Did you ever wish you could bottle the magic that helped companies such as Uber, Tinder and Dropbox transform into the Unicorns they are today?

Last Wednesday (15th December 2021), in celebration of Andrew Chen’s book launch in Asia, we were honoured to host him during our webinar on “Driving Viral Growth” as our guest speaker. Over a thousand registrants signed up within the first week and we ever very quickly oversubscribed.

Andrew Chen is the legendary Silicon Valley Growth Hacker, and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Through his methodology, he has managed to grow companies the likes of Uber, Tinder and Dropbox to Unicorn status.

During the webinar, Andrew had an in-depth discussion on growth methodology with Jennifer Zhang, CEO and Co-founder of WIZ.AI. They discussed the importance of not only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) but also the necessity of having a Minimum Viable Community (MVC), because even the most brilliant product in the world is useless without users and a strong community.

Most importantly, Andrew shared the real-world use cases of how Tinder, Slack and Clubhouse employed the Atomic Network leverage their community of users to grow at scale and create incredible retention rates past even the D +30 mark.
On this, Jennifer drew parallels to her experience on how WIZ.AI’s Talkbot solutions are helping our clients scale up customer engagements to help companies overcome the cold start problem while still ensuring cost efficiency. Part of Wiz’s vision is to grow with growing companies and we assist hundreds of companies

Jennifer noted that customers were growing numb to in-app notifications and other text-based engagement methods, providing diminishing returns and that traditional voice engagements provide the best Customer Satisfaction Score CSAT however were costly to set up and maintain.
By combining the cost efficiency of human-like conversational voice AI to provide the voice engagements that customers respond to, together with an omnichannel approach to customer engagement. WIZ.AI were able to help companies from regional banks to fast growing Unicorn start-ups to grow their network at scale.

WIZ.AI is committed and will continue to engage with the Growth Hacking ecosystem in SEA and contribute to the regional digital transformation.

If you have missed the session, fret not! A short summary of the key takeaways from Andrew was prepared to help you to scale the network effect.

• A common trait of many successful Silicon Valley companies is that they are very good at connecting people together, to create communities of users that in turn invite more users to join.
• Viral growth is not just a campaign, it is a journey of engagement and community that invites users to share their experiences with other users.
• User cases such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Uber, and Tinder demonstrated network effect is equally valuable in both B2B and B2C industries. However, B2B is more about targeted engagements Company by Company and the growing communities within the Company, while B2C usually grows city by city.
• One of the key approaches to tackling the Cold Start Problem is getting enough users to use the product at the same time. You will need to build not just the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) but the MVC (Minimum Viable Community) for your start-up to take off.
• When a certain size of network is built, there are couples of metrics to monitor the ongoing viral growth, including yearly & monthly growth rate, retention rate and the number of connections, etc.
• Growth hackers should be able to not only look at the micro but also the macro view on their strategy.