K atie c ouric

One or Two Will Do
When Joivan Wade, creator of the Facebook page “The Wall of Comedy!”
with 4.2 million followers, started his first web series, he messaged every
Facebook connection he had, asking, “Hey, I know you’re probably busy,
but would you mind checking out my online series?” Some of those people
have recently written back, “Oh, Joivan, I see that you’ve just done your

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first Hollywood movie. I’m so proud of you, you’re doing so well.” In the
Facebook message chain remains the prior message he sent. Those same
people hadn’t responded until seven years later to tell him how proud they
were. Only about five of the thousands of people he messaged had written
back to him right away.
Not everyone has the time or necessity to help or work with you. But
you need to keep pushing until you get the results that you want. In other
words, don’t message five people and get discouraged if none of them
respond. Message a hundred more people, and then another hundred people
after that until you find people who will advocate for you or the right
collaborators to work with. Even if only two or three people want to work
with you, it’s something. It’s quality, not quantity, that helps you grow.
Focus on one or two valuable connections or partnerships.
Unique Offerings
Shazam (recently acquired by Apple) is a perfect example of a company
that started small with a unique offering, an app that can identify music
based on a short sample played using a device’s microphone. Chris Barton,
Shazam’s founder and board director and former head of Android business
development for Google, has always focused on partnership business
development to accelerate growth. Barton explains that in the beginning
Shazam struggled for six years before it had any success. It was a small
start-up that built its platform before smartphones even had apps on them.
Then, finally, Shazam entered into a partnership with AT&T to distribute a
music recognition application that generated significant revenues for
Shazam in those nascent start-up days. Even though its scale paled in
comparison, Shazam’s technology was valuable to AT&T, offering the
ability to differentiate its phones from other phone company providers. And
the money that Shazam got from this partnership helped the start-up further
develop its technology.
The AT&T deal was not Shazam branded, meaning Shazam didn’t get
its brand’s name attached to the technology on the AT&T platform. So
Barton and his team still wanted to find an opportunity to grow brand
awareness and expand the company. When the iPhone came out in 2007,

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the App Store didn’t yet exist. Barton’s team thought, “Wouldn’t it be great
if we could get Shazam on the iPhone?” In 2008 Apple started to put
together the App Store for launch. They reached out to a handful of
companies and Shazam was among them. This “luck,” said Barton, was due
to the fact that their product had a unique offering.
That’s when Shazam’s scaling to massive audiences began. Back then
there were only one or two million iPhones—not the crazy numbers you see
today—but for Shazam it was game changing. People were downloading
their apps, and as the number of iPhone sales increased, so did Shazam
downloads.
Barton says that what really led to Shazam becoming a massive success
was the combination of the accessibility through the iPhone app platform,
coupled with a simple but great user experience. It was almost magical for
people to discover that they could push a button and immediately find out
the names of songs. It delighted users so much that they would end up
showing the app to their friends, which drove massive word-of-mouth
growth. So if you have a unique offering and can find the right partners, you
can position yourself for massive growth.
YouTube is another company that grew because of its offering and a
strategic alliance. It was built and acquired in twenty-two months for $1.6
billion because it strategically leveraged the Myspace platform to direct
traffic to its own platform. YouTube created a snippet of code (now referred
to as an embed code) so people could embed videos into their Myspace
profiles. This was novel at the time; it acted as Myspace’s first video player.
When users saw that their friends were embedding videos on their Myspace
profiles, they often wanted to follow suit. YouTube grew because it was
seen on Myspace profiles, and users were sharing the word about the
company without even realizing it.
YouTube also made some intelligent moves like having its logo on the
player and designing it so that when users clicked on the video it took them
to the YouTube website. It’s important to note that this is a different kind of
strategic “alliance” because Myspace actually didn’t even know this was
occurring at first. By the time YouTube gained critical mass and Myspace
tried to stop it, it was too late. Myspace responded to YouTube’s
tremendous growth, when it finally noticed it, by deactivating YouTube’s
embed code, which caused Myspace users to revolt, forcing Myspace to

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reactivate it. Then Myspace tried to acquire YouTube but lost out to Google.
So sometimes you can maximize the value of traffic sources from social and
digital platforms without having to create “formal” partnerships. In this
case, for example, YouTube leveraged the fact that Myspace already
allowed embed codes on users’ profiles to build their audiences. Instagram
also scaled quickly by encouraging people to share their beautiful pictures
on their Facebook profiles, which drew more users to the Instagram
platform. Though Facebook was aware of it, the two platforms didn’t have
any kind of formal partnership until Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012.
Zenga took a similar approach by leveraging Facebook’s platform when
it started in 2001. At the time, Facebook allowed game users to send friends
invites like “This person wants to invite you to play . . .” Facebook
eventually changed the way you could send invites, but by that time Zenga
had already leveraged this tool to grow into a billion-dollar company.
Barton also pointed out that Dropbox, where he served as head of
mobile business development, is another example of a company whose
growth is attributed to partnerships. Dropbox tried every imaginable tactic
to drive growth. Eventually what worked best for them was getting users to
invite their friends by gifting free storage. Essentially, Dropbox structured a