Deep: How are companies driving growth?
Unconventional tactics from top tier companies like Lyft, Netflix, Instacart, Atlassian, Anthropic, Snapchat and more
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive these in-depth pieces of analysis you can do so below. Or you can find out more about what you get as a paid subscriber here.
Hi product people 👋,
As we mentioned in a recent briefing, Netflix recently confirmed its plans to drive growth by spending less on original content and instead focusing on global distribution. As part of this, the product teams at Netflix are using AI models to improve the quality of voice dubbing by matching the lip movements of the original actors as closely as possible.
More recently, decisions by Airbnb's mobile product team led to a 25% increase in global app downloads, contributing to 11% year-over-year revenue growth, and Snap's choice to ignore the shift to enterprise trend and focus on a completely different segment led to an 85% increase in ad revenue.
One company even reversed its global internationalization strategy to focus solely on the US market in an unconventional decision to drive domestic growth instead. More on that later.
With traditional growth tactics like refer-a-friend under threat because of iOS 181, and product teams increasingly burdened with figuring out how to drive growth while cutting costs, this deep dive explores some of the less conventional ways top tech companies are driving growth in 2024.
If you're currently exploring ways to drive growth in your own organization, this analysis should help.
Coming up:
An in-depth look at how companies including Lyft, Grammarly, Spotify, Atlassian, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest and others are driving growth
How Lyft’s unique customer segmentation strategy contributed to a 41% increase in revenues
The new feature from Calendly which improved qualified lead rates by 40%
A closer look at an innovative new API product from Instacart and how it’s stimulating growth with partners like the New York Times and GE Appliances
Key trends and takeaways to inform your own product’s growth strategy
The full list of 20+ tech companies featured
How this deep dive is structured
When we talk about growth, we’re specifically focused on growth across key areas including revenues and user growth.
To some extent, everything a company does is directly or indirectly linked to growth but in this analysis we’ll be sharing examples of tactics and features built to specifically stimulate growth.
Here’s how this deep dive is structured:
Company - the company featured in this deep dive
Growth tactic category - the specific category of the tactic used by the company featured. This includes tactics like internationalization, cross-selling and expanding, customer segmentation and developing new pricing models.
Example - a detailed explanation of how the tactic works in the context of the company featured.
Link to example and more information - links to more information about the growth tactic example.
Growth performance - how these new features contributed to the overall growth at the company. This includes revenue and user growth metrics like DAUs / MAUs, based on the latest company earnings (if it’s a public company) or publicly available knowledge.
Category breakdown
To help structure this analysis, each growth tactic example is broken down into specific categories.
The full list is available for paid subscribers at the end of the post but these categories include growth tactics across areas like:
Internationalization - expanding services or products to new countries or regions, often involving localization and translation efforts. Reddit recently unveiled plans to translate every single page on its website into French for the first time - with more countries to follow. AI and proprietary LLMs play a big part in this. We’ll explore how some of the companies featured are doing it.
Pricing models - adjusting or introducing new pricing structures and packages to increase revenue and attract different customer segments. This can include price increases, new models or simplifying existing pricing structures as Airbnb recently did after a backlash.
Customer segmentation - targeting specific groups of customers with tailored products and marketing strategies. Product teams are increasingly building new propositions around new or existing user segments to drive growth. We’ll take a look at some examples of companies who are doing this exceptionally well.
New features - introducing new functionalities to existing products to enhance user experience and engagement. Figma recently built new features targeting users outside of designers with the launch of Figma Slides and Workspaces, for example.
New revenue stream - exploring and establishing new channels or methods of generating income. Reddit recently signed a data licensing deal with Google which allows it to use Reddit data to train its AI models and AI is opening up new opportunities for developing revenue streams.
Partnerships - collaborating with other companies to leverage their resources or audience for mutual benefit. An ill-advised partnership can end up being a waste of time for everyone but a well executed partnership can drive significant growth. Perplexity just inked a deal with major telecom companies like and banks including Softbank in Japan and Deutsche Telekom in Germany for example.
AI - integrating artificial intelligence technologies to improve services, features, or analytics. New features that use AI can radically alter the value proposition of a company in a way that stimulates growth. We’ll share some of these examples.
A deeper look at some of the ways companies like Lyft, Instacart, Pinterest, Calendly and others are driving growth
And with that, let’s take a deeper look at some of the examples featured.
Instacart
Growth tactic examples: new API products, category expansion into new areas, enterprise focus
Instacart’s business continues to grow significantly, with gross transactional volumes reaching almost $8 billion recently.
There are a variety of powerful tactics Instacart has deployed to achieve this growth including significant investment into new revenue streams like advertising which has grown 17% year on year to $228 million.
But there's one innovative new API product in particular that's explicitly tied to growth that's worth knowing about: