All sessions will be in English only, but what we are going to cover there is applicable to any software startup in any market. TheVentureCity invests in startups from the whole Americas and also from EMEA.
Most of them counted on the product to be the main driver of growth.
Facebook: invite your friends, we made it super easy for users to scale this process, instead of asking emails one by one, we used contact importers for email and also phone contact list.
Pinterest: we created a very good SEO engine, since we have billions of well annotated images that are described in different ways and different languages by the community, helping with hundreds of different keywords for each single image.
Whatsapp: simple 1:1 network effect, you need your friends on the other side for the product to work. Whatsapp was able to run on very slow, weak signal mobile networks, better than any other. They also offered the received and read.
For Google, we know that the product was really fast and results were amazing, and we all think that it was the only thing that made them grow. However, Google bought placement in many different places, from websites to browsers, as the initial trigger to get to a point where word of mouth did the rest.
Every product/industry/market has a different set of challenges, there is no silver bullet, but for sure that are some different known levers that can be tested.