The “rabbits story” — reframing growth (6/7)
What do COVID-19 and Figma have in common with atomic bombs, Paypal and Australian rabbits?
Question:
What do COVID-19 and Figma have in common with atomic bombs, Paypal and Australian rabbits?
Well, you’ll find out in this post ;-)
To get there though, let’s first talk about those Australian rabbits…
Yes, rabbit.
If you’ve ever watched the Discovery Channel, you’re probably aware that rabbits know a thing or two about reproduction and“growing their family”.
But did you know that in the 18th century, rabbits were an absolute plague in Australia? A few of them hitched a ride on a British ship, and soon there were literally millions of them across the continent.
Without the presence of any predators, the rabbit population exploded.
According to Wikipedia (great source):
“Rabbits are suspected of being the most significant known factor in species loss in Australia.”
Fucking rabbits!
Anyway, back to us. Back to business.
A big part of truly mastering a new field, is to add stronger mental models to your brain. Each mental model is like a pair of ‘different glasses’ to see the world.
As it turns out, rabbits are an excellent analogy to get you thinking about growth properly.
In fact…
If you understand how rabbits overtook Australia, you’ve got the right mental model to understand and engineer aggressive product growth & adaptation
For starters, of course the rabbits never had a ‘plan’ to overtake Australia.
It’s not like they were sitting in the boat, thinking “dang, I think we’re going to take over Australia and annihilate 300 native species in the process.”
No. The rabbits didn’t have a plan.
But their DNA had a plan…
Deep in their DNA — optimised through thousands (millions) of years of evolution — were the keys to dominating this new continent. Consider this…
Baby rabbits are sexually mature within 2 or 3 months
Once they hit that point, they’ll have a new nest of babies every 30 days!
Each nest averages 6-8 baby rabbits
And those newborn baby rabbits… will be pregnant within 3 months, too!
One pair of rabbits can have ~100 offspring in a season.
Damn…
That escalated quickly ;-)
No wonder they took Australia by storm.
But what’s really happening here is a process or growth cycle that’s called a “growth loop”…
The bunnies are of course just the players in the game. It’s not the bunnies that grow fast, it’s the population that explodes.
Nature had (accidentally) engineered a growth loop right into them.
And that mental model of a ‘growth loop’ describes not only how rabbits overtook Australia. It also describes how a small Wuhan virus turns into a global pandemic… or a viral video that gets shared around online… or how a nuclear explosion happens… or how high-growth startups grow!
.
.
.
“But isn’t that just viral growth?”
Yes, and no.
In a marketing context, we think of viral growth in the sense of “users inviting new users”, often driven by some form of social sharing and recommendations.
That’s a good start, but as you’ll see… it’s only scratching the surface!
There are many more growth loops, than just viral loops:
USG-SEO loops
Paid ads loops
Content/SEO loops
Aggregator loops
Marketplace loops
Engagement loops
Enterprise sales loops
Branding-ID loops
Media/PR loops
Review-search loops
…
… and then all the variations on each. Oh my!
Whether you’re looking at Figma (see P.S.), Slack, Uber, TikTok, or any other explosively growing company, you’ll always find an engineered growth loop at the basis of it.
For me personally, I had a moment of zen-like euphoria when I learned how this works, but we’ll need another email to truly do that justice. We’ll get to that later…
In tomorrow’s email we’ll discuss how this concept fits together with the other growth essentials, and how all the pieces of the puzzle can click together.
For now, remember this:
All scalable, durable growth—both in nature and in business—happens through “growth loops”
Strong growth loops become what’s essentially your “growth DNA” —and make fast growth almost inevitable
...and it’s exactly when you start to think about growth loops that you’ll realise how powerful “systems” are, and how weak “hacks” are, if you want to drive stable, scalable growth…
Companies that succeed are the ones who are able to enhance their ‘growth DNA’ to become the rabbits of their industries… while other companies have a DNA that puts them on the path of the Dodo.
Don’t be the dodo.
—Team Double
P.S. Have you ever used Figma? The design tool that Adobe acquired for a staggering $20 billion in 2022?
Figma, as a company, is an amazing example of growth loops in action. If I had to, I would write a 6.242-word article about it. But luckily, Kevin Kwok already did. Excellent article, and a great supplement to what we’ve spoken about above.
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