PayPal – A true example of a product-led growth company
My understanding of a great business is that keeps on growing and innovating and PayPal has done the same. They taught the product world key lessons on listening to your customer, finding product-market fit, and once you have a PMF go full force. Maybe this is not a recipe for a legacy company but start-ups or organizations that operate in startup fashion can surely implement it. Read full content on my website - https://nikhilmv.com/
Nikhil M. Varshney
Key Takeaways
- PayPal had 416M active customers, $1.2T in total payment volume for the last 12 months, and ~37k transactions per minute.
- After separation from eBay, PayPal started trading again in 2015, their stock has given almost 4x returns to the shareholders, to date (with a peak return of ~8x)
- PayPal Used a Double-Sided Reward Structure, which helped get millions of users in a matter of months
- PayPal build lasting brand value and loyalty through word-of-mouth referrals with smart targeting and creative rewards that add value to the consumer experience.
About PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. ($PYPL) operates as a technology platform and digital payments company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. Its payment solutions include PayPal, PayPal Credit, Braintree, Venmo, Xoom, PayPal Holdings, Inc. ($PYPL) operates as a technology platform and digital payments company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. Its payment solutions include PayPal, PayPal Credit, Braintree, Venmo, Xoom, Hyperwallet, and iZettle products. The company’s payments platform allows consumers to send and receive payments, withdraw funds to their bank accounts, and hold balances in their PayPal accounts in various currencies. As of Sept 2021, PayPal had 416M active customers, $1.2T in total payment volume for the last 12 months, and ~37k transactions per minute.
After separation from eBay, PayPal started trading again in 2015, their stock has given almost 4x returns to the shareholders, to date (with a peak return of ~8x in Sept 2021). In this blog, I am not going to talk in detail about the stock performance and maybe that is a topic for some other time but this blog is to specifically discuss what made PayPal a successful product company. It is the epitome of what I call product-led growth. To find that let us go to the history of what created PayPal and the DNA for success. Below is the timeline I created to show key historical events related to PayPal.
To learn more about PayPal's network management strategies, referral program and exponential growth that happened after the eBay incident read this story on my website here - https://nikhilmv.com/2022/02/01/paypal-a-true-example-of-a-product-led-growth-company/
Upvote
Nikhil M. Varshney
Finding the right passion that drives your growth is critical. Building and scaling products that enable organizations to gain users is my passion. After 8 years of creating products and delivering growth, I have exposure across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations. Right now, I lead product management for intelligence (artificial intelligence and machine learning) at Athena Health. It’s a $17B dollar company recently acquired by Hellman & Friedman and Bain Capital in the largest ever levered buyout. At Athena, I am helping our customers increase access to care by adding more appointments on calendars and reducing wait times. My passion for building products started with my first venture in healthcare where I developed an enrollment application that increased membership by 2.5 million members. I joined HM Health Solutions (HMHS) right after my master’s. HMHS is a sister company to Highmark, Pennsylvania’s largest insurer. It is a product company with more than 15M healthcare members and
Related Articles