Hypergrowth Marketing Playbook: The OpenAI Case Study
Part 1: Market & Product
Most marketers struggle to get awareness and leads, but lucky marketers in hypergrowth face different challenges. OpenAI is one such company in one such market. This is a three-part blog where I detail drivers of hypergrowth across the market, marketing, and expansion.
Riding the Mega-Market Tsunami: Why Timing is Everything
Most hypergrowth companies are capitalizing on a substantial market change: Apple the shift to mobile phones, Amazon the shift to online ordering, AWS the shift to cloud-as-a-service, Zoom the shift to work-from-home, and Atlassian, the shift to Agile development and new ways of team collaboration. When a mega-trend massively shifts behavior, a company can grow massively in excess of its own efforts. They surf the wave instead of trying to create waves (like the rest of us). Despite our wildest dreams, it is nearly impossible for marketing to CREATE a market tsunami.
The First Mover Advantage: Hard to Catch if They Execute Well
In the case of OpenAI specifically, their launch, early popularity, and first-mover advantage are substantial. It became one of the fastest products in history to reach 1M users (5 days) and 100M users (2 months). Sam Altman has become the almost-official spokesperson for all of AI. Few can compete with his personal 3 Million followers on X. OpenAI itself has 3.7 M followers on X, 2M on Reddit, 1.3M on Instagram, and more than 100M downloads on Google play.
Netflix had this advantage, making it hard for even the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime or Hulu to catch them. Tesla had the first-mover, as did Amazon. If the first-to-market executes well, it’s difficult to catch them. But they must execute well - Facebook famously overtook Myspace.
Beyond the Hype: Why Product Excellence is Non-Negotiable
But having a fantastic market and being first to market isn’t enough. Marketing is an amazing megaphone that amplifies a company’s success. But behind real hypergrowth is a product or customer experience that’s innovative and fantastic. If people become deeply concerned about OpenAI’s privacy and safety, if their speed is too slow, if their price is way too high for the value, if their products aren’t competitive in specific industries, or if they get leapfrogged in use-cases, growth could slow.
One of the secret sauce elements of Atlassian’s product-led-growth strategy was that all the money we WOULD have spent on sales was invested into product (a fantastic product that could “sell itself.”)
The Power of Partnerships: Why Distribution Channels Make or Break Success
Distribution matters substantially, especially in this AI market of giants. Netscape lost to Microsoft Explorer because Microsoft could bundle its own product with its massive Windows distribution. OpenAI has the Microsoft Distribution channel, and has recently added a promising parntership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into Siri. Google Gemini has its own Google-world distribution. Much of Anthropic’s financial success is through its key partner, Amazon, and it’s also distributing through Google. Microsoft’s exclusive commitment has been a huge lever for OpenAI. Can they maintain that exclusivity?
Part 2 and 3 are coming next:
This original article was so long that I broke it into daily reading doses. Tomorrow I will publish Part2 - Hypergrowth Marketing Playbook:
Fanning the Flames: Earned Media is Way Better than Advertising
Welcome to the Social Age: Where Market Momentum Goes Viral
Content as Currency: Building Trust Through Value
The User Content Engine: Amplifying Authentic Voices
And then, part 3:
Friction-Free Growth: Make it Easy to Learn, Buy and Expand
The Community Catalyst: Turning Users into Advocates
The Expansion Playbook: Growing Beyond Core Markets
The Perpetual Chase: Why Hypergrowth Never Sleeps
The Hypergrowth Playbook Applies to All of Us
See you tomorrow!
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.
Looking forward to the next parts!