Top 11 Startup Companies That Grew Exponentially

Top 11 Startup Companies That Grew Exponentially

Are you trying to grow your career or business? Are you interested in actual growth strategies, not the content that excites you but not a plan to implement?

Please take a deep breath and prepare for various viewpoints and real-life examples of how startup companies have built their fortunes. 

Regardless of whether you have a business or just a career professional studying and acting on the success of people and organisations, this will give you a quantum leap into the success you desire. 

According to marketing insights, 20% of small businesses fail in the first year, which rises to 50% in five years. How do you ensure you're in the percentage of successful companies? Don't try and make it up; model the successful ones I will discuss in this article. 

Also, more marketing data insights show that 88% of millionaires in the US are Self-Made Entrepreneurs, so having a business or thinking about starting one increases your odds. 

If you desire to increase your revenue and grow faster while enabling you to have more free time, then grab your free case study and a step-by-step system where legendary businesspeople, CEOs, entrepreneurs and other executives reveal their idiot-proof growth strategies that will empower you to take practical steps so you can get more significant results in less time.  

In this article, you will understand how the Top 11 Startup companies became successful and thrived. These 11 startups were chosen because the rate at which they grew was swift and well above average. 

Famous Startup Companies' Stories

1 – PayPal 

PayPal is a financial technology firm that operates in numerous nations. PayPal is worth about 83.5 billion dollars at the time of writing this article. PayPal used a high-level growth hack early in its operations to grow its user base exponentially. 

PayPal has a refer-a-friend system and rewards a person with $10 for referring others to their business, while new users get $10 for signing up. 

When conducting business, learn to use growth hacks and other proven frameworks to help you penetrate markets and leverage resources to their maximum point. You must be careful when using an advanced growth hack like this one because PayPal was making a high-risk bet, but it paid off. 

Understand your numbers and work out what can be used to acquire customers at a breakeven, then profit from them later or profit upon getting them as a customer. PayPal also used partnerships to grow. 

PayPal partnered with eBay, which eBay later bought for 1.5 billion dollars. Most entrepreneurs will have to find a way to partner with big-time brands and businesses. Still, you are more likely to partner with small to medium-sized businesses, which can triple or increase your business sales by more than ten times.

2 – TikTok

Social media is a big part of our society today. TikTok was founded in the year 2016 and, in under a decade, has hit a critical mass scale and is still multiplying.

Through careful research and selected acquisitions, TikTok grew to geometric levels to avoid the significant challenges of entering foreign markets from scratch. 

Acquiring other businesses allows you to cover more ground, and momentum and trust are already built with customers buying from a particular brand. TikTok bought out Douyin, which had already acquired Musical.ly, a business with a strong presence in the USA. TikTok integrated Douyin into its systems. 

TikTok has made small and big appearances in its younger generation-targeted audience communication channels. This company is active in the places where its audience hangs out.

Lastly, TikTok has convinced high-level and mid-level celebrities to download the app and tell their millions of followers. Any business can replicate this form of influencer marketing to get more awareness.

3 – Louis Vuitton (LV)

Louis Vuitton is a luxury fashion brand that we all or most have heard about. This company was founded in 1854, yet I hear so much about this brand that you would have thought they were a newer one. 

One of the many secrets of the success of this company is that they had their products promoted by the best talent. Top names in the fashion industry were promoting the LV brand. I know what you're thinking. 

Of course, anybody lucky enough to be promoted by significant players and famous people in a particular industry will be successful, but what are my odds? It isn't impossible, but there are levels to this, and this is a form of influencer marketing. 

To model this technique, make a list of micro-influencers of about 100 to get started, but increase the list in the future. Next, do one or two things. One, reach out to them, build a relationship with them, and don't ask for anything in return. Please get to know them as a human and be genuinely interested in their story, mission and goals. 

After about six months or longer, when the time comes up, ask to partner with them and split profits. Suppose you want to do something other than the previous method.

