This is how Indian products like MX Takatak, WazirX hacked their virality, and here is how you can do it too! 🚀

Abhinav Gupta
2 min readJul 10, 2021

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Photo by Sticker Mule on Unsplash

I have been spending a lot of time on thinking and designing referral flows for my current project. (Details soon!)

To start off, I found products that have a massive number of downloads and have a referral program.

First comes MXTakatak, their referral is simple.
• Share a link with your friend
• Get them to download & signup on to the app
• Make them watch 100 videos
• And, you have made a successful referral.

For every such referral, you earn 5–7 rupees.

Next, I checked WazirX. Their referral program is as follows:
• Share link with your friends
• You earn a 50% commission on every friend’s trading fees.

Zerodha’s program is to Refer your friends to earn 10% of the brokerage they pay!

In Cult Fit’s referral, you earn fitcash which can be redeemed during any purchase on the cult fit app/website

Meesho on inviting friends gives commission for each sale the friend makes & they have an earning leaderboard too.

To summarise, Most of the referrals have a monetary output.

You do a task, it gets done and you get your commission💰

And this has been successful too, want to confirm?
Check downloads of these apps.

• MXTakatak : 100M+
• Meesho : 50M+
• WazirX : 5M+

Thus for Indian products, we have referrals designed to cash out or to get credits that can be redeemed.

Looking for referral flows outside India, I observed that for every successful referral they give more access to the core product.

Like Public, giving away free stock.

Even if they provide monetary rewards, they are in form of credits that can be redeemed in-app.

Now, why Indian products use monetary referrals?

It’s because we like getting definite variable rewards.

Here,

• Definite -> Money

• Variable Reward -> Money your earn is proportional to number of people you invite.

Why variable reward? 🙄

This keeps users motivated to get more and more rewards.

A small framework to design referrals is,

Cue -> Routine -> Variable Reward Framework. (Habit building Framework xD)

Here,

• Cue -> Earn / Get XYZ by referring your friends
• Routine -> Invite friends, Share links
• Variable Reward -> Getting definite variable reward.

Things to keep in mind while designing referrals? 😇

• Understand the motivations of your target audience
• Understand their needs
• Give your audience a definite incentive
• Make referrals easy and not complicated
• Activate them by linking to your core product.

If paid acquisition is your fuel, Referrals are your wheels.

Use them.

What are your 2 cents on referrals? 👇

Let’s talk on designing delightful experiences for users?

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Abhinav Gupta
Abhinav Gupta

Written by Abhinav Gupta

Designer in Residence @10kdesigners

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