The author | Peng Qian, GrowingIO market interns

On April 22, Quora raised $85 million in Series D funding. Quora, the world’s leading question-and-answer community, has been valued at $1.8 billion, joining the $1 billion unicorn club.

Over the course of eight years, Quora’s growth is certainly not impressive compared to Snapchat, which has already gone public. But it is a steady, steady progress. Today we’ll take a look at what Quora is doing right as it grows!

A,Inspired by the failure of SocialCam

Before analyzing the Quora growth trajectory, let’s take a look at a failed case. SocialCam is a video-sharing App that allows users to share their favorite videos to social networks like Facebook through a third-party social account interface.

(1) A roller coaster experience



In order to achieve rapid growth, SocialCam made [number of registered accounts] the company’s core metric, and launched a series of viral marketing campaigns around bringing in new SocialCam. First, SocialCam has updated its site with clickbait, borderline, whimsical video content, attracting a lot of visitors. Second, videos viewed on SocialCam are automatically shared to a user’s Facebook circle of friends. With this dual virality, SocialCam grew rapidly and was once hailed as the Instagram of video.

Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012.



However, Facebook continued to receive complaints from users that SocialCam violated their privacy by sharing videos they watched on Facebook without their consent. In the end, Facebook decided to shut down SocialCam’s traffic portal. SocialCam’s visitors “fell off a cliff” after losing Facebook traffic; Coupled with an imperfect product, the retention rate was extremely low, and in less than a year, the 10 million page views were almost zero.

The first step is wrong

Analyzing SocialCam’s experience, there are many failures: aggressive marketing, single channel, neglected product design. In Sean Ellis’s words, it’s not a Product/Market Fit (PMF).



Sean Ellis, who first coined the concept of Growth Hacker in 2010, has worked for several Silicon Valley startups and helped Dropbox grow 500% a year. Sean Ellis believes that a successful startup must go through three stages: Product/Market Fit, Transition to Growth, and Growth.

Where SocialCam failed was in scaling up its early products before they were ready for the market. It was like building a house before the foundation was ready.

Getting back to Quora, its early growth was nowhere near as spectacular as SocialCam’s, but it has been growing steadily. So how has Quora evolved over the past eight years?

Quora’s Growth Hacker Journey

Like the entrepreneurial pyramid above, Quora’s growth story can be broken down into three distinct stages.

(I) Product and market matching period

Quora has done an amazing job raising money, raising $11 million in Series A funding in its first three months of launch at A valuation of $86 million. This is not only because of the star power of the founders themselves (he was Facebook’s first CTO), but also because Quora is so well positioned in the market that its core value is quality content.



To this day, the company has not lost sight of its mission to share and deliver knowledge. At the beginning, they invited a large number of Silicon Valley stars to enter the market, from the technical questions and answers, quickly shot up in the tech industry. An innovative upvote system also provides constant social feedback. A lot of users said that a sincere answer can get a lot of continuous likes, and it’s nice to be followed constantly.

By early 2011, Quora had 500,000 registered users, but users were overwhelmed by the stream of questions and answers. So in June 2011, they redesigned the topics and navigation pages so that users could quickly find what they wanted to see. In September 2011, the mobile terminal was officially launched.

In its early days, Quora focused on sharpening the core values of its product and retaining users with quality content. Their metrics are never about active users, but about content quality and user experience. It brings to mind the old chicken soup, slow is fast. In the Quora context, slow is steady and steady is fast.

(2) Transitional period

Quora said back in 2013 that advertising would be the way to monetize, as 30 to 40 percent of all Quora traffic is generated by users’ direct searches. A lot of users search for questions like “What’s the best SUV under $100,000?” Therefore, precise advertising based on users’ interests will become a very feasible business model.



But they didn’t start advertising until March 2016, when they hit 100 million monthly live users. The time span is nearly three years, and the attitude is still very cautious. The initial ads will appear on a handful of query pages, and the messages will be carefully selected. And it started with just four advertisers — Lever, Uber, Wealthfront, and Sunrun.



As shown above, the AD is labeled “promoted by xyz” under the question. PC users will see a short recommendation, on mobile, just the advertiser’s name.

Prior to the official introduction of advertising, Quora also conducted a series of monetisation attempts, including AMA (Ask Me Anything) and paid rewards.

For many startups, business liquidation is an urgent matter. As long as there is enough traffic, most companies will choose advertising as a profit point. However, there are also quite a few companies that don’t think much about whether the ads they deliver are of value to both the advertisers and the users. Quora’s cautious approach to advertising shows that no matter what stage a company is at, it should not compromise the value it brings to users.

(3) Growth period

Quora has always been a very low-key company, they rarely release their data to the public, and the founders have always stressed that the quality of content and user experience is what they really care about. But the number of active users at least shows how popular Quora is, with 100 million monthly lives announced in March 2016 and 190 million monthly lives by Series D, just a year later. What did they do in between?

When they closed their Series C round in 2014, they still said the money was mainly used for product optimization. The idea was to grow the content and balance it with the number of users, and the monetization problem would go away.

In the process of iteration, they launched many new features, such as regular micro-interview Writing Sessions of celebrities, Knowledge Prizes that users can reward for asking questions, and celebrity certification of Barack Obama. The core purpose of these features remains to improve content quality, share and promote knowledge growth.



After the Series D round, the founders said the main purpose of the round was to internationalize. After doing enough preparation and figuring out the logic of products and markets, expanding into non-English markets (French and Spanish) and adding infrastructure became a major strategy for Quora to accelerate its growth.

Third, the growth inspiration brought by Quora

After eight years and four rounds of funding, Quora has a lot to learn from getting to a $1.8 billion valuation.

(I) Find the core value of the product

Quora’s mission is to share knowledge and promote the growth of knowledge around the world. Throughout their development, this core mission has never changed.

Quora has always stressed that its top concerns are content quality and user experience. So everything they do is centered around these two core purposes.

(2) Dynamic PMF

Product and Market matching (PMF) is the premise and foundation for the growth of a startup company, but it does not mean that the PMF product can be done without worry. Market demand is always changing dynamically, which means PMF is not always valid.

From the initial PC q&A community, to the launch of App in line with the trend of mobile Internet, to online advertising, AMA and other product forms later, Quora has been constantly optimizing its products according to market conditions to better meet the needs of users.

Quora’s growth story will inspire you, but where does your company/product fit on the startup pyramid?


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