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As 2025 comes to a close, this edition is a roundup of the stories and ideas readers kept coming back to.

If you missed any of these earlier, this is a good time to catch up.

Happy binge-reading!

Growth Stories

• Lovable’s success story was 17 months in the maketing

• PostHog’s five failed ideas to $1M ARR with open source

• How Tally forms won with “boring” product in a crowded market

• Figma’s community-led growth story

• How Submagic Turned TikTok Into a Growth Engine

How Founders Think

• The 1-Year Rule

• The Power of Driving to “No”

• Hire for the Spark, Not the Resume

Which of these are you most excited to read? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here, as always. Happy holidays, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Elan

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I’m starting a new series called Origin Stories, where I explore what made founders care deeply about the problems they chose to solve.

This week, it’s Notion.

Ivan Zhao (CEO and Co-founder of Notion) got the idea for Notion in his final year of college.

During his last year, Ivan was helping his artist friends with their websites and portfolios, as he was the only nerd in his friend circle.

He built three or four sites for them. That’s when he realized something.

These people were creative and capable, but they couldn’t create with software.

This led him to the idea of building software that would allow people to create tools for their work and life, without needing to be programmers.

Later, Ivan became obsessed with this idea after reading Douglas Engelbart’s paper, Augmenting Human Intellect.

Engelbart argued that computers shouldn’t just automate work. They should help humans think better and solve problems more effectively.

The result was Notion’s first version, which was a developer tool that allowed anyone to build their own software.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

The team realized that most people didn’t care about creating software. They only cared about getting their work done.

This forced Ivan’s team to rethink the idea. Instead of asking people to build software, they decided to hide that power inside something people already used every day.

They chose to build productivity software that people used in their daily work.

Notion was rebuilt as a flexible document editor and eventually became an all-in-one workspace. But their core philosophy hasn’t changed: people should have the ability to create tools for their work and life without programming knowledge.

That’s the reason for what Notion is today - the lego for software. You can build a project tracker, task management tool, or knowledge base the way you want.

Notion isn’t there yet, but they are close to achieving their mission.

Key Takeaway

• A world-changing idea means nothing if it doesn’t resonate with the people you’re building for.

• Don’t love your use case (the problem), but your values and philosophy.

• The best ideas comes from your personal experience, not from your social media feed or idea generators.

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This week’s ‘How Founders Think’ insight comes from Amit Bendov, Co-founder and CEO of Gong.

Most companies do not succeed, not because they lack a great idea. But because there are not enough people willing to pay to build a viable business.

Amit understood this early while starting Gong. Instead of assuming the idea was great, he went out to test whether anyone would actually pay for it.

He reached out to 50 people he did not know. People with no reason to be polite or encouraging.

He shared the concept: A system that listens to customer conversations and shines a light on what is really happening across sales teams.

Then he asked three simple questions.

1. How much would you pay?

2. What concerns do you have?

3. What would stop you from buying?

Two things became clear.

1. People thought the idea sounded too good to be true, which meant they saw the value.

2. And most gave the same price, about $50/month, which showed there was a real market willing to pay.

The calls proved the problem mattered and that people were willing to pay for a solution. Only then did the team commit to building the product.

The lesson is simple: Your idea might sound great to you. What matters is whether enough people will pay for it.

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In this edition, I covered Tally Forms’ first million journey. I initially assumed their story would be similar to Jotform’s, but I was proved wrong.

Jotform was the first web-based form builder and targeted webmasters and developers. Tally, on the other hand, was a Notion-style form builder, and focused on indie makers, and no coders.

Both were bootstrapped and Tally did borrowed Jotform’s idea of signup-free product trials, but everything else - from product philosophy to marketing tactics - was miles apart.

Let’s deep dive into it.

About Tally.so

Tally is the simplest way to create beautiful forms & surveys, for free. Launched in September 2020, they’ve grown to:

• 16,000+ paying customers

• 800,000+ users

• $4M+ in ARR

Tally’s Founding Team

Marie Martens and Filip Minev bootstrapped Tally as their second startup after shelving HotSpot (an influencer collaboration platform for hotels) due to COVID.

As frequent form users during their HotSpot days, they were unsatisfied with existing form builders, which were rigid and quickly hit a paywall. So they set out to build a form builder that was simple, powerful, and didn’t break the bank.

The Premise

• Fully bootstrapped

• Lean team of 5 until $1M

• Zero marketing spend

• Competitive market with Typeform, Jotform, and Google Forms

• Gave away 99% of their features for free

Tally.so’s Marketing Strategy

Tally was built as a new kind of form builder for makers and no-coders.

This clearly defined target segment shaped their early growth efforts. They focused on being active in the forums, communities, and social platforms where indie makers, no-coders, and early stage startup founders spent their time.

How did they go about it?

• Doing the unscalable

• Product Hunt launch

• Partner with no code communities

• Riding on user generated content

• Build in public updates

• Unlimited free plan

• In-product shareability

Doing the unscalable

Even though Tally is a self-service product, they acquired their early users by doing the unscalable things: cold outreach, social selling, and community engagement.

Cold Outreach

Marie and Filip manually curated and reached out to a list of 1,000+ indie makers, creators, and founders who upvoted and engaged with similar products in Product Hunt and X.

We contacted hundreds of creators and founders. Most never replied, but the few who did became our first users and our loudest champions.

- Marie Martens, Co-Founder, Tally

No code communities

In addition to the cold outreach efforts, the team was very active in no code communities. It helped them get featured in podcasts, newsletters, and no code tool write-ups when they launched.

Social Selling

Once they launched the beta, Marie started pitching Tally to people who were looking for a form builder or unhappy with the existing ones.

All these unscalable activities helped them onboard their first 300 users in two months. These early users helped Tally validate their idea and set the foundation for their product-led growth motion.

Made With Tally

Tally is inherently shareable because every form or survey created is shared with at least one other person.

For example, when a founder created a waitlist form using Tally, the natural next step was to add it to their website (exposing it to their visitors).

Tally leveraged this with one of the oldest PLG growth tactics by adding a ‘Made with Tally’ badge to these free forms. So when people saw and interacted with those forms, they were introduced to Tally.

Each form became a distribution node, giving Tally second-order reach and creating a repeatable viral loop.

In the first three months, they had 300 users but more than 1,000+ respondents. Basically, one user was introducing Tally to three other people organically.

User Love

We’ve seen what a great product experience can do in the cases of ClickUp, Flodesk, Figma, and Notion. Users can’t stop talking about the product in their network.

Tally was able to pull off the same effect.

Users didn’t just adopt it, they became Tally’s brand ambassadors. Happy users were vocal about finally finding a cool, flexible form builder.

They also recommended Tally to peers who were looking for online form builders.

Product Hunt Launch

Six months later, in March 2021, Tally launched on Product Hunt.

The team didn’t treat it as a one-off checklist item. It was planned six months ahead, even before the cold outreach campaign. All along, they were building momentum for this specific moment.

