While hearing the growth stories of tech companies, it may seem like many of them are growing from zero to million users almost overnight. However, that’s not the case. The truth is that their hard work and growth strategies have paid off and yours can too.

And here are some of their success stories to make you inspired.

1. Journey from college portal to world’s largest social network- Facebook

Back in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created a rating portal called Facemash on Harvard campus. Though the site facebook-1attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in its first 4 hours, the Harvard administration had to shut down the site since it violated copyright and individual privacy.

After being inspired by the Facemash incident, Zuckerberg launched a new site Thefacebook.com, which was accessible only for Harvard students, initially. Gradually, the site expanded to nearby universities and high schools and was renamed Facebook.com.

Beginning at Harvard as a closed network site and slowly expanding to nearby colleges allowed Facebook to stay relevant. This strategy helped them to learn user behavior at early stages and created a solid product.

Currently, Facebook is the largest social network having 1.44 billion monthly users.

2. How brainstorming session came up with an idea of a popular social network- Twitter

In 2006, board members of podcasting company Odeo held a daylong brainstorming session and came up with basic idea of Twitter.

The first prototype of Twitter was tested out as an internal service inside the company. Eventually, the full version was launched to thetwitter public.

Once Twitter rolled out, it got popularity very quickly, which lead to many new signups. However, in the early days, the problem was a large audience who signed up for an account, then never returned to the site..

After in-depth analysis of interface and user experience, they realized if users followed 5-10 accounts in the first few days, they are more likely to stick around the site for longer, one of the best findings that rocketed the growth of Twitter.

Currently, Twitter is more of an information network than a social network with 302 million active monthly users.

3. Quora- The story of the Q&A site

Quora was started in June of 2009 by two former Facebook employees. At the early stages, the site was largely centered on tech topics as most of the early users were friends of the company and had jobs in the tech quoraindustry.

However, the team successfully expanded the breadth of the site as most of the users were interested in things other than their jobs and started discussing extracurricular topics there.

The growth team knows that time spent on the site is one of the most important metrics to be focused on. In June 2011, Quora tweaked their website design to make information discovery and navigation easier, which largely helped Quora expand the site to many categories.

Though there was no official announcement, in 2012, comScore reported that Quora was receiving 1.5M uniques per month.

4. Single hack increased signup rate by 60%- Dropbox

Houston developed the early prototype of Dropbox. The founder of Dropbox initially created the storage system for his personal use. He then realized that his product could benefit others too.dropboxlog

Since the launch, the growth has been tremendous. After 4 years, the yearly revenue of Dropbox reaches $116 million. Currently 1 billion files are being saved to Dropbox daily.

Having said that, Dropbox actually spends very little on advertising. One of their growth strategies is to incentivize existing users to refer others. For every referral invitation accepted, extra storage space is given to the person who referred. According to Houston, this hack increased the sign up rate of Dropbox by 60%.

5. Whatsapp- World’s fastest growing app

Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former Yahoo! employees wanted to build a better sms alternative for smartphones. In 2009, after purchasing their first iPhone, they realized that the seven-month-old App Store was whatappabout to create a revolution on mobile apps industry.

In the same year, Whatsapp was launched exclusively on the App Store for iPhone. By early 2011, Whatsapp was classified as one of the top 20 apps in the App Store.

The growth of WhatsApp was never in a traditional way. Unlike almost every other chatting app, WhatsApp focused only on one thing, the product. The company didn’t spend a buck for user acquisition, and in the first two years press only mentioned WhatsApp a few times. The app has grown immensely through word of mouth by the users.

Half a billion people are now regular active users of Whatsapp.

6. Growing user base by 2 million in 2 weeks- Spotify

Spotify is a commercial music, podcasts and video streaming service launched in October -2008. Spotify useddifferent growth hack strategies in different growth phases.

Spotify was one of the first companies to integrate their app with the Facebook newsfeed, which allowed users to share what they were listening to on their Facebook profiles easily. This strategy helped the Spotify brand to get immense social reach.

Within 2 weeks, Spotify user base grew from 3.4 million to 5.3 million.

7. A single hack grew email lists to 700k- Airbnb

Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a marketplace for people to list and book accommodations around the world. One of airbnbtheir growth strategies is to promote contests to build email lists.

Instead of giving away some unrelated prizes for contests, Airbnb offers prizes that represents their brand. One of the best things about this strategy is it doesn’t create junk lists in emails that don’t represent their demographics.

By using this strategy they grew their email lists to 700k.

Don’t give up on your startup just yet. These success stories prove that it’s possible to grow your company into successful business in no time.