Lessons learned from growing LinkedIn to 175 million users | Hacker News Reader

Lessons learned from growing LinkedIn to 175 million users

quibb.com

48 pointssandimac12 comments

Open articleView on HN

"Control + F"

"password" - Zero Result found

Apparently, after 175 million users, they haven't learnt anything about correctly storing passwords. chuckles

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Control + F "Make it impossible for users to unsubscribe to marketing emails"

I think there was a typo in the paragraph that is titled "Reduce friction vs. Increase desire", because for a lot of things there is ridiculous friction. I have email addresses that I have never signed up to LinkedIn receiving emails... Any time I want to unsubscribe to the emails.. I can't.

In order to unsubscribe, I have to sign in, but guess what, I never actually created any account so can't sign in.

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LinkedIn offers a lot of value to (nearly?) everyone in business, I don't deny that, but the article was a little flakey and was more of an advertisement for Quibb than any substantial lessons you can learn from how LinkedIn has grown. (Ps. Sandi, I like Quibb, so I'm not bashing you)

sure - totally agree re: passwords/unsubscribe/etc. I'm not saying LinkedIn has the best product or user experience or retention/engagement - but they have done a great job growing the userbase.

as for flakey - maybe you're smarter than most of the Growth Hacker Conference attendees :) when Elliot surveyed the audience about which channel they'd focus their time/effort on, the vast majority chose the channel with the lowest conversion rate (i'm assuming they thought it had the most potential upside?) - which is exactly the opposite approach that Elliot took (focus on what's working, let engaged users do the work, reduce engaged user friction), and what actually allowed them to grow.

Also: spam your user base with irrelevant stuff on a daily basis even when they've opted out of every email possible. Pretend it's an "accident".

I'm nearly to the point with LinkedIn where I want to take them to court. What they're doing is a clear violation of CAN-SPAM. I generally feel that kind of thing is a waste of the courts time, but I simultaneously feel that marking the messages as spam in gmail isn't doing enough to curb their annoying and illegal behavior.

Indeed.

And you know what annoys me more? There are probably 10s of LinkedIn engineers on HN who are probably reading this thread and know about this illegal spamming and should know better then to leave that unchecked.

Also once enough people have opted out create new emails that default to opt in.

LinkedIn is a prime example of an ultra low value service that should be run as one minimal thing done well not try to be Facebook.

While they're clearly doing some things right, if I get another unwanted email mentioning the phrase "thought leader" I'm not going to be responsible for the results.

There has to be a lesson somewhere about posting stuff on your company blog that targets your company's market instead of HN.

Valid point, but I think the HN crowd is somewhat their target market. Surely there are benefits to marketing to the HN crowd now that Ycombinator is pretty famous.

The HN audience has a high overlap with Quibb. Although less technical and development focused, I discover a lot of good startup and industry-centric content through the site.

HN is a public forum for sharing news with a large group of mostly strangers around the world. Quibb is for sharing news within a very small and private group of people that you work with and all the speech and thought restrictions that implies. That's not very high overlap.

Anyone can convince themselves this is their ideal audience and get some iota of validation by pooping out articles for us.

"SEO"'ing you're way up to the top helps, too. LinkedIn is cancerous.

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