They were intentional with their early user outreach and specifically targeted users who were active on Product Hunt. So by the time Tally’s team was ready to launch, they had a solid user base who could boost their chances of reaching the top spot.

Since they had a decent user base, they didn’t launch through an external hunter but did it from their own profile. Tally ended up ranking #5 of the day with 695 upvotes, after holding the #1 spot for 23 hours.

Even though they lost the top spot, it helped them double their user base from 1,500 to 3,000.

User generated Content

Tally hugely benefited from user generated content especially by indie makers and content creators.

Indie makers who built in public often showcased what they were building and shared their tech stack. Tally frequently appeared in those stacks as their waitlist or signup form builder of choice.

The other segment was content creators trying to build a following in the indie makers community. One of their primary content themes was sharing tool lists that help people build businesses faster and with little money.

Tally made those lists more often than not, since it was free and useful for indie makers.

This generated a lot of visibility, especially when the mention came from an established maker or creator with a large audience. At times, it almost looked like Tally had its own social media army.

#100DaysofNoCode

If indie makers and content creators helped Tally build visibility, their partnership with 100 School took it to the next level.

100 School is an online community for aspiring no-coders. They run bootcamps that help people learn no code tools and start building on their own.

The partnership got Tally included in their tool list, where participants learned how to use it and built simple use cases to showcase their progress.

Everyone in the bootcamp shared their daily updates on Twitter with the #100DaysOfNoCode hashtag.

The result was a constant wave of organic mentions that kept Tally in front of thousands of aspiring no coders throughout the year.

Build in Public

Marie and Filip took a build in public approach. Whether deliberate or accidental, it aligned perfectly with their growth strategy since indie makers were one of their key target segments.

As part of building in public, they consistently shared their wins, failures, and learnings through blogs and social media posts. It helped Tally build trust, credibility, and a loyal following in the maker community.

Building in public also earned them a lot of support and goodwill, as other indie makers wanted one of their own (an underdog) to succeed while competing with larger players in the market.

Freemium

Tally made 99% of its features free, which made it extremely referable. Users were happy to share it within their network simply because it was free and useful.

This also increased the effectiveness of their other growth loops like ‘Made with Tally’ and ‘100DaysOfNoCode,’ since it removed the cost barrier that usually comes with trying a new product.

In addition, Typeform unintentionally helped the cause by increasing its prices and limiting the free plan to only 10 responses. With unlimited free forms and responses, Tally became a compelling alternative and pushed more people to switch.

Growth Mix/Flywheel

Key Takeaway

Tally shows that you don’t need a novel idea or a big budget to stand out and succeed.

They managed to win while building a boring product in a competitive market. All they did was pick an underserved and priced-out segment and deliver a product that users loved.

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This week’s ‘How Founders Think’ insight comes Callum McKeefery, Founder and CEO, Partner.io (and ex-Founder/CEO of Reviews.io)

When Callum was building Reviews.io, he couldn’t afford to hire experienced salespeople. So he started hiring people from everywhere else — cafés, bars, nightclubs, real estate.

He didn’t look for credentials. He looked for attitude. If someone showed genuine drive or great customer service, he’d hand them his number and say, “If you ever want a career change, give me a call.”

He could train them in sales, but not in work ethic. That had to come built in.

It worked. Many of those early hires stayed with the company until the exit.

The lesson is simple: in the early days, skill matters less than drive. You can teach someone what to do, but not how to care.

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This week, I’ve covered PostHog, one of those rare startups that found success not by getting everything right, but by pivoting fast and betting on open source.

In this edition of First Million Story, I’ve broken down how PostHog used open source as their growth lever and hit their first $1 Million ARR in two years.

Let’s dive in.

About PostHog

PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that helps product engineers build successful products. It was the founders’ sixth idea, a pivot they made after joining Y Combinator’s W20 batch.

PostHog launched in February 2020 as an open-source project on GitHub and Hacker News, gaining immediate traction among open-source enthusiasts.

Within two years, PostHog crossed $1 million ARR by October 2020, entirely through inbound growth and without a sales team.

Today, the company generates over $10 million in ARR, serves more than 190,000 customers, and is valued at $1.4 billion.

PostHog Team

PostHog was founded by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser on January 23rd, 2020.

• James Hawkins (co-CEO, co-founder): Built PostHog after five failed startup ideas, once he and his co-founder realized developers needed analytics tools they could self-host and control their data. James emphasizes radical transparency and engineer autonomy — principles that shaped PostHog into an open-core company that’s transparent not only in its product but also in how it runs the business.

• Tim Glaser (co-CEO, co-founder): An experienced engineer and open-source contributor, Tim architected the first version of PostHog in just a few weeks. His focus on performance, scalability, and developer experience became the foundation for PostHog’s technical credibility and early community growth.

The Premise

• Sixth startup idea after 5 pivots in 5 months.

• YC backed (part of W20 batch).

• Product analytics market was crowded and built for non-engineers.

• PostHog targeted developers who needed to own their data.

• The first and only open-source product analytics platform.

PostHog’s Pivot Story

James Hawkins and Tim Glaser pivoted five times in six months, including twice after joining Y Combinator’s W20 batch.

• Sales territory management software

• CRM with predictive analytics

• 1:1 tool with predictive analytics

• Technical debt monitoring tool

• Engineering retention tool

• Open-source product analytics platform

They joined YC with their fourth idea, a technical debt monitoring tool. It had 600 users and inbound interest, but no one was willing to pay.

Five friendly YC companies turned them down in a row. They tried $39 per user, $5 per developer, even $300 per team, but still no one bought.

After a YC dinner one night, they decided to start over.

They had kept a three-page list of startup ideas, and one of them stood out — product analytics. Both founders had struggled with it before. Setting it up was painful, and teams were reluctant to send data to third parties.

A conversation with the founder of Sentry confirmed it: “We would never send all our data to third parties.”

That was the spark.

They pitched the open-source idea to their YC partners, who were equally excited. They rebranded as PostHog and started building.

Three weeks later, PostHog launched.

PostHog’s Marketing Strategy

PostHog’s open-source approach was a major differentiator. At the time, all leading tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap were closed SaaS products.

Going open source did not just shape the product, it defined who it was for and how it would grow.

Unlike competitors that targeted product managers and marketers, PostHog’s open-source model made it ideal for product engineers who could deploy it themselves and customize it to their needs.

Their strategy was simple: make the product easy to find, simple to deploy, and frictionless to try for product engineers.

So how did they do it?

• Launched on GitHub and Hacker News to reach developers directly.

• Promoted on Twitter (X) to drive early traction and GitHub stars.

• Ran short paid search bursts to capture high-intent traffic.

• Offered a YC Founder Deal, onboarding 50+ startups in year one.

• Kept awareness alive through Reddit, LinkedIn, and GitHub campaigns.

1. Open Source as the growth lever

Being open source helped PostHog drive its initial growth and product adoption.

