The Social Media Success Thread
One business, one week,
one thing that worked.
Every week we take apart a real company that did something specific and copyable, and show you the mechanism underneath it.
Not a growth-hacking list. Not a thread of screenshots. A documented decision, why it worked, and the version of it you could run this month with what you already have.
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The archive · 6 issues
- No. 06River Pools and Spas · 2008 onward6 min
The Question Everybody Refuses to Answer
A swimming pool installer nearly went under in 2008, then built the most visited pool website in the world by writing the one article his entire industry had agreed not to write.
In the winter of 2008 a fibreglass pool company in Virginia was in serious trouble. Customers who had signed contracts were asking for their deposits back, three of them in a single day, and the company did not have the money to return.
Read the opening → - No. 05Airbnb · 2007 onward5 min
The Rooms Were Already There
Airbnb never built a hotel. Every room it sells existed before the company did — empty, unpriced and invisible. What it added was not accommodation. It was permission to trust a stranger.
The founding story is well worn: a design conference came to San Francisco in 2007, the hotels filled, and two flatmates who could not make rent put air mattresses on their living room floor and built a page offering them with breakfast.
Read the opening → - No. 04Duolingo · 2011 onward5 min
The Owl That Came Back on Day Forty
Duolingo's innovation was never the teaching. It was working out that the entire product is whether somebody opens it again tomorrow — and then running its social media on exactly the same principle.
Language courses were expensive and dull, and most people who bought one stopped within a fortnight. Duolingo made one that was free, and then spent a decade on a problem the incumbents had never treated as a problem at all: getting somebody to come back on day forty.
Read the opening → - No. 03Warby Parker · 2010 onward5 min
They Deleted the Part Everybody Hated
Four students worked out that the worst thing about buying glasses was not the price. It was standing in a shop under a strip light being told what suited you.
Glasses cost hundreds of dollars for a piece of moulded plastic and two ground lenses, and they cost that because a very small number of companies controlled the frames, the lenses and, in many cases, the shops selling them.
Read the opening → - No. 02Patagonia · 2011 onward5 min
The Advert That Told You Not to Buy
On the busiest shopping day of the American year, Patagonia took a full page in the New York Times, printed a picture of its best-selling fleece, and told readers not to buy it.
Black Friday, 2011. A full page in the New York Times carrying a photograph of the R2 jacket, one of the company's best sellers, under the headline "Don't Buy This Jacket". The copy below it set out what making the thing had cost the world in water and carbon, and asked the reader to consider repairing what they already owned instead.
Read the opening → - No. 01Dollar Shave Club · 2012 to 20165 min
The Ninety-Second Film That Said the Quiet Part
A man with no razor factory asked out loud why a packet of blades cost twenty dollars. Four years later Unilever paid a reported billion dollars for the company that question built.
In March 2012 a video appeared in which a man walked through a warehouse explaining that his razors were good and cheap, that the ten-bladed vibrating handle sold by the incumbent was not necessary, and that nobody should be paying twenty dollars a month to a brand endorsed by a footballer.
Read the opening →