In that case, the second option is right from the start, you will be requesting a partnership, and since you're targeting them like many others are, you would have to work on reaching out to higher volumes of micro-influencers with criteria that match your business interest. 

Partnerships are a proven way to start generating sales and awareness because you're collaborating with someone who already has trust in the market you're trying to reach. Lastly, the micro-influencers you target have to be relevant to your brand, products and services you provide. 

4 – China Pacific Insurance Company (CPIC)

CPIC is an insurance company headquartered in Shanghai. This business was founded in the year 1991. CPIC rose to prominence and dominated markets by providing superior value to competitors. 

Value is relative to the person you're targeting, so CPIC has ensured growth by communicating with its customers and understanding what they need the most. Their product line and services are so massive that they can cross-promote across different and complementary niches to maximise sales and repurchases per customer. 

CPIC does tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and like other billion-dollar firms, they ensure systems are in place to attract, educate, and sell at super high levels. Additionally, CPIC experiments with new technology, which helps give them a more significant advantage in business. 

Furthermore, CPIC has an Omni-approach marketing philosophy, which means they are marketing and advertising from countless media and distribution channels. Big companies should adopt this if they are not already doing this. 

If you're a small to medium size company, marketing to those few selected channels would be a better fit since you're not at critical mass like the billion-dollar firms, this insight is based on insights from top experts who looked at a variety of companies and their positive yield related to their marketing activities when using or not using the omnichannel approach. 

For Startups, creating the systems is challenging, but consider making them, modelling other business systems of scale or partnering with enterprises with the business processes of scale already in place, and you can join in on this and benefit from it. 

There are numerous case studies of businesses doing well and partnering with other companies, and their sales doubled, tripled or even increased by ten times or more. 

5 – Adidas 

Adidas is a German multinational company that designs and manufactures shoes. This company didn't invent a new way to brand itself and build a large fortune. This business used an already proven marketing framework to grow exponentially. 

One of their first successes was when the business gave a pair of athletic spiked shoes to a German marathon Olympic runner, Lina Radke. Does this marketing strategy sound familiar? Of course, it does; this is influencer marketing. 

Businesses are more and more leveraging influencers to grow their brands and revenues. Some firms pay a lot of money to get the influencer to cooperate or partner with them. 

There is an abundance of influencers that are finding one, preferably micro-influencers if you're new or trying it for the first time, which will help boost your brand in a highly effective manner compared to trying to do it all on your own. 

If you have the cash, consider testing influencer marketing in small amounts. If you have no budget, work out a performance-based agreement and only pay the influencers a percentage of the sales generated. 

If you want to get strategic, you can give all the profits to the influencer of just the first sale of the buyers, buying with the condition that you get all the contacts of the buyers, then go to them and resell again and over again because now you have their contacts. 

These are all proven techniques I came across when studying Jay Abraham's masterful work, the highest-paid marketing consultant in the world.  

6 – Adobe

Adobe was founded in the year 1982. Adobe is a computer software company and a SaaS product, meaning software as a service. The company succeeded as a result of many successful business practices. 

One of many things Adobe did was create a product, like Photoshop, so powerful that its name became synonymous with picture editing. When someone would reference or say to another, “Go Photoshop that”, they were referring to one of Adobe's products. 

This is similar to someone saying, “go Google that”, meaning search it on Google. Anytime a company markets their brand in such a way that the mass population uses the company's name, product, or anything brand-related as a synonym for a common word or phrase, it demonstrates market dominance. 

This type of marketing effect can be modelled, but not easily. If you're a startup, solopreneur, freelancer, etc., consider a long-term marketing strategy that will lead the large population to associate your brand with something related to your products and services. 

I caution you; the word you try to go after and make synonymous with your brand can't already be taken. Forget trying to convince the public to change their minds if a business has a word already in the public's mind. 