Open source meant product engineers could deploy the product themselves without talking to a salesperson, as long as they had a need. For the open-source community, the only thing that mattered was whether the product was useful.

If they found something useful and interesting, they were happy to share feedback, contribute to the product, and spread the word.

That is exactly what happened with PostHog.

PostHog was valuable for engineers because it solved an important problem: helping them understand their impact on users. With its launch, engineers were free to experiment without needing approvals. Curiosity turned into adoption, and adoption turned into advocacy.

It built the viral loop for PostHog in the early days.

They continue to maintain their open-source community edition and as of now, they have 300+ contributors and over 5 million downloads of their GitHub repository.

2. Freemium

With its open-core model and self-hosting option, PostHog had already removed the friction of trying the product for open-source enthusiasts.

Similarly, they made it easy for hobbyist product engineers and early stage tech founders to try PostHog through a generous freemium cloud version.

The combination of freemium and open-core helped PostHog build on its early traction by making it effortless for developers who liked the product to share and recommend it within their networks.

3. The GitHub Launch

GitHub is one of the largest open-source communities, with over 150 million users and 28 million open-source projects.

PostHog leveraged this community exceptionally well — not as a one-off launch channel, but as a repeatable growth engine fueled by word of mouth.

How they did it:

1. Launched on GitHub to make the project discoverable to developers.

They launched on February 15, 2020, and asked early users to star the repo to build momentum.

GitHub rewards popular projects by featuring them on the trending page, so PostHog promoted the repo on Twitter (X) and followed up with a Hacker News launch five days later.

Both these helped them achieve:

• 1,500+ stars on their GitHub repo

• A feature on GitHub’s trending page

• 990+ deployments within a couple of months

We also spent ~$2,000 promoting the repo on Twitter which, combined with the successful launch on Hacker News, got our repo trending on GitHub.

— James Hawkins, Co-Founder, PostHog

2. Ran GitHub star campaigns to keep the project visible to open-source enthusiasts.

They turned it into a repeatable growth channel by running regular star campaigns, including:

• Black Friday campaign

• Valentine’s Day campaign

This helped them increase the number of stars, and contribution to the project. Within a year, they crossed 4,000 stars, and 40+ contributors. Today, the project has over 29,000+ stars and 300+ contributors.

4. The Hacker News Launch

A week later, on February 20, 2020, PostHog launched on Hacker News.

Product engineers and technical founders loved the positioning:

“Self-hosted, open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude-style product.”

The post hit the front page with over 140 upvotes in 7 hours, bringing in a new wave of signups and GitHub stars.

Similar to GitHub, PostHog didn’t treat Hacker News as just a launch platform, but as a community to engage with. It became one of their key content marketing channels, where they regularly shared posts about startups and open source.

14 of which received 100+ upvotes and the highest being 684 upvotes. And these upvotes aren’t just engagement within HN, but drove 10,000+ page visits at an average per post.

5. YC Deals

YC Deals is Y Combinator’s internal platform that offers exclusive discounts and credits to YC startups.

For PostHog, the ideal customers were product engineers and technical founders at early-stage startups. Being part of the YC network made it an obvious move to pitch to the 2,000+ companies already funded through YC.

Their reasoning was simple: YC startups are a high-quality filter — a group of fast-moving teams with real growth potential. By supporting them early, PostHog could align itself with the next generation of successful companies and grow organically through YC’s tightly connected network and the wider Hacker News community.

Their YC Deal:
One free year of PostHog Cloud with up to 10 million events per month, or a one-year enterprise license for teams that preferred to self-host PostHog.

This approach helped them onboard 50+ YC startups by 2021 and establish brand awareness across the YC ecosystem far more effectively than any traditional growth strategy.

Today 65% of every Y Combinator batch use PostHog.

6. Paid Search

While Hacker News and GitHub helped PostHog gain initial traction and build a steady stream of word-of-mouth interest, they began investing in paid search ads by late 2021 to scale revenue once they achieved product-market fit.

They started with campaigns targeting users searching for “open-source analytics software” and alternatives to SaaS analytics tools such as “Hotjar alternatives” and “Amplitude alternatives.”

Paid ads were never at the heart of their marketing strategy. Instead, PostHog used them to kickstart and amplify the impact of what was already working — community-driven growth.

7. SEO

PostHog began focusing on SEO early 2022, after reaching clear product-market fit.

By then, they had real revenue, a proven ideal customer profile, and strong retention — in short, they had confidence that long-term bets would pay off.

Their early SEO strategy focused on bottom-of-funnel keywords, which they called “defensive SEO.”

Defensive SEO: Rank for terms that mattered most to users ready to buy who searched for,

• Product comparisons (amplitude alternatives)

• High-intent category keywords (open-source analytics software)

This type of content worked like sales collateral: it helped capture high-intent users while reinforcing word-of-mouth. Even if someone didn’t adopt PostHog, they might recommend it to others.

By the end of 2022, PostHog was ranking for more than 500+ keywords in the top 50.

Growth Mix

GitHub and Hacker News gave them reach, and open source helped PostHog build credibility with developers and drive adoption at scale.

Key Takeaway

PostHog’s story is a great reminder that you don’t have to get it right the first time, you just have to move fast enough to notice when something clicks.

They pivoted through 5 ideas in six months before realizing developers cared deeply about one thing: owning their data. That insight led to PostHog, open source product analytics for product engineers.

GitHub and Hacker News gave them reach. YC gave them the right network. Open source gave them credibility and adoption at scale.

Everything they did came back to one simple idea: make it useful, make it transparent, and let the community do the marketing for you.

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This week’s ‘How Founders Think’ insight comes from Marta Bitar, Co-Founder and CEO of Flodesk.

“Our goal became simple: get people to say ‘no, I don’t like it,’ and then learn from it.”

— Martha Bitar, CEO, Flodesk

Most teams avoid hearing no. Marta Bitar did the opposite.

In the early days of Flodesk, discovery calls often ended in rejection. One prospect, a fashion blogger, couldn’t get past the first step of their prototype.

Her feedback was blunt: “Marta, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. This is so confusing.”

For the founders, it was crushing. They questioned if they had anything real.

Marta came from a sales background and was used to rejection. For her, a no was a starting point.

So they shifted their mindset: instead of chasing validation, they aimed for rejection. The goal became getting people to say “no, I don’t like it” and then digging into why.

Every no revealed what was missing or confusing.

This “aim for no” mindset helped them create emotional distance from what they were building and truly understand what people were struggling with.

You’ve probably seen the headline: they hit $1M ARR in a week. The truth is, it actually took closer to 17 months.

That’s what I want to unpack. Let’s look at how Lovable built momentum step by step before the explosive launch.

About Lovable

Lovable is a platform that lets you build apps and websites by chatting with AI. It launched publicly in November 2024 after evolving from a viral open-source project, GPT Engineer.

Within a week of its public launch, Lovable hit $1 million ARR with a team of just 15 people.

