November 13th, 2017

Over the last 20 years, technology and the forms of spending, investing and paying for different types of softwares have changed tremendously. Every start-up company faces obstacles but having the right growth strategy or right concept can move and grow the company exceptionally fast. Here is a list of a few new and improved companies that started out small but made it at a rapid pace:

PAYPAL, EST. 2000

In the early days, PayPal needed users as any new and start-up business would. PayPal started out with 24 users in 2000, which were made up of their employees. By the time their cash incentive had hit its stride, they had hit daily growth in new users of 7%.  

At the end of March of 2000, PayPal had 1 million users. Within the summer of 2000, they had around 5 million accounts. This was a huge increase in users.

To produce the number of users they had back in 2000, the company decided to have a promotion going on for new customers. The promotion would cost the new customer $10 for each new sign up and another $10 for referrals. This not only made customers happy, but this also helped the company itself. Today PayPal has roughly 184 million users.

MINT, EST. 1996

Mint, a  personal finance management app which has been around for over 20 years is one of the top financial apps and websites on the market. Before becoming who they are today, Mint realized that waiting until their product was officially launched before they started acquiring customers would burn a serious hole in their revenue.

What the company came up with before launching the site was to build a waitlist of customers. The customers who would be entitled to VIP access soon as the product was live, which would allow the company to generate revenue starting on day 1. In just 8 months, Mint collected more than 20,000 email addresses and was acquired by Intuit for $170 million.

ACORNS, Est. 2015

Acorns are currently one of the most popular micro-investing apps. When using your credit or debit cards,  the leftover change you have per transaction is then invested. Very simple and something everyone is capable of doing.

From lacking customers when starting up, the company decided to have a perk for their customers. From within the Acorns app home screen, the users have the option to share their current contact list with the company. With that, this gives the company the ability to send out text messages to the contacts. For every sign up the company receives, the user will also receive a credit of $2.50.

According to an April 2016 press release from Acorns, there are more than 850,000 people who have opened an investment account with Acorns since the app launched almost 20 months ago.

The best growth within a company usually will start with a strong growth strategy. With the data and help of these three apps and websites, these are the simplest and most helpful way of receiving an easy way of saving or using your money within a great company.