Marketing experts are saying to find a word that is not already taken and then hammer that into society's mind. 

7 – Tencent

Tencent is a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate from China active in the global market. When Tencent was founded in 1988, the goal of its business birth was to develop a diverse, high-cash-flow business that's stable and compounds over time. 

Another goal from its inception was to make business decisions based on big data and other data-driven metrics. When you examine big businesses, you notice they have many products and services with solid systems that can continue scaling and handle extremely high volumes of orders. 

As a career professional, freelancer, startup founder, seasoned entrepreneur or professional investor, there are ways to extract value from mega firms and use it equivalently for your business. 

You may not be likely to handle the high volume like them, but having in place or creating at least nine strategic, solid partnerships with systematic referral systems will help your business prosper because you're penetrating your target business market from different angles and positions, just as the mega-corporations are. 

Pretty cool, right? So why is this important? Most businesses only have one or two ways of driving leads and sales, so they are at high risk if something changes. For example, if you are only driving sales through advertising, and the ad cost rises, an algorithm changes or the ad platform is discontinued, your business is at stake. 

However, having partnerships on top of your regular marketing activities creates a solid approach to building a lasting and ever-growing business that grows in value. 

The critical takeaway is to have a strong marketing foundation that drives leads and sales with diverse income streams and to make decisions based on data and market response from testing approaches. 

8 – Moutai

Montai is a Chinese liquor business and brand. The success of this firm in China is of such a magnitude that it is more significant and worth more than the nation's four biggest banks. The secret behind this store is the value and pricing. 

Upon opening its first store, this company priced its liquor beverage at a competitive discount, making people feel they are getting more than they pay. This standard good practice is based on business moguls and magnates from their interviews and discussions. 

If you sell a product or service for $1,000, the rule of thumb is to provide ten times the value; here, it would be $10,000 you're charging or asking for to collect the sale. Montai may not have given precisely ten times more value than what they were asking for from their price, mathematically, but they still used this concept of providing more value than what they were asking for from the sales price. 

This is important because when people buy when they feel they get more than what they paid for, they are likely to return and buy again and tell others about it. Think about a time you spent on something and thought it was a steal or got more than what you paid. 

This makes you feel good and highly likely to buy repeatedly. Mouai is worth more than Toyota, Nike and Disney, so they are doing something right. One last thing to note, Monati became China's to-go-to alcoholic beverage choice because the drink was used in major public and governmental events. 

This drink was used to welcome Richard Nixon, Former US President, to China when meeting China's Premier Zhou Enlai at a banquet. Think of ways to get your brand in front of the mass public by any means necessary. One influencer, event or partnership could skyrocket your brand to astronomical levels.    

9 – Wish

Wish is an ecommerce giant; in my opinion, I call them the little Amazon. The founders of this billion-dollar empire are Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang. Wish made 2.5 billion in revenue in the year 2020. 

Due to COVID-19 and the pandemic, certain businesses benefited from it. Wish already had an established presence in the market. During the COVID years, consumer shopping spiked because, in many regions worldwide, citizens had limited mobility to go to local stores and browse in person. 

Wish took the idea of an ecommerce business tailored to ordinary citizens because he cared about having citizens get similar products but for an incredibly cheap amount. Peter claims he wanted to provide a great shopping experience while at the same time cutting prices so customers have more cash left over. 

This philosophy is similar to Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. The company Wish became successful because of a mix of intelligent moves. One smart move was targeting a consumer market that all other businesses ignored. 

A second smart move was finding underpriced advertising to stretch the advertising dollars further before ad costs rose. This company did have investment backing, but businesses can still learn from these techniques. 

Sometimes you may only understand what a business is doing to succeed if you become an insider or look at their internal systems and strategies by shadowing them, working for free and being as close to the leaders running these large business enterprises as possible. If you uncover and model their secrets, you will likely see great success.     

