If you spend just a few minutes browsing the internet for educational content about product development, marketing, and business strategy, you’ll find many familiar themes. Everyone’s talking about “going viral”, “growth hacking”, or optimizing in some form or fashion. But talking about this stuff as a theoretical concept can only take you so far. At some point, the rubber has got to hit the road and you need to see real-life, tangible examples of how you can ever hope to unlock fantastic growth for your company.

Enter Unroll.Me, the email service that took the world of email by storm. The product was conceived and designed by co-founders Jojo Hedaya and Josh Rosenwald and it quickly gained steam as a new and far more efficient way to clear email inboxes from unwanted emails. The alpha version of the product was launched in just two months after Rosenwald and Hedaya started the company in 2011. And in less than three years, in July of 2014, Unroll.Me announced that it had reach 1,000,000 users. Not long after, it had more than quadrupled that initial growth to over 4,000,000.


But how did Unroll.Me do it? And what can you learn from their success? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, starting with one of Unroll.Me’s key pillars of success.

1. Simplicity Should Rule Everything

However you end up interacting with Unroll.Me—whether through their website or their app—you’ll find that everything is as simple as it can be. Their homepage is minimalistic in its design. This is apparent with the simple button that serves as the central call-to-action, and the four lines of text that accompany the button. Even the idea portrayed by that text is as simple as can be. “Clean up your inbox” is the essence of the product and so Unroll.Me has put it front and center on their website.

Designers and strategists can learn from this simple, minimalist design and text layout. Sure, Unroll.Me has other benefits and features it could list out when you first land on their homepage. But they don’t do that. Instead, they focus on one, core benefit that their product delivers—a clean inbox. And their explanation for how that’s achieved couldn’t be more succinct: “Instantly see a list of all your subscription emails. Unsubscribe easily from whatever you don’t want.”

The rest of the above-the-fold content is covered in white space, but when you scroll down, you see illustrated snippets of the product in action. But even then, each snippet is a short paragraph (3 to 4 narrow lines) with a small image positioned adjacent.

To be sure, simplicity means different things to different businesses. You won’t want to copy Unroll.Me’s design because it’s not true to your business. But you can draw on it for inspiration.

2. Execute Product Strategy, then Learn and Adjust

Good design is easy to see throughout Unroll.Me’s features, products, and websites, but what’s not immediately apparent is their fantastic ability to execute. As mentioned before, the first version of Unroll.Me was launched just two months after the original idea for the product was conceived. And even though the launch happened at hyper speed, the product received mentions in major tech news publications which helped propel it to the heights that it has reached today. Moreover, this quick execution meant that the founders Hedaya and Rosenwald could get quick feedback from the marketplace to based their product development decisions on.

Had they spent extra time wringing their hands over getting everything absolutely perfect, they could have missed their moment. And even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have seen such an accelerated growth pattern because product development would have been a far more static process.

3. Be Helpful Whenever Possible

If you browse through Unroll.Me’s Twitter feed, you’ll notice that they’re consistently helping users in anyway they can. They use social media to interact with and help any users who are experiencing difficulty using their product. You’ll also notice that on their website they have a frequently asked questions page where they answer all the questions that customers usually have. This is a key component of Unroll.Me’s success that many companies tend to overlook.

Generally, people often think of social media and their website as a place to sell their products and services. And they think of customer service as the people who respond to the emails or calls that come in. But in today’s digital marketplace, the line between marketing, customer service and sales is increasingly blurred. As Unroll.Me (and others) have showed, social media is not just a place to build brand awareness and drive sales, it’s also a place to answer your customers’ questions. In other words, it’s also a place where customer service has a role.

In fact, by treating social media as a customer service channel, you’ll see the natural side effect of increased sales. After all, when people evaluate a company, they evaluate that company’s customer service. And if they see that your social media accounts are generally responsive and helpful when people pose questions on social media, your company is more likely to be seen in a favorable light to a prospective customer.

Conclusion

You could know Unroll.Me’s story—or any other company’s success story—by heart, but that won’t guarantee success for you. Of course, knowing how others have fared before you and learning from their successes and failures will inform the path you have in front of you. But ultimately, you’ll have to walk your own journey. So as you look over these 3 takeaways about product, marketing, and strategy from Unroll.Me, take the time to think about how these apply to your company or project. Think through the ways that you can inject more simplicity into your design. Review your product or campaign launches and ask yourself if you’re prioritizing execution. Finally, don’t forget to be helpful to all your customers and prospects, no matter where they are.