How BranchOut Hit The Tipping Point and Grew From 1M to 5.5M Actives In 2 Months

At the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.
Take heed entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula?
Find a real problem. LinkedIn works if you?re a white-collar grad with a great resume and tons of professional contacts to tap. But what if you?ve only got basic schooling and experience, and your only contacts are your friends? BranchOut lets you convert your existing social graph into your professional network, something LinkedIn?s lack of a meaningful Facebook integration prevents. It can help you find a top tech career, or a blue-collar temp job.
With each friend you add on BranchOut, you get access the names and employers of their friends, even if they?re not on BranchOut. That means there are actually 400 million profiles on BranchOut. Your second-degree connections can be searched so when you?re applying for a job, you can find out if someone you know happens to know someone who works there. Then you can request an intro and referral. With the world?s economy still shaky, helping people without other resources to find jobs is a real problem worth serious societal benefit.
Hire a dedicated growth team. BranchOut now has a full-time team working on analytics, A/B testing, new designs, registration flow optimization and viral techniques. They made it extremely simple for a user to invite their most relevant friends to join BranchOut. It suggests you invite your co-workers and schoolmates first, who then receive the invites as highly visible Facebook notifications.
BranchOut?s founder and CEO Rick Marini tells me the average user who enters the flow invites the Facebook-set ma