10 – Salesforce 

Salesforce is a billion-dollar cloud software-based company. The founders are Marc Benioff and Parker Harris. Marc was a former technology executive at another mega business enterprise. Marc was highly paid but had a vision of owning his enterprise and contributing value far exceeding current players in the business sector he targeted. 

Salesforce proliferated because they were among the first to create a customer retention management (CRM) cloud system that piqued incredible interest. Salesforce pushed the lines of marketing and even regretted it sometimes. 

When creating advertising campaigns, they would reference popular culture and relate it to their brand to get their message out to the public. This is common, so when Salesforce was a new startup, they ran marketing campaigns to test what would get them the most attention. 

Later, they started producing conferences and bringing together large volumes of customers and potential customers. There are unlimited ways to get attention to your brand and then convert that attention to sales and new business or income streams. 

New startups, freelancers, executives in leadership roles or whatever the case may be, can benefit in a shorter period by going straight to those who already have the market's trust, doing joint ventures with them, and paying on results only so there is no risk. 

Imagine how much your business would grow if you only marketed to companies that are non-competitive to you but serve the same market. The possibilities are infinite, and more success becomes available when you train yourself to operate in the business exponential zone. 

11 – Spanx 

Spanx is a primarily women's clothing line mega brand that Sara Blakley founded. At the beginning stages of the startup, Sara developed a prototype for her first launch. After launching, she saw that the market accepted what she was producing. 

This wasn't random because she often got asked about her clothing inventions when she first took a pair of scissors and cut the feet off a couple of tights. She wore this to a party and got a lot of attention, so people asked about her modified creation. 

Upon this finding, she researched and found manufacturers to produce an ideal prototype. Success early in a startup is rare, but she generated $4 million in the first year and then $10 million in the second year of business. 

One of the most significant breaks in this company was when in 2002 Sara sent her products to Oprah, and her products were featured to her audience and the mass public. What do you think happened next? 

Of course, you probably guessed it. The business grew exponentially. In the year 2023, she is worth an estimated 1.1 billion dollars, according to Forbes. The critical takeaway is using other people's assets and audiences to grow your business. Not everyone will be fortunate enough to be featured on a mega-hit talk show, but there are different levels to it. You can build your audience, but that can take years before seeing any progress. 

One of many secrets to successful businesses and their growth is their marketing to and convincing influencers to share their business brand. 

There are numerous ways to do it. One way is to make them a business partner and share sales and revenues, so you only pay out what is made from profits. Another way is to pay them directly to have them introduce your brand to their audience. Money is not an excuse here, and there are many influencers that you can get access to, even if they are not super mega influencers.

Lastly, Spanx sells in many different ways, and one of them is direct to the consumer. Examine your business and see if it is worth testing traditional and non-traditional marketing channels. Your marketing has to be communicated to motivate your target buyer to buy through proven sales copy techniques. 

One general sales copy technique uses the same language and slang as the target people. Become an insider so you know all the details about their hopes, dreams, aspirations, pains, etc. 

Next, use their language to relate to them and demonstrate how your offer solves their problem. Find high-converting sales copy techniques, and your business will grow exponentially.

12 – Airbnb

Right, let's talk about Airbnb. These guys are an absolute giant now in lodging and hospitality, but they started small, just like anyone else.

The founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, spotted a massive problem holding them back in the early days. The problem was simple: the photos of the places for rent were rubbish. Think dark, blurry mobile phone pictures.

It just didn't look trustworthy, and people weren't booking. So what did they do? Did they build a fancy photo-editing tool? Nope.

They did something that everyone tells you not to do. They did something that doesn't scale.

The founders themselves flew to New York, rented a proper high-quality camera, and went door-to-door, taking professional photos of the listings for free. Can you imagine? The founders of a tech company are acting as freelance photographers.

The result was immediate. The listings with professional photos got two to three times more bookings.

It was a game-changer. It proved that a better presentation built trust and drove sales. That manual, non-scalable effort gave them the momentum they needed.

