The story starts with Chamath Palihapitiya. He pioneered the concept of a team focused entirely on growth. Recognizing that dedicated teams for product development and marketing on their own would not achieve the network effect Facebook needed to expand, he pitched the idea of a new team that sat somewhere in the middle1.
This ‘Growth Team’ would solely focus on how to drive user acquisition strategy and growth. By experimenting, testing and analyzing, his team discovered the key to sustainable hypergrowth for Facebook was to “get any individual to seven friends in 10 days.1”
This one metric became a key focus for the entire company. The rest is history. It’s an approach that has been followed with enormous success by many others. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Google2 have all experimented over the years with various Growth Team models – formal and informal – to drive customer acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention.
The results speak for themselves. In FY 2020, the top 300 global platforms generated approximately $1.5 trillion in revenues with 41% of that from B2C, 59% from B2B.