How TikTok grew 500% with product-led strategies
Lessons behind TikTok's early product-led growth strategies and how they designed it. It's not by accessing your Wi-Fi.
👋 Hello! Welcome to this week’s ADPList Newsletter, a weekly advice column. Each week, we tackle design, building products, and accelerating careers. We’re looking for sponsors; if you’re interested in supporting our newsletter to advertise, let’s chat here.
TikTok has been downloaded 3 Billion times, almost half of the world's population.
At a spicy hearing on Capitol Hill last week, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew fought for the app’s survival in the US. But the question is — how did TikTok even grow so fast to 150M+ Americans on the app?
In today’s newsletter, I will tell you about their 5 key early product-growth strategies. Can you guess what are they? Scroll down to find the answer.
Brought to you by Cohesive
Cohesive is your #1 creative AI partner that crafts magical content. From design copies, idea generation, and writing design specs to product docs - supercharge your work creatively with its powerful & intuitive editor. End ChatGPT prompt struggles. Create, refine, edit, and publish seamlessly with Cohesive.
How TikTok drive 500% product growth: A breakdown to 5 key strategies.
It’s difficult to overstate how dominant TikTok's become. Even the analysts are puzzled. If you add up the revenue of Twitter, Snapchat, Zoom, Lyft, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Spotify together, it still wouldn’t be as big as Bytedance.
TikTok’s grown so fast it’s broken the models. In this case study, we will dive into Alex Zhu (founder of Musical.ly. He’s a designer and PM), where it eventually transformed into TikTok.
My biggest takeaways from this deep dive:
Most product-led growth is designed by understanding humans.
To execute any of these strategies, it’s important to first narrowly define your target user.
Always start with a niche. You can expand the use case once you have distribution and design for the billions.
Most of these strategies are invented and worked well for consumer tech companies but B2B can learn from too.
Users need to feel invested to want to continuously contribute to and share your platform.
Let’s dive into 5 product growth strategies that drove TikTok’s insane growth. 👇
1. Focus on a niche from zero to one phase, then diversify new use cases
“In the zero to one phase, you want to be a brush, you have to solve a specific need very well, but once you reach one, and one to grow to X, you want to be a canvas, you want all kind of things to happen on this blank canvas”
This is very much in line with how most of the largest consumer tech companies grew.
Facebook started with college kids
Amazon focused on books
ADPList started with designers
Uber started with ride-hailing
On a smaller scale, Paul Graham talks about how all one needs to do is to find 1000 of your truest, most obsessive fans and you can make a living off that group.
📌 Key question: Am I narrowing down my audience enough?
2. Don’t design against human nature
“I was observing their behavior, 50% [they] were listening to music, and the other 50% [they] were taking videos and photos, selfies and [put the] stickers and shout[ing] around, and they had some good laughs. So that gave me some idea, first, entertainment is going to be much easier than education cause education is against [the] human nature and entertainment are following human nature.”
Top tech companies started as underestimated frivolous things and the next big thing will look like a toy.
Giving into human vices can change the world.
YouTube, Apple, Google, and Netflix started out as toys but contributed more to education and learning than smaller education-focused companies.