Today, the company generates over $100 million ARR, making it one of the fastest to reach that milestone, and is valued at $1.5 billion.

Lovable’s Founding Team

Lovable was founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin in 2023.

• Anton Osika (CEO, co-founder): Built GPT Engineer in a weekend to show his teammates the potential of LLMs. His conviction that software creation should be accessible to everyone became the backbone of Lovable.

• Fabian Hedin (co-founder): A repeat founder and CTO who joined Anton to turn the open-source project into a scalable product.

The Premise

• Validated idea: GPT Engineer, Anton’s open-source project, proved AI could write real code and gave him instant visibility in the GitHub community.

• Market timing: AI coding was peaking after ChatGPT’s launch, with hype around new AI coding platforms like Replit, Bolt, Cursor, and Vercel.

• Early challenge: Turn the viral project into a reliable product and capture early adopters in a fast-emerging, noisy market.

Lovable’s Marketing Strategy

Unlike other competitors, Lovable’s target persona were non-technical entrepreneurs, and product managers who wanted to turn ideas into working products without hiring engineers.

Their marketing strategy was simple: educate the market and show, not tell, what an AI coding platform could do (create end-to-end apps with prompts) and inspire non-technical users to build applications on their own.

So how did they go about it?

• Open-sourced GPT Engineer to validate demand and seed community.

• Strategic preview launches to refine the product and sustain buzz.

• Shared demo videos that showed value before users even tried the product.

• Built in public: sharing updates, and engaging with the X tech community.

• Organic word of mouth by AI enthusiasts/evangelists and reviewers

1. Open-Source as the Spark

Anton’s first move was to release GPT Engineer on GitHub, a scrappy open-source project that worked like a teaser for what would later become Lovable. It wasn’t just code; it was proof that AI could actually build apps.

The timing was perfect. After ChatGPT’s launch, the tech community was hungry for examples of AI coding, and GPT Engineer delivered. The launch tweet drew 600,000+ views with more than 550 retweets.

The GitHub repo hit 500 stars in a day, 38,500 stars in a month, and 50K stars in 9 months. As of now, it has more than 54K stars.

Developers quickly jumped in to try, contribute, and share. The momentum snowballed, giving Anton:

• Instant credibility and visibility

• An idea validated in the wild

• A ready-made developer community

And most importantly, it set the stage for the Lovable app.

2. Strategic Launches

Anton didn’t rely on a single “big bang” launch. Lovable’s path to $1M ARR was built through three deliberate stages, each designed to grow the audience, refine the product, and build anticipation.

Lovable Alpha Launch

The first launch in December 2023 was just a preview, but it created serious traction. They kicked it off on X (Twitter) and followed up on Product Hunt a couple of weeks later.

On Twitter, the launch post exploded with 427,000 views, 240+ retweets, and 1.7K saves.

On Product Hunt, Lovable teamed up with one of the platform’s top hunters and landed #1 Product of the Day and Week with more than 1,325 upvotes.

Even without product access, the alpha launch generated excitement and drove signups. In the first 30 days, more than 15,000 people joined the waitlist.

Lovable Beta Launch

Eight months later, Lovable rolled out its beta on X, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.

The launch tweet pulled in 450,000 views and 6,400+ engagements.

On Product Hunt, it ranked #2 Product of the Day with 1,058 upvotes, while the Hacker News thread gathered 180+ upvotes.

In just two months, Lovable added 50,000+ users and converted more than 1,200 of them as paying customers. For the community that had been waiting since alpha, it felt like finally getting through the door.

Lovable Public Launch

The public launch in November 2024 was the final act, fueled by all the excitement and anticipation built through the earlier launches.

Lovable went live again on Product Hunt, X, and Hacker News. On Product Hunt, it hit #1 Product of the Day. The launch tweet and Hacker News post didn’t match the reach of earlier launches, but the anticipation built from alpha and beta carried it forward.

Within a week, Lovable doubled paying customers to more than 3,000 and hit its first $1M ARR in just 8 days.

This was the payoff of 17 months of compounding. The alpha built curiosity, the beta showed people were ready to pay, and the public launch opened it up to everyone.

4. Demo-Driven Awareness

Demos became Lovable’s most effective growth content. During the preview and beta phases, Anton shared short videos of micro-apps built from simple prompts on X and other platforms.

It showed the value of Lovable before anyone even touched the product, creating a sense of leverage. For founders and product managers, it looked like a way to launch and validate ideas faster.

That pre-conceived value, combined with fear of missing out, made people rush in when the public launch opened.

5. Instant Gratification → Fast Conversions

With Lovable, the payoff came right away. You typed an idea and a working prototype appeared in minutes. People weren’t just trying out a tool, they were already building something real.

When they hit the free prompt limit, upgrading felt obvious. Most people would rather keep going and finish what they started than stop and wait for another day.

That simple trigger helped Lovable double its paying customers in a week, from 1,500 to 3,000, and became one of the drivers behind its rapid revenue growth.

Great product + the right friction for free users = rapid revenue growth.

6. Building in Public

Anton built in public from day one. He shared product updates on X, talked often about the future of AI coding, and stayed active in conversations with evangelists and the developer community.

This steady stream of updates did more than show progress. It built trust, kept Lovable in front of the right people, and gave the community a story to rally around.

7. Amplified by AI Evangelists and Reviewers

2023–2024 was a golden window for new AI tools. Evangelists on Twitter, YouTube, and blogs were constantly looking for the “next big thing” to test and share.

For them, reviewing new tools wasn’t just curiosity, it was content, a way to engage their audiences and grow followings.

Lovable benefited massively from this dynamic. The GitHub project and staged launches ensured it was always part of the conversation. Anytime someone posted a list of “AI coding tools you should know,” GPT Engineer or Lovable showed up.

Lovable’s Compound Growth

Lovable’s early growth didn’t come from product shareability but from the novelty of the idea itself. The concept of building full apps through prompts with real-time visual output was new, exciting, and inherently shareable.

Anton and team kept the audience engaged through phased launches and demo-led content that consistently showed progress. Each demo sparked curiosity, spread widely, and pulled in fresh reach. By the time the product was ready, they already had an audience primed and eager to use it.

Key Takeaway

Lovable’s success wasn’t overnight and they didn’t really go from 0 to $1M ARR “in a week.” It was a phased journey built over 17 months.

The growth came from compounding momentum: an open-source project, community buzz, staged launches, and demo-led storytelling. By the time the product was ready, the market was already primed.

For founders, the lesson is clear: what looks like overnight success is usually the result of months of invisible momentum.

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Every other week, I share frameworks and philosophies that helped founders build successful SaaS companies in the ‘How Founders Think’ series.

This week’s insight comes from Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of Jotform.

“I always kept one year of salary for every employee in the bank.”

—Aytekin Tank, CEO, Jotform

Most founders focus on how fast they can grow. Aytekin Tank built Jotform by focusing on how long they could last.

