GitHub's Missing Referral Engine: A Product Growth Analysis

👀 I Want To Give You Something For $0 

We’ve been exploring the idea of launching a paid database, compiling hundreds of A/B tests from the world’s best brands to give you growth ideas. I’m deeply thankful for everyone that reads this so planning on giving every subscriber FREE access, but I need your help on what format you’d like:

😢 How GitHub Could Increase Virality 

What’s GitHub’s biggest untapped opportunity? Despite having an absolutely GORGEOUS onboarding experience, for a product that is all about collaboration they don’t ask (or give you a single opportunity) to share/invite collaborators to GitHub in onboarding. 

What’s the big deal? When you start using a product with a collaborator it has a few benefits:

✅ Becomes a far stickier product - usage goes up >3x from my anecdotal experience 

✅ Blended customer acquisition cost drops 

✅ The LTV & conversion rates of referrals is way higher than organic or paid traffic 

How could GitHub increase referrals? One of the most effective ways I’ve seen to drive users to take an action are contextual or triggered events. 

If you want to make someone upgrade to your paid product, contextual paywalls, where the user tries to access a feature and sees it’s gated is a great conversion booster. Instead of you harassing them they were the reason the paywall was shown and they understand the reason to upgrade.

In the case of referrals the most effective test I’ve run to boost share rates is to ask for a share after a user completes an action successfully (e.g. they just made a purchase or successfully completed an action of some kind). 

How could this be applied to GitHub? Seems to me the best time to do it would be when you successfully push your first piece of code to GitHub. Make it a celebration, congratulate the user and let them share the accomplishment with friends. 

This could be done multiple times. If you’ve made a change to a project there might be people who you should let know, either colleagues, friends or some form of userbase. Asking for you to share changes makes sense vs coming across as a marketing strategy (this acts more as a re-activation play of colleagues, bringing them back into GitHub vs new user acquisition). 

How else could this be applied? Here’s a couple more ideas:

✅ As GitHub now has their CoPilot feature – their AI code writer, you could even throw up a referral when CoPilot successfully debugs a piece of their code. 

✅ Identify the product champions within a team and instead of asking to share with a public audience ask them to share with their manager, aiding an enterprise sales motion. 84% of B2B buyers begin a buying process with a referral so it’s an unbelievably powerful channel.