Growth marketing has been a key component of the success of many modern startups and global brands. Rather than relying solely on traditional advertisements, these companies utilized growth marketing with diverse strategies involving experimentation, creativity, data, and virality to achieve faster growth.

In the case of Airbnb, when they first started to grow, the business was struggling. However, their growth team executed a bold strategy using Craigslist, which had many potential visitors. Ultimately, their strategy involved integrating all Airbnb listings with Craigslist, which gave almost instant exposure to a far larger user-base. As a direct result of this strategy, Airbnb gained three times as many listings in just a couple of months.

Similarly, Dropbox employed one of the more famous referral tactics in growth marketing. In their campaign, Dropbox offered both the person referring and the person receiving the referral twice the free storage space within Dropbox than each normally had. This created a network of Dropbox users who became effective promoters of the service among their own networks and the company grew from 100,000 to over 4 million users in 15 months.

Uber also grew rapidly using free and saved credits at the point of referral. Almost every launch in a new city came with promotions like “Invite a friend and get a free ride.”  This almost instantly began to cascade in viral adoption. In less than a decade Uber went from launching in one city to launching in over 900 cities worldwide.

In India, Zomato achieved dominance through hyperlocal expansion and product mined models. By leveraging SEO-based food reviews, discount-based growth hacks, and a screens based food delivery business model, Zomato evolved into a household name with millions of active consumers each month. 

Another fantastic example is Spotify, which leveraged its freemium model paired with hyper personalized recommendations. By allowing free access and social sharing Spotify quickly became the number one music platform with 600 million users worldwide. 

Finally, Figma is another prototypical SaaS success story. Rather than marketing in the traditional sense, Figma launched with a freemium business, with a product-based growth strategy through design document collaboration. This growth (word-of-mouth and proliferation across design teams) gained traction, which culminated in Adobe’s $20 Billion deal to acquire the startup. 

These examples show that growth marketing can be more than just campaigns – it can be.  creativity, experimentation, and ability to scale a proven model into a global brand.