While competitors raised big rounds and hired aggressively, Jotform stayed disciplined.

For 18 years, Aytekin followed one rule: always have a year’s worth of salaries saved.

That simple rule meant no layoffs.

Just slow, steady, intentional growth.

No bets they couldn’t afford.

No team they couldn’t protect.

Growth is exciting. Staying alive is underrated.

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In this week’s ‘First Million’ series, I’ve covered Fathom. It’s the story of a seasoned founder building in a brand-new product category and turning it into a mid-eight-figure business. They hit $1M ARR in under a year by focusing on trust, reliability, and retention.

Let’s deep dive into their growth story.

About Fathom

Fathom is an AI notetaker that automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. It solves a universal work problem: staying engaged in meetings without losing key details.

Today, it’s used by 175,000 companies, is the #1 app on Zoom and HubSpot Marketplaces, and ranks highest in user satisfaction on G2.

Fathom’s Founding Team

Fathom was founded by Richard White, best known for building UserVoice, the customer feedback platform. After more than a decade running that business, he stepped away in 2019, feeling he’d reached the limits of what he could learn there.

When starting Fathom, Richard pulled in four top engineers from UserVoice, raised early funding from his network, and approached the new venture like “speed-running a video game” he’d played before. Making faster, sharper decisions from experience.

The Premise

• Serial entrepreneur: Richard White had already spent over a decade building UserVoice and brought a seasoned team of engineers into Fathom.

• Painkiller product during the pandemic: Remote work had exploded, and professionals were spending hours in virtual meetings while still scrambling to take notes.

• Good product ≠ Retention: In a product category like AI notetakers, retention was the real hurdle. People had to use it regularly to see the value.

Fathom’s Marketing Strategy

Fathom set out to solve one clear problem: taking and organizing meeting notes without breaking focus.

Their strategy was straightforward, get in front of people who live in meetings: sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams. The goal wasn’t just to capture calls, but to make the process so reliable and effortless that users would never go back to manual note-taking.

They didn’t try to chase every possible channel. Instead, they focused on:

• Launching on the Zoom App Marketplace to quickly seed users

• Fixing reliability and retention before scaling

• Leveraging a free forever core product to fuel word of mouth

• Monetizing managers through a targeted team plan

1. Zoom Marketplace First Launch

Zoom was the market leader in online meetings during the pandemic. Richard saw his audience was there, so he built Fathom only for Zoom.

In early 2021, Zoom launched its app marketplace and investment fund. Fathom applied and became one of the first 50 partner apps.

Launching exclusively on Zoom’s marketplace gave them instant distribution. Zoom put them in front of a huge audience, bringing 100,000+ signups in the first month.

Even today, their Zoom’s marketplace app page gets more organic visitors than marketplace’s home page.

2. Retention Before Revenue

The surge of signups hid a problem: almost no one was using the product. At one point, they had only 100 daily active users.

They found three causes:

1. Many signups weren’t having meetings at all, they used Zoom only for personal catchups during the pandemic.

2. The onboarding wasn’t intuitive.

3. People forgot to add Fathom to their meetings.

They couldn’t fix the first. But they improved the other two.

The biggest friction was people forgetting to turn it on. Their fix was a desktop app that auto-prompted users to activate. Activation jumped from near zero to over 60%.

People kept forgetting to turn Fathom on, so we built a desktop app that prompted or auto-joined in meetings. Overnight, activation jumped from near zero to 60%, turning a major drop-off into consistent usage.

— Richard White, Founder/CEO, Fathom

3. Layering on Review Sites

Once the base was strong, Fathom focused on credibility. They doubled down on G2 reviews and became the top-rated app in their category.

This made it easier to convert free users to paid. People saw it as the best option in the market.

Early on, Product Hunt helped us reach great early adopters, but G2 became a real growth lever. We asked happy users for reviews, built strong social proof, and shortened the sales cycle. People saw others loved Fathom and thought, ‘Great, I’ll try it too.’

— Richard White, Founder/CEO, Fathom

4. Free Forever = Virality Engine

Fathom made a bold choice: keep the core product free forever. No pricing friction, and more reason to share.

Every time someone saw Fathom in a meeting, it was a built-in referral.

5. Team Plan = Monetizing the Right Users

Richard planned to monetize after a year, but when the market shifted in early 2022 and investors started valuing revenue over user growth, he launched a paid plan sooner.

To keep virality, he charged managers instead of individual users. The new Team Plan gave managers high-level visibility into their team’s performance.

We never wanted to monetize individual users, even when they offered to pay. Our focus was charging founders and executives who wanted Fathom for their whole team and visibility into all their meetings.

— Richard White, Founder/CEO, Fathom

The sales team had been working customer support until the premium plan was ready. Once it launched, they reached out to the existing customer base. It worked: $100K ARR in the first month, $1M in eleven months.

Fathom’s Growth Flywheel

Fathom’s growth loop was simple: launch in the right place, turn new signups into active users, get them into more meetings, and let every meeting spark the next wave of users.

Why It Worked

Fathom reached $1M ARR by solving the riskiest problem first: retention. Solving it early proved the product’s value for daily use.

Keeping the core product free removed friction and turned every meeting into a referral. Charging managers kept the virality and aligned revenue with the people who had budgets.

Their priority sequence made each stage feed the next,

Activation → Retention → Amplification → Monetization

Fathom’s approach was simple: build something people love, remove friction at every step, and monetize without breaking the loop.

The smaller the bus, the faster it moves. Every new hire makes the bus heavier, harder to steer and accelerate.

So before deciding to hire, try solving the problem through better systems.

But it’s not just about size. It’s also about who gets on.

Founders don’t just design the product. They design the team that builds it. The people sitting next to you shape the speed, culture, and direction of your company.

Hire who can help you accelerate faster and make your work experience better.

Who’s sitting next to you on your bus?

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In this week’s ‘First Million’ series, I’ve covered Reviews.io. It’s a classic story of an underdog. They bootstrapped their way to an $82 Million acquisition. Let’s deep dive into their growth story.

About Reviews.io

Reviews.io is a review collection and publishing platform for small e-commerce businesses. It was founded in 2012 and went to market in 2013. They got to their first million in 2 years.

Reviews.io went on to collect more than 28 Million reviews for 8,000+ brands. They were doing $10+ Million in ARR before they got acquired in 2022 for $82 Million.

About the team

Callum Mckeefery and his wife Nikki Albano co founded Reviews.io.

Actually, they had two ideas

1. Affiliate fraud detection tool.

2. Review collection and publishing software.

Callum first pitched the affiliate platform idea to a large mobile company, but it was rejected for being too complex. At the end of the conversation, when he inquired about their review management process, they’re open to explore a tool.

Callum took that as a cue. He spent a week building the MVP for the review management tool and pitched it back to the same company. They liked the product but felt Reviews.io was too small to partner with at the time.

That didn’t stop him. Their interest gave Callum the initial validation he needed. He went on to interview a few more small e-commerce owners to understand their review collection process. During these conversations a pattern emerged: many of them were paying TrustPilot even though unhappy with the experience.

It convinced Callum to go all in. He decided to build a product specifically for unhappy TrustPilot customers.

The premise

• Bootstrapped with a small budget.

• Competing with well funded competitors.

• Unhappy Competitors customers

Reviews.io’s Growth Strategy

Based on the initial prospect interviews Callum positioned Reviews.io as a friendly alternative for TrustPilot. He decided to target the underserved and overpriced small e-commerce businesses who aren’t happy with TrustPilot.

His strategy was to acquire a few early customers, make them happy, and get them to refer others in their network.

So how they went about it?

Trade-shows and Expos

Without a huge budget or a large salesforce, they decided to follow a 1:few marketing approach. Callum saw expos and trade-shows as a platform to talk to as many potential customers as possible.

So, when they had the initial version of the product they attended IRX Expo 2013 in Birmingham which was a huge conference for small business retail owners. It attracted more 2,500 retailers.

Reviews.io registered as an exhibitor for it and got a small booth space.

Their goal was to talk to as many retail owners as possible at the event. They tried a few creative tactics to attract footfalls,

• They had put up some banners and had a table football machine.

  

• Engaged with potential event attendees through socials by replying in their event related tweets.

  

• To convert the booth visitors they offered freemium plan.

  

All these helped Reviews.io to generate a lot of interest and some of them converted as their first few customers.

Within the first week, they onboarded 50+ customers and collected 850+ reviews.

They went on to attend a lot of retail events in the initial days to create more reach for the product.

Unexpected Snowball Effect

Based on the feedback from their initial customers, they improved the product. As expected many of those initial customers were happy to refer Reviews.io to other small business owners in their network.

But something interesting and unexpected happened.

Reviews.io offered brands with a review widget and a trust badge to embed in their websites. Each had the Reviews.io logo.

Brands were eager to add them in their website to build trust and social proof with their prospective customers.

This created a flywheel effect. Visitors to those brand websites got awareness about Reviews.io through the widgets and a lot of them reached out to learn more about their offering.

Basically, the branded widgets acted as mini billboards, redirecting part of their customers website traffic back to Reviews.io.

Every new happy customer become an inbound channel for Reviews.io. Within 6 months they were helping 500+ brands and collected over 350K reviews.

Reviews.io’s Growth Loop

Conclusion

Even though Reviews.io entered a competitive market, they used it to their advantage. Instead of chasing innovation, they turned the market leader’s weakness into their strength.

They broke a lot of startup myths:

• You don’t need a radically new solution.

• You can outdo well-funded competitors without a big budget or team.

By positioning themselves as a friendly alternative to TrustPilot, they were able to ride the network effects that review publishing platforms had already created.

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This week, I’ve covered a product that I use myself on a daily basis: Notion. Even this post was written using it. I’m sure most of you reading this probably use it too, or have at least come across it once.

Even though I’ve been using it for years, I never really looked into how they got started and what helped them grow in the early days. This edition is all about how Notion got to their first million.

If you're expecting to read about Notion’s ambassador programs, TikTok, or community-led growth, this might disappoint you. I’ve focused on the scrappy early days. Let’s get into it.

About Notion

Notion is LEGO for software. They give you blocks to build whatever you need to solve your work problems.

Today, they're valued at $10 billion and it’s revenue is estimated to be $300 million, with more than 100 million users.

About the team

Ivan Zhao, influenced by early computing pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, he believed software should augment human thought - not just serve as a tool.

Simon Last, Notion’s co-founder and first engineer, shared Ivan’s obsession with building tools that empower non-programmers.

Their shared vision: software should be built like LEGO with simple blocks that anyone can use to create something powerful.

The Premise

The initial vision was to build an easy-to-use developer tool that would let anyone create software. But after two difficult years, they realized most people just didn’t care about building software.

So they pivoted to something people already cared about - productivity tools.

They launched Notion as a productivity software. But they kept the same core philosophy: empowering people to create what they need to get their work done.

Early-stage Marketing Strategy

Notion was positioned as a productivity platform, which meant any knowledge worker who cared about getting organised was their target audience.

In the early years their goal was to identify product market fit. Why?

When they entered the market, everything was siloed.

• People used Google Docs to write

• Slack/emails to collaborate and share

• Used trello or to do apps to manage tasks

Notion challenged the status quo and wanted to become a centralized home for information and software.

The idea made sense. The question was whether people would understand and use it that way.

So how did they find product-market fit and get to their first million?

• Product Hunt launches - Helped them validate the idea and attract early adopters

• Word of mouth – Users didn’t just love the product, they became evangelists

• Shareability – The product was inherently shareable by design

• Referral programs – Notion empowered power users to invite their network

Product Hunt Launches

Product Hunt was one of the biggest early levers for Notion. They knew early adopters hang out there and used it strategically, even after an unexpected first launch.

Unexpected Launch

Not many people know this, but Product Hunt allows anybody to hunt and share your product even without you knowing.

In late 2015, someone posted Notion on Product Hunt without the team’s knowledge. They weren’t ready yet as the product was still in beta.

But the response was strong as people showed a lot of interest. It received 412 upvotes and became #3 Product of the Day.

To manage expectations, Ivan jumped in. He explained that they weren’t ready to launch and promised a proper release soon.

Notion 1.0 with Naval

In mid-2016, they had the first version of the product. This time they approached the product hunt launch strategically.

If you aren’t aware, Naval Ravikant was one of their early investors. The team decided to leverage Naval Ravikant’s social presence.

They launched Notion 1.0 using Naval’s Product Hunt profile as he had a big following there - around 20K.

That launch worked. Notion got over 2,500 upvotes and 3.5K reviews. It was one of the quickest product to make it to the 1,000 upvotes club.

In addition, it became Product of the Day, Week, and Month. It also won the Golden Kitty Award.

The Product Hunt launch helped them to get their first few thousand early adaptors.

Notion for iOS

They launched their app on Apple’s App Store in late 2017, and it was featured as App of the Day in December. This gave a further boost to product discovery among mobile users.

Apple selects App of the Day based on quality, innovation, and user experience.

Notion 2.0 Launches

They followed the same playbook for Notion 2.0 in 2018. Two years later, another Product Hunt launch.

It got more than 4,497 upvotes and 312 comments. Like the first time, it hit #1 product of the day, week, and month.

Even their Notion 2.0 launch tweet earned 1,000+ engagements.

As the icing on the cake, The Wall Street Journal published a product review after the 2.0 launch.

If the first launch helped them attract early adopters, the 2.0 launch validated product-market fit and marked their entry into the mass market.

Notion for Android

In mid-2018, they launched their Android app. It was something frequently requested by early adopters at the time. It opened up another acquisition channel, and the app went on to be named App of the Year 2018 on the Google Play Store.

By the end of 2018, just six months after launch, the app had reached 100K installs.

Word of Mouth

To grow fast, people need to love your product enough to share it. That’s what happened with Notion.

Their early users didn’t just use the product. They evangelized it.

Finding a gem

People couldn’t resist sharing Notion once they discovered it. It felt like a hidden gem - replacing 3 to 4 other tools with one beautifully crafted experience.

Self Expression

Notion let users organize their work the way they wanted. It made people want to show off their organization skills through their Notion workspaces.

They shared screenshots and URLs of their workspaces.

Suggestions

On social forums, whenever someone asked for note-taking or task app suggestions, Notion’s power users were quick to recommend it.

This is what a great product can do. It makes people market for you.

Shareability

Notion was shareable by design.

It let users share their pages using public URLs. These pages came with Notion’s domain and a CTA like “Made with Notion” or “Get Notion for Free” at the top.

A few common ways people used it:

1. Sharing information: People shared notes, summaries, and internal docs with others. It became the easiest way to distribute structured knowledge.

2. Sharing templates: Users created their own planners, trackers, and journals, and were happy to share them with others.

Every shared page created more awareness. It was a user-generated content strategy on steroids.

Referral Program

Notion introduced a referral program in early 2017 aimed at power users. Instead of cash or gift cards, they offered something more aligned with their product, free credits and unlimited blocks.

The program was simple: refer a friend, earn credits. Credits could then be used to unlock pro features.

It turned users into evangelists by rewarding them with more of what they already loved using.

Growth Loop

Notion’s growth loop was simple but powerful:

1. New kind of product: It broke the status quo. One tool to replace many.

2. Reach early adopters: Notion used PH to reach early adaptors.

3. Great product experience: Simple on the surface but offered depth.

4. Evangelism: Users became advocates.

5. Sharability: Public pages made spreading the product effortless.

6. Referrals: Amplified word of mouth.

The more people used it, the more they shared. The more they shared, the more it grew.

Closing Thoughts

Notion’s growth story is a great example of what a great product combined with thoughtful marketing can achieve.

They strategically launched it in product hunt and once they gained initial traction with early adaptors, two things happened:

• Users organically shared what they built with Notion - to show off and to share knowledge.

• Notion amplified that love by introducing a referral program.

They gave people a better way to work - and made them want to talk about it.

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Like many marketers, I used to be skeptical about TikTok as a growth channel for SaaS. That changed when I came across Submagic. They went from launch to $1M in ARR in under 90 days, using TikTok as their main growth channel.

Let’s look at how they did it.

About Submagic

Submagic is an AI-powered tool that helps individuals and businesses create powerful short-form videos in just three clicks.

They launched in May 2023 and now make $8M ARR, with a team of 13 and no outside funding.

The Founding Team

Submagic was co-founded by David Zitoun and Tsi-fei Chan.

David, the non-technical founder, has been into video since he was 12. The idea came from his own struggle to add captions to his content.

Tsi-fei brought 8 years of experience building a website builder. He’s a believer in “three-click” simplicity, which shaped Submagic’s product philosophy.

They met through YC’s Co-founder Matcher and decided to test the partnership by building MVPs. Submagic was the first. They built it in six weeks with one core feature and a working payment flow. It worked, they looked back.

The Premise

• A painkiller product

• Bootstrapped

• Lean team

• No marketing budget

• Built in 6 weeks

• Clear ICP (creators, agencies, small businesses)

• Charged from day one

Submagic’s Marketing Strategy

Submagic focused on solving one clear problem: adding captions to videos.

Their strategy was simple: get in front of creators, small businesses, and agencies already using short-form video to grow. David saw TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube Shorts as their main distribution channels.

They didn’t try to do everything. Instead, they focused on:

• Founder-led TikTok content

• Affiliate program with creators

• Word of mouth

Founder-Led TikTok Strategy

Unlike most platforms that reward followers, TikTok rewards content. David realized you didn’t need a big audience to get big reach. If the content was good, TikTok’s algorithm would take care of the rest.

So he ran the playbook himself:

• Created a new TikTok account (@submagic.co)

• Filmed simple product demos

• Posted daily with small content variations

• Nothing happened for 10 days

• Then one video went viral and hit 100,000 views

• That video brought in 40–50 paying customers at $16–$20/month

Sounds cool?. But that was just the start.

Generous Affiliate Program

Recognizing TikTok’s growth potential, David looked to scale what had already worked. So they launched an affiliate program within 30 days of its first customer.

The idea: let TikTok creators drive growth by posting content with affiliate links.

• Found small creators (often students)

• Onboarded 50–70 early affiliates

• Offered 30% lifetime commission

• Proved 20K views could earn ~$500

• Encouraged daily posts from fresh accounts

It worked. In the next 60 days they hit $1 Million ARR. Their affiliate network grew to 3.5K in 6 months.

Why it worked?

It was a win-win. David wanted to scale TikTok without doing it all himself. Creators wanted an easy way to earn online.

He used his own success ($3K from 100K views) as proof. If they could get 20K views, they could earn $500. The pitch was simple and compelling.

It led to early success for the first group of creators. They shared those results, which brought in more creators. What started small became a viral loop.

Today, Submagic has over 9,000 affiliates driving 20% of its revenue ($1.5M+).

Word of Mouth

While affiliates were the main engine behind the first $1M ARR, Submagic also delivered exceptional customer experience from day one.

David personally reached out to their first 100 customers, collected their WhatsApp numbers, and created “Submagic Lovers” groups.

In those groups, customers co-built the product: offering feedback, testing new features, and acting like true product managers.

That made them feel valued, and naturally, they started talking about Submagic within their networks. This not only built credibility but also drove direct signups through word of mouth.

Submagic’s Growth Mix

Conclusion

Submagic’s journey challenges the conventional SaaS playbook.

From day one, they were clear about the problem, the user, and the channel. That clarity helped them turn TikTok — a platform most SaaS founders ignore — into their growth engine.

They built virality into their growth through an affiliate program. Instead of scaling TikTok themselves, they let creators do it, essentially building an army of TikTok marketers for Submagic.

If you’re looking for an unconventional growth strategy, Submagic offers a blueprint. It shows that the right product, in front of the right audience, on the right channel can unlock serious scale.

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I was debating whether to cover Zapier or Lovable this week — until I stumbled upon an interview with one of Supademo’s founders. Their growth story intrigued me enough to learn more about their journey. Supademo recently crossed $1 million in ARR, and like the other products I’ve covered, their early-stage marketing had plenty of interesting elements.

Let’s dive in.

About Supademo

Supademo is a no-code platform that lets you create interactive product demos in minutes. Launched in November 2022, they’ve grown to:

• 1,500+ paying customers

• 60,000+ users

• $1M+ in ARR

About the Team

• Koushik Marka: A serial entrepreneur who previously founded Studiotale, a video marketing agency specializing in demo and explainer videos.

• Joseph Lee: Also a serial entrepreneur, previously founded Freshline (eCommerce for food distributors) and scaled it to $3M in revenue.

