The Story Behind Airbnb's Success and Your Top Weekly Posts

[GrowthHackers](  Would you open your apartment's door to strangers and ask them to pay for the nights sleeping on your couch and some cereal for breakfast? What about the other way around; paying to stay at someone else's flat and eat cereal in their own bowl? It is 2019 and Airbnb is most people's first booking option when it comes to picking "home away from home". But it wasn't always like that. In this Growth Study, our community member Morgan Brown tells us how Airbnb's Founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia turned they loft into a lodge space in order to afford rent in the entrepreneurial (and expensive) San Francisco. You can check the whole story [here]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Upcoming AMAs:  January 31, we have VP Growth at Acorns and Growthhackers PM Growth, Hila Qu, joining us. Hila Qu is a user growth expert with extensive experience in growth strategy, architecture and tactics, including product-driven growth, paid acquisition, CRM, and analytics. Currently, she is VP of Growth at Acorns, has helped the company to grow the user base to over 4 million, and successfully launched 2 new products. Previously, she was PM of growth at Growthhackers.com and worked hard to build the community alongside Sean Ellis and the team. Born and raised in China, Hila also has unique insight into growth and startup strategy in both the US and China. She writes about growth hacking as a contributor to Startup Grind Publication in [medium]( and her recently published book about growth hacking was ranked as top 4 best business book of 2018 in China.  Ask her all your questions [here]( Top posts from the week --------------------------------------------------------------- Blogging • 31 upvotes • 1 comment • Posted by John Bonini [13 How to Build A Successful Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch in 2019]( If you were starting a content strategy from scratch in 2019, where would you begin? Which mediums would you prioritize? How would you find your audience? Would you blog? Create video? Launch a podcast? Write long-form content like ebooks? We asked over 40 marketers for their advice on where they'd start if they had to start all over again. --------------------------------------------------------------- E-commerce • 10 upvotes • 1 comment • Posted by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré [12 3 Ways to Deploy jumper’s Automated Checkouts For Massive Sales]( Social media has become a powerful place to increase brand awareness and turn casual social media users into loyal customers. However, the problem comes because this isn’t really news anymore. Everyone knows how good social is at driving revenue. And the main challenge you’ll face is thanks to social media itself.  In other words, social commerce is a blessing and a challenge. --------------------------------------------------------------- Marketing Strategy • 19 upvotes • 1 comment • Posted by May Soon [11 13 Easy Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses (That Won’t Break The Bank)]( Marketing ideas span a broad spectrum, from handing out flyers at the nearest Starbucks to engineering record‐breaking jumps from the stratosphere. Here are some tried and tested marketing ideas and tactics for small to medium‐sized businesses that don’t have the luxury of a huge budget. --------------------------------------------------------------- B2B • 12 upvotes • 1 comment • Posted by Emil Shour [10 How Lucidchart Grew to 14 Million Users with Tyler Bench]( Yes, you read that title correctly… Lucidchart has over 14 million users (and counting) of their software. With that many users, one of Lucidchart’s major challenges (albeit, a great problem to have) is figuring out which ones are the right fit to talk to sales. Our guest today is the person who is tackling a lot of those challenges – his name is Tyler Bench and he’s the Director of Demand Generation at Lucidchart. Check out the interview here:* --------------------------------------------------------------- Engagement • 8 upvotes • 1 comment • Posted by Vipul Garg [9 Chat Marketing –  The Future of Marketing Automation for Brand Success using chatbots]( Chatbots now serve as a powerful means of not just engaging but also entertaining a large customer base in real-time. With chatbots businesses can move beyond customer engagement and target personalization at scale and achieve long term profitability --------------------------------------------------------------- • 22 upvotes • 28 comments • Posted by Damien Coullon [8 AMA with Damien Coullon, Linkedin's Head of Growth [Must Read]]( Damien Coullon is the Director of Product and head of Growth at Linkedin, driving SEO, Guest experience, Onboarding, Notifications and Virality. He believes in blending qualitative insights with quantitative analysis to get to meaningful user insight as fast as possible. In other words, Growth = quantitative intuition + fire. Over the last 4 years, Damien has worked with amazing teams to accelerate Linkedin's growth by increasing the value they deliver to their members. For example, they have shortened the time to get value for new Linkedin members, reduced the volume of email sent by half, increased the effectiveness of their notifications, enabled new acquisition channels like SMS to reach members in emerging markets, created new guest experiences (SEO) making it easier for people to discover the many things Linkedin can do for them, and created new ways for people to find each other and and the things they care about. Before Linkedin, he was head of Product and Software engineering in an e-commerce startup, and before that, he was doing strategy consulting. See more on LinkedIn. [Linkedin's growth team is always growing. See their latest Growth PM openings] --------------------------------------------------------------- Growth • 13 upvotes • 2 comments • Posted by Inessa Bokhan [7 5 Reasons to Invest in SEO [+SEO Proposal Template in PDF]]( Surprisingly enough, some businesses are still in doubts about SEO. If you're one of them, here are the 5 reasons to start doing SEO to give your biz a boost in 2019. --------------------------------------------------------------- E-commerce • 8 upvotes • 2 comments • Posted by Gigi Rodgers [6 How to Protect Your Ecommerce Margins in the Age of Hyper-Competition]( "How long will you be able to [move product] when you’ve cut down on quality, shaved your margins razor thin, and developed a customer base that’s ready and willing to abandon ship as soon as the next deal comes along"? Damn. Good question. Here's some ideas. --------------------------------------------------------------- Copywriting • 10 upvotes • 3 comments • Posted by Ashley Luk [5 How To Write The Best Google Ads Copy & Back It Up on Landing Pages]( There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to ad writing, but there are some best practices that can help make us more successful if we follow them. Read our latest post for what you can keep in mind while writing ad copy (and landing pages) for Google Ads. --------------------------------------------------------------- Content Marketing • 32 upvotes • 3 comments • Posted by Benji Hyam [4 Content promotion for 2019: Our shift in strategy and the 3 tactics we'll use]( Last month, I wrote a post called “Content promotion is changing. My thoughts on where we go from here.” In it, we shared months of traffic data from our clients that shows how content promotion is changing and outlined ideas of what we can test going forward. After the last month of testing and exploring the various options we have available to us, I want to share what our content promotion approach will be for 2019. --------------------------------------------------------------- • 52 upvotes • 32 comments • Posted by Kieran Flanagan [3 AMA with Kieran Flanagan, VP of Growth and Marketing at Hubspot [Must Read]]( Hi, my name is Kieran. I work at a company called HubSpot. During my time there I've helped to grow our international business, our freemium business, and our global demand. Previous to that I did marketing for Salesforce, Marketo, and helped many B2C companies generate more business through organic search. I should be able to help with anything on: - Acquiring more demand - SEO, Content, Paid, Virality, and other crazy ideas to grow an audience. - Turning demand into paying customers - activation, monetization - Structuring marketing and growth teams in product lead companies - and generally anything about scaling demand :) I also co-host the GrowthTLDR.com podcast where we speak to leading growth experts in the space, so I can pass on all the excellent advice I've learned from others. Lastly, I'm also happy to discuss anything related to Pugs, as that's my real passion in life! --------------------------------------------------------------- Analytics • 9 upvotes • 3 comments • Posted by Gigi Rodgers [2 Top Google Analytics Alternatives for Ecommerce]( It’s free, it powers analytics for 64 percent of the top 500 retailers in the U.S., and it single-handedly made analytics a mainstream concept for marketers and ecommerce managers everywhere. But just because it’s the most popular option doesn’t mean Google Analytics is the absolute best option for every ecommerce business. --------------------------------------------------------------- B2B • 25 upvotes • 6 comments • Posted by Ilya Azovtsev [1 How to Start an Email to Get Opens]( “If your email isn’t opened, it never existed.”If you send an email to your clients and leads and they didn't open it - it means that they didn't get ANY possible information you included there. So it's the same as you didn't send that. But how to make your emails opened? --------------------------------------------------------------- Like what you've been seeing from GrowthHackers? Know someone who'd like these emails too? [Forward This Email To A Friend]( [Connect on Twitter]( [Unsubscribe]( • [Account Settings]( Have feedback or a question? Email us: hello@growthhackers.com 1901 Newport Blvd. Suite #175 Costa Mesa CA, 92627 PS: If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe [here](. -The GrowthHackers Team