Imagine the ubiquitous Facebook morphed with the popular Babycenter for young mothers and you’ll come up with something roughly resembling the sensational, China-based social network Babytree.com. Founded in 2007 by Allen Wang, a former employee of Procter & Gamble, Yahoo!, and Google Asia, the site has experienced bamboo-like growth over the past two years. Barely three years old, Babytree already boasts 12 million unique visitors a month and has scored $10 million in VC funding from the highly vaunted Matrix Partners fund (early investors in companies like Apple and SanDisk).
In a recent INSEAD interview, the founder shared some of the reasons for Babytree’s success, and one point in particular caught my attention: Wang’s decision to build the business with a “launch many, launch early” approach. This is a core philosophy that Wang picked up during his time at Google Asia, and as a result Babytree has launched more than 40 products since its inception, including blogs, Q&A boards answered by volunteer medical professionals, calendars filled with local events for young mothers and their children based on where they live, and an e-commerce section selling baby products.
This “Google”-esque approach seems very similar to the emergent strategy that we talk about a lot here at Innosight and have written about extensively in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth and more recently in Seizing the White Space. In many ways the opposite of a deliberate strategy, an emergent strategy is the process of vetting critical assumptions by “testing early, testing cheaply, and testing often,” redirecting the venture’s strategy, and even adjusting its business model, according to the lessons learned from these tests. This type of “test-and-learn” strategy is best suited for tackling uncharted industry terrain with highly uncertain market variables because it reduces the risk that is inherent in launching these new ventures.
One of the shining stars of Babytree’s test-and-learn strategy is a photo-sharing feature on the site. Though photo-sharing and -uploading is a nearly ubiquitous feature on most social-networking sites, Wang’s team went a step further and discovered that the optimum number of photos a user should be allowed to upload is 50 at a time. The staff observed fairly quickly that users became bored and frustrated when they were only able to upload one photo at a time. However, by continuing to closely observe their users after allowing more than 200 photos to be uploaded at once, Wang and his team discovered that “if you ‘turn up the volume too much’ and enable parents to upload photos by the hundreds, then the idea becomes in their mind unmanageable.”
By optimizing a small detail like the number of photos a user is allowed to upload at once, the site has created such a useful and enjoyable service that it now holds more than 10 million pictures and has become the largest photo depository for young parents in China. This is one of the many examples of how an emergent strategy has led to products and features that have helped Babytree become an incredibly “sticky” site, with mothers spending on average more than 45 minutes a day browsing.
As Allen Wang’s application of this “launch many, launch often” approach creates more and more home-run features like this photo-sharing function, Babytree is reaping the rewards of envious growth in one of the world’s most elusive markets. Multinational companies like Kimberly-Clark (Huggies), Walt Disney, and P&G (Pampers), have poured more than $3 million into advertisements on the site in just nine months.
