LinkedIn — Building a Community of Half a Billion by Aatif Awan

Aatif Awan — born & raised in Pakistan — led Growth at LinkedIn. He led the transition of LinkedIn from 500K To 500M Members. He helped LinkedIn to build A Half A Billion Member Community. Listening to his talk at Traction Conf Vancouver 2017 is a delight.

LinkedIn became from not existing at all to becoming ubiquitous in just a matter of 13 years — LinkedIn grew from 500,000 to 500 million professionals in this time period so that’s a thousand X growth. Aatif shared the lessons
learned along the way so as entrepreneurs thinking about building their startups and building their companies and growing them you can apply these lessons.

When you are a start-up what you want to think about growth is because it’s
essential for your company. You won’t succeed if you don’t figure out how to grow. So you don’t even need to have a growth team your growth team is the
founder(s). In case of LinkedIn, so from the very beginning product market fit
was built into the product growth. LinkedIn changed that by making profiles
public by default and back at the time you know people were a little bit more
conscious for privacy so it wasn’t that much of a slam-dunk deal but it worked
out beautifully because that enabled a big growth channel for LinkedIn.

The way virality started for LinkedIn was that Reed Hoffman and the early founders they invited their networks. They were already well-connected in the valley — so early users were venture capitalists & entrepreneurs and that set the tone for the kind of network LinkedIn wanted.

LinkedIn identified the key growth channels and what were the drivers for them and started optimizing each of them. For LinkedIn it was Virality and SEO. Finally LinkedIn started expanding beyond the US. Every time LinkedIn launched in another language they’d see growth in that market more than double. That’s how you remove the bottleneck for a lot of new users so they came flooding — and growth started really pick up to 245 million members.

LinkedIn invested very heavily in mobile and international partnerships — and international expansions especially in China and India. China is a very unique market for everyone and it was about 20% of world’s professionals and LinkedIn couldn’t really realize a region without China. So LinkedIn worked with local partners like 10 cent in Alibaba and that was really critical to its success. Growth in China has brought LinkedIn to 500 million members.

Aatif shares that Growth is about accelerating the realization of your vision, not moving metrics up-and-to;the-right.
• At Linkedin, our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member
of the global workforce.
• Growth team accelerates this throügh. creation of the economic graph that
connects people, companies, jobs and . schools.
• Taking this view led us to focus on quality signups, not just signups

Good product comes first and growth second — Aatif Awan

Product retention should not be anything lower than 20% — it’s not healthy. If you are a very sticky product like Facebook you’re talking about numbers like 60%. Somewhere in between should be what you should aim for. If your rettention isn’t good nothing else matters. Don’t even invest in a growth team, just focus on the product and fix it first.

LinkedIn invested in two scalable growth channels from the very beginning which were Virality and SEO. Virality for LinkedIn means that members are
trying to build a network so they import their contacts and then they can invite them to LinkedIn or if they’re already linked and connect with them. SEO any content you create including your profile we are making it available
to search engines and a lot of people discover our product. Two powerful channels Virality and SEO — they complement each other they amplify each other. LinkedIn had them from the very beginning and they made the project better. There is another reason to invest in multiple scalable channels because if you have just one channel it can be a strategic liability. Especially if at some point Google decides to invest in that product and boom — you know their ancestral ranking much higher than yours — you’ve lost most of your growth.

A/B testing allows you to move fast word, move faster and resolve some of the
opinion based disputes at the company. You can actually test a lot of things like user satisfaction or you can a/b test SEO. So think bigger there and make sure you’re measuring everything.

The most important of things — hiring the right people is really important.

You are building the companies of the futures. You’re solving problems of the future and you’ll hear from a lot of people. One thing is really important to keep in mind that you can learn from all those stories but don’t be satisfied with stories — how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth — Aatif Awan

Traction Conf Vancouver 2017: http://tractionconf.io presented by Launch Academy, Boast.AI, and Victory Square Ventures.

About the Author: Imran Jattala is Co-Founder of Center for Global Innovators (CGI)-Innovation Consulting with the design thinking mindset of IDEO, and the business capability of McKinsey, all of that combined with the entrepreneurial spirit of the best startups. With a mission to build Knowledge Economy & to make Pakistan Top-50 Innovative Nation. He tweets at: @ImJattala