Want Hockeystick Growth? Try These Strategies from Airbnb, Slack, Instacart, Dropbox and Netflix When you look at stories from the early years at these and other hugely successful companies, three trends emerge.

We've all seen those charts showing "hockey-stick growth." They are the envy of entrepreneurs who haven't found it, and among the most important moments in a company's history for those who have. Hockey-stick growth tells a story: A company was slowly finding its way, and then — rocket ship. The rest is history.

But hockey-stick growth didn't just happen. Something triggered it. There was an inflection point. What was it?

I was a founder and longtime product lead at Airbnb, and now I write a newsletter about product growth that's the No. 1 business newsletter on Substack. (Find it at lennysnewsletter.com.) And I wanted to answer this question: What precedes an inflection in growth? To find out, I spent weeks researching inflection points and chatting with leaders at two dozen of today's most successful companies — including founders and early employees at Figma, DoorDash, Tinder, YouTube, Snap, Airbnb, and others.

From that, I came to three conclusions:

1. The majority of growth inflections sprang from a specific product improvement.
2. Many of the most durable inflections came from the company doubling down on their primary growth engine (like SEO or virality).
3. A surprising number of growth inflections came from an unexpected external event, without the product changing at all.

Before we get into the stories, it's important to note that long-term sustainable growth is never as simple as just one thing. Although a single moment can (and often does) ignite growth, to build a durable business you'll still need to build something that people want (through ongoing product improvements), along with a well-oiled growth engine that drives lasting growth.

But it often starts with a single moment. Let's explore these stories; read on for some of the examples I found.

Related: 3 Ways to Drive Business Growth Using AI

Strategy 1

Product Improvements

Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen popularized the Next Feature Fallacy, which is the mistaken belief that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product. But in my research, I found — surprise! — that the most common source of growth unlock actually was adding an additional feature. This doesn't mean you're only one feature away from blastoff, but it does tell me that a better product experience is often at the heart of unlocking growth. Here are some examples.

What to Learn from Airbnb

Jonathan Golden, Airbnb's first product manager, recalls:

No sooner had we learned to build supply than a European copycat came knocking on our door. They had just received $90 million in funding and ramped up to 400 employees in two months. If we lost Europe, we really wouldn't be in the business of travel anymore. Growing on our own timetable was officially out the window.

We needed to change tactics and go on an all-out blitz to capture as much of the European market as we could. That meant we had to be local. It was September 2011, and our site was woefully U.S.-centric. In just over three months, I purchased top-level domains for nine countries, assembled a global translation team, contracted with Akamai to reduce site load time, and restructured the UI on every front-facing interaction to support long text strings (crucial when you go from 'average' to 'durchschnittliche'). We also shifted to a multicurrency payment platform.

Then it was time to build supply and demand. We opened offices in eight European cities. [Cofounder and CEO] Brian [Chesky] cared about the types of people we hired, focusing on 'missionaries' and not 'mercenaries.' Emphasizing culture, we brought in employees who cared about and who wanted to grow the community. We also bought two smaller players in Europe, to seed supply. In January 2012, we did a PR blitz to drum up as much press as possible.

This pace might sound too fast — and it was. The night before the international launch, we were still trying to get the homepage translated! And we were undeniably neglecting operational challenges. But it was worth it. When competition comes after you, move ridiculously fast."

Related: 6 Tips to Drive Sustainable Business Growth

Quick Hits

"Figma's biggest inflection began with the public release of Team Libraries in 2017, about a year after launch. The sheer amount of leverage that it provided to design teams made us such an obvious winner against Sketch, Framer, etc. It changed the entire conversation with large teams." — Badrul Farooqi, first product manager

"The original idea of Netflix didn't work. But hundreds of failed experiments later, we finally tested the unlikely combination of 'no due dates, no late fees' and subscription; that ultimately was the thing that ended up working. And boy, did it work." — Marc Randolph, cofounder and first CEO

"The first big growth unlock for Duolingo was the launch of the mobile apps, and betting on mobile as our main platform. Duolingo originally launched as a website. In October 2012, we launched the iPhone app, and it quickly became the No. 1 downloaded app in the education category." — Cem Kansu, vice president of product

Related: How to Thrive During an Overwhelming Business Growth Spurt

Strategy 2

Doubling Down

Sometimes, the greatest inflections come from a company doing more of what's already driving growth.

SEO is a great example.

This changed the game at Pinterest, where SEO was already the company's primary acquisition channel, as well as one of two main channels to re-engage users. (The other was notifications.) When the team doubled down on its SEO work, says Jeff Chang, an early growth leader at the company, "the amount of free traffic coming from Google each day was quite insane. We may have 100x'd or 1,000x'd SEO traffic."

Virality and partnerships are also key.

Dropbox credits a lot of its early growth to two big projects. It ran a "Dropbox Space Race" in 2012, which was a campaign to get college students to all sign up for Dropbox — and the winning schools earned free Dropbox space. "It's probably the most zeitgeist growth hack I've seen — I still meet people who were in college during those years who fondly remember the race," says early growth leader ChenLi Wang. Dropbox also grew quickly after partnering with Samsung, because the app was included in Samsung's new phone onboarding. That led to more than 100 million new sign-ups alone.

Finally, channel partnerships can be critical.

This is what Instacart discovered and then doubled down on. "Our first growth inflection point was signing our first national retailer and beginning our transition from a consumer company to a retailer enablement company," says cofounder Max Mullen. That sent a signal to other retailers that "delivery wasn't just a fad."

I don't have the data to prove it, but I suspect that this kind of growth strategy ends up being the most durable. Because this isn't just about big jolts of growth; it's about building upon a winning strategy.

Related: Why a Growth Mindset is Essential to Success and How to Shift Your Mindset

Strategy 3

Harness External Events

Growth isn't always triggered by a change in product or strategy. It can also comevfrom an outside force (which is sometimes engineered from within). Examples:

Slack

"The biggest growth inflection for Slack was a PR and news media consensus that Slack was 'the next big thing,' partly driven by the press's own use of Slack, which all had magically compounding effects on our user growth." — Merci Grace, first head of growth

Tinder

"Jamie Anderson, an Olympic gold medal- winning American snowboarder, did an interview that included Tinder at the Sochi Olympics, discussing Tinder being 'next level' in the Olympic village. It caught us by surprise, but our PR team went hard on that." — Jonathan Badeen, cofounder

YouTube

"In the first year, two videos achieved virality that were different from the vlogging of the time — a video from Saturday Night Live and one of Ronaldinho Gaúcho juggling a soccer ball. Those got NBC and Nike thinking of YouTube as a distribution platform." — Steve Chen, cofounder

Related: The Key to Achieving Your Company's Growth Strategies Is Talent