The lesson here is gold. Don't be obsessed with scaling from day one.

Find the biggest thing stopping your first few customers from buying and fix it yourself, by hand if you have to. Get in the trenches.

This hands-on approach builds a superior experience and gives you real-world feedback that no spreadsheet ever will. Once you've proven what works, then you can figure out how to systemise it.

13 – Dropbox

Dropbox. The simple cloud storage service that everyone and their dog has used at some point. Their growth story is legendary, and it wasn't down to spending a fortune on ads.

It was all about a genius referral programme that was baked right into the product. They could have spent millions on Google Ads, but they realised their cost to get a customer that way was way too high.

Instead, they looked at what PayPal did and created their own viral loop. The offer was dead simple: refer a friend, and you both get more free storage space.

Not a discount, not cash, but more of the actual thing you're using. Simple. Effective.

This worked so well for two reasons. First, the reward was incredibly valuable to people who were already using Dropbox. If you're using it to store your files, more space is exactly what you want.

Second, it turned their user base into a massive, free sales team. Happy customers were telling their friends, and everyone was getting rewarded for it.

This single strategy led to a 3900% growth in their user base in just 15 months. Think about that.

They went from 100,000 users to 4 million without a massive advertising budget. They built a product that people wanted and then made it a no-brainer for them to share it.

The takeaway? Your happiest customers are your best marketers. Stop trying to find new customers all the time and start thinking about how to empower your current ones to spread the word.

Build a referral system where the reward is more of your core product. Make it easy, make it valuable, and watch your business grow on its own.

14 – Stripe

Now, for Stripe, the company that powers payments for a huge chunk of the internet. Their strategy was different.

They didn't go for the mass market, not at first. They went for a small, but very powerful, niche: software developers.

Look, before Stripe came along, getting online payments to work on a website was a proper nightmare. It was complicated, the documentation was awful, and it was a massive headache for developers.

The founders, Patrick and John Collison, knew this pain because they were developers themselves. So they built Stripe with one person in mind, the developer.

They made their product ridiculously easy to use with clean code and simple APIs. Their documentation wasn't just good, it was beautiful.

They solved a massive problem for a group of people who had been completely ignored by the big, clunky financial companies. What happened next was magic.

Developers fell in love with it. They became Stripe's biggest advocates.

They would go into their companies and tell their bosses, “We have to use Stripe, it will save us weeks of work”. This drove a bottom-up adoption that was impossible to stop.

The people building the products were demanding to use their tool. The lesson here is about focus.

Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, find a specific group of people with a big, painful problem. Really understand them.

Build the absolute best solution in the world for them. If you make an influential group your champions, they will do the selling for you inside their organisations and networks. That's how you win.

15 – Canva

Canva is another monster of a company. They took the world of graphic design, which used to be locked away for professionals using complex software, and made it accessible to literally anyone.

Their growth strategy was built on an incredibly smart freemium model. The thing is, their free version isn't some crippled, useless trial.

It's a genuinely powerful tool that you can use to create amazing things without ever paying a penny. This was their masterstroke.

They removed every barrier to entry. This allowed millions upon millions of people to experience the value of Canva firsthand.

By giving away so much value, they built enormous trust and a massive user base. This created a huge funnel for their paid subscription, Canva Pro.

Once you're using it and loving it, upgrading for more features feels like a natural next step, not a hard sell. They let the product do the talking.

On top of that, their growth is product-led. What does that mean? The product itself is a marketing engine.

When a user creates a presentation for work, a social media graphic, or an invitation, and shares it, they are also sharing the Canva brand. Every design created is a potential advert for a new user.

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. So, what's the takeaway for you? Don't be afraid to give away real value for free.

Build a free offering that helps people solve a real problem. This builds a loyal audience.

Then, figure out how your customers can naturally spread the word just by using your product. When your users become your marketers, you've created a growth machine that's hard to beat.