How These Four Startups Revolutionized Marketing and What You Can Learn from Them

Tomic Riedel
3 min readMay 3, 2024
Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Marketing isn’t just about big budgets or fancy ads. It’s about creativity, hustle, and breaking the rules.

Some startups have done it so well, they’ve changed the game forever.

From clever referral hacks to viral videos, these startups have rewritten the marketing playbook.

Their stories offer valuable lessons for any startup. Let’s dive in and see how these four changed startup marketing forever.

Dropbox’s Referral Program

What? Dropbox used a referral program to encourage existing users to invite others. Both parties were rewarded with additional storage space when a referral was successful. This approach turned Dropbox's users into a powerful marketing force, resulting in exponential growth. This growth hacking technique has become a standard for startups that want to grow quickly by tapping into existing networks.

Lesson Learned: Leverage Your Existing Users

Details: Dropbox’s referral program demonstrates the power of using existing users to invite others. By offering a small motivation that aligns with the core value proposition (extra storage), Dropbox used word-of-mouth marketing to achieve exponential growth. Startups can learn…

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Tomic Riedel

Sharing the process of building a portfolio of apps to make people more productive.