in funding so far and at its last round in July 2024, it became a unicorn. Its backers include General Atlantic, Target Global, VNV Global, and Flint Capital. Here’s a breakdown of Flo’s fundraising history.

Flo - Drawbacks and Criticisms

Flo’s success is not without its drawbacks. In 2019, the Washington Post published an investigative piece about Flo’s data-sharing practices with third parties. Like many digital products and apps, Flo shared user data with platforms like Meta and Google. This data is used to retarget website visitors and users who might drop off from certain processes, and enable ad targeting via Meta’s ‘Lookalike audience’ feature. The company did this largely without user consent and was fined by the United States Federal Trade Commission in 2021.

This fine led to an unknown number of women deleting the Flo app as a response to Flo’s privacy violations. Many users were shocked that their private sexual and reproductive activity was being shared with advertisers and advertising platforms.

Flo responded to this and built features like Anonymous mode and Security sharing. These features have brought the company privacy awards. It has also open-sourced its technology for this feature and received ISO certifications for its work to improve privacy. 

Flo - The Future

Flo’s future is bright. It’s a freemium service that’s achieved high paid user retention numbers in a unique category with low competition. Its product and retention model also encourage consistent usage - the more you use Flo, the less you’re likely to move to another app. The cost of switching from Flo to another app is too high. Many women I spoke to have used Flo since their teens and couldn’t imagine life without it. 

Unlike many freemium apps, it’s figured out a way to earn good revenue via premium subscriptions, and add-ons and continues to grow this pie. 

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, here’s what the CEO Dmitry says:

Here are some possible future scenarios for Flo:

1. Acquisition
   
   A healthcare service provider could acquire Flo. Large medical providers would love to get their hands on Flo’s data - for research and customer purposes. Women’s health has been largely ignored and more funding is moving into the sector.
   

2. IPO

   Flo could go public and begin trading on a global stock exchange. It trades at a fair value compared to revenue and makes more profit and consistent revenue than most tech companies that have gone public in the last 5 years. 
   

3. Remain private and build 

   
   Flo earns enough revenue and profit to provide consistent dividends to its shareholders. It’s crafted a niche in the women’s healthcare category and can continue to build, test, and deploy features that improve women’s health.

Conclusion

Flo's innovative approach to women's health demonstrates the power of depth. A product like Flo competes with native apps from some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Still, by leveraging data, personalisation and useful features, Flo has created a unique app that empowers women to understand and manage their bodies, ultimately improving their overall well-being. The company shows us that there’s an opportunity to build profitable, sustainable and great products in niches that are ignored and underserved.

Thank you for making it to the end of this case study. I hope it was useful to you as it was a learning experience for me. If you learnt much, please share this with friends, colleagues, managers and family.

Please follow Growth Case Studies on LinkedIn for more updates and click the buttons below to share with friends!

Hello friend 👋🏽.

Firstly, I’d like to thank you for subscribing to Growth Case Studies. As I type this, 1031 people like you have subscribed to this newsletter.

When I announced Growth Case Studies in September, I was one week deep into onboarding at my new job. Two things informed my announcement. One - If I posted about it, I would be committed to writing a growth case study. Two - I could figure out work and write the first newsletter simultaneously.

Reader, it was a challenging month. Not only did I have to commute to work for the first time in over 5 years, but I also had to read many technical documents, meet stakeholders and generally get up to speed with the business. If you know me, you know I like to understand technology products and business models wherever I work.

As September progressed, it was clear that I wouldn’t make the first edition of this newsletter. So what did I do? I panicked for a bit - realising that over 1000 people relied on me to write, and I hadn’t even started researching.

This was me every time I remembered Growth Case Studies.

Anyway, we’re here now, and I am sending you something. While reviewing the list of subscribers, I noticed a lot of names I hadn’t come across before. So here’s a bit of a reintroduction.

My name is Olabinjo Adeniran, and I like computers. I’ve spent the last 10 years primarily working in different marketing roles for technology companies. While preparing for a career in software development, I rediscovered marketing and made a hard career pivot towards it. I’ve led multi-channel campaigns for some of Africa’s most impactful startups (including 2 unicorns) and now work globally.

I started writing about marketing in 2017 via digitalmarketer.ng, focusing solely on digital channels and occasionally talking about offline channels.

In 2019, I co-founded Future Africa, turning it into Africa’s most prolific venture capital fund. The firm is most notably known for its angel investor community, the Future Africa Collective, which invests alongside it. By my exit from the firm in February 2022, it had invested over $6 million in over 60 startups and went on to invest in about 100 startups by the end of 2022.

Before I left Future Africa, I wrote a 30-day newsletter series called 30 Days of Growth - challenging myself to write consistently. 30 Days of Growth is a series of emails on growth, marketing, product, startups, VC, and everything in between. You can get the ebook here.

Following my exit from Future Africa, I had more free time and wrote The Growth Handbook - Scaling Fintech in Nigeria. The book takes a unique marketing lens at growing fintech companies. It is a compilation of lessons, mistakes and advice from seasoned professionals across the fastest-growing companies in the technology-enabled financial services industry. You can get The Growth Handbook here.

As you can see, my interests have been consistent since I was about 5 years old. I love technology, ads, and learning about how technology companies grow worldwide.

This time, I’m doing something a bit different. I am embarking on a journey to spotlight global technology companies and learn lessons from their successes & failures - some are underrated industry leaders, while others are pretty popular.

Thank you once again for coming with me on this journey. Please expect a case study soon.

A bien·​tôt,
Olabinjo.