• The Supademo team currently has 9 members.

The Premise

• New tool entering a space with established competitors

• Lean team with founder-led marketing

• Most incumbents were enterprise-focused

• Deep domain understanding, especially around product demos

The Marketing Strategy

Supademo’s initial focus was on “busy founders.” The idea: offer a fast, efficient way to build product demos for sales, onboarding, and marketing — without needing a designer or dev. This strategy is reflected in their messaging, content, and channels.

Over time, they shifted focus toward larger companies, targeting product marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

How did they go about it?

• Launch in founder communities

• Free demo giveaways

• Product-Led SEO (inspired by Zapier)

• Product update email outreach

• Ungated product access

• Founder-led content

• In-built shareability

The Launch

They initially launched on Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Reddit — communities filled with early-stage founders. The response was strong and helped generate their first wave of traction. Within the first few weeks, they saw:

• 300 signups

• 200+ user demos

• 4 paying customers

Free Interactive Demos

After launch, they offered free interactive demos to founders on Reddit and Indie Hackers. Founders would share their product, and Supademo would create an interactive demo for free. It was a simple but powerful way to showcase the product’s value, and it drove tons of signups.

Joseph and Koushik repeated this playbook across different platforms and communities. Each time, it sparked a lot of engagement. In total, they created interactive demos for 100+ products.

Outreach via Product Update Emails

They subscribed to product updates from other SaaS tools, then created Supademo demos for new features and sent them back to the team. Since product marketers typically handle those updates, this approach got them straight to decision-makers in their ICP — a clever outbound tactic.

ProductHunt Launch

Compared to other products we’ve covered, Supademo saw strong engagement through their Product Hunt launches. They launched on Product Hunt about a month after their public debut. Their first launch received 250+ upvotes, and subsequent launches garnered 700+ upvotes each. Their most recent launch even became the #1 Product of the Day.

Product-Led SEO

Supademo leaned into SEO early, building a strategy inspired by Zapier’s playbook —leveraging other brands’ visibility and reach.

1. Targeted software task-related "how-to" queries like “How to export a file as PDF in Figma”. Supademo has covered 450+ such use cases, with each page featuring an interactive demo that walks users through the task.

   

2. They also targeted "[Brand] + demo" searches like “Zendesk demo” and “Mixpanel demo.” So far, they’ve created demo pages for 45+ brands and 20 of those pages are ranking in top 10. Supademo focused on products with ICP overlap, crafting tailored interactive demos for each.

   

Both of these approaches helped Supademo reach their ideal customers — even when those customers weren’t actively searching for Supademo itself.

They built this foundation way before demo-led SEO was thing. Today, this strategy accounts for nearly 50% of their organic traffic.

Loginless Demos

Supademo noticed that sign-up friction was preventing users from reaching the “aha” moment. So they made the product accessible without requiring a signup — no registration, no emails, no confirmation steps. Joseph called it Loginless Demos. Users could try the product first and only sign up after experiencing its value.

This shift improved both the quality of signups and overall product adoption.

Free Tools (Bonus SEO Win)

I should have included this as part of SEO but, it deserves a special mention. As a byproduct of their ungated model, they spun off modular tools from their core product and offered them as standalone free tools, optimized for SEO.

These free tools now drive 20% of their organic traffic. In an interview, Joseph mentioned that nearly 11–12% of visitors to the free tools page end up converting into signups.

Founder-Led Marketing

The founders took a 'build in public' approach and stayed highly active in founder communities across platforms.

Koushik engaged with the founder community through Indie Hackers, X, and LinkedIn, consistently sharing updates on Supademo’s user growth, revenue milestones, and progress.

Joseph focused on thought leadership, regularly sharing insights on growth and product updates across LinkedIn, X, Indie Hackers, and Medium. He often wrote about startups, product building, team hiring, fundraising, and more.

Here are some of his top posts:

• LinkedIn post around product onboarding and activation

• Product Hunt Launch Checklist

• My 5-step blueprint for finding the ideal cofounder

• Founder’s Playbook to Raising in a Down Market

One of his recent LinkedIn post about product onboarding got 3K+ engagements.

Shareability

Supademo’s product is inherently shareable. Free users’ interactive demos include a watermark, so when shared or embedded on other sites, it gives Supademo visibility. This likely played a big role in increasing their brand search volume from 0 to 5,000+ in two years — without big-brand campaigns.

Supademo’s Growth Loop

Final Thoughts

Supademo’s growth didn’t come from flashy tactics or one big viral moment. It was the result of showing up every day and doing the small, non-scalable things that compound over time.

They stacked a series of low-friction, high-leverage experiments — whether it was ungating the product, replying to Reddit posts, or creating demos for product update emails. Each move helped reduce friction and get the right people to experience the product.

Their approach reinforces what we’ve seen in other growth stories: early growth is often just about doing the unscalable things.

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This week, I explored Coupa’s early-stage marketing in our ‘Startup Marketing’ series — and it’s growth story is unique in its own way.

What interested me to study about Coupa was, it is a enterprise software. After doing growth studies on PLG and SME segment products, I wanted to understand how enterprise products do their early stage marketing. So, here we are!

About Coupa

Coupa is a business spend management platform that helps enterprise companies manage procurement, expenses, and supply chains. Founded in 2006, Coupa went public in 2016, and was later acquired for $8 billion in 2022. That’s a 16-year journey from 0 to $8B — impressive by any measure.

The Team

Coupa was founded by Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner. Both were working on Oracle’s Procurement Application when they decided to strike out on their own.

Coupa’s early vision was all about making procurement radically simpler, faster, and cheaper — especially for mid-market companies that were getting ignored by big, clunky enterprise software.

The Premise

• The procurement space was dominated by giants like SAP, Oracle, and Ariba

• Coupa was the first open-source procurement software

• It aimed to make the buying experience seamless and intuitive for employees

• Bootstrapped from day one

• The founders had credibility — they were well known in procurement circles due to their work at Oracle.

Marketing Strategy

Coupa’s strategy wasn’t to fight incumbents head-on — it was to expand the market. Their goal was to make procurement software accessible to companies of all sizes, especially those that couldn’t afford Oracle or SAP.

So the strategy was clear: Get in front of finance and procurement teams who wanted to streamline their purchasing process but lacked the budget or IT capacity for heavyweight solutions.

So how did they do it?

• Launched an open-source version of the product

• Tapped into founders procurement network

• Got featured in the procurement blogosphere

Open Source Software

Open source was rare in enterprise software at the time — and almost unheard of in procurement tech. Dave believed it was the future. It aligned with his mission to build software that was user-friendly and dramatically cheaper to own.

By using Ruby on Rails and embracing open source, they were able to build and ship a complex product quickly, with limited resources.

Why it worked?

Procurement automation wasn’t a new problem — the market was mature. Coupa didn’t need product validation; it needed to solve accessibility and affordability.

The open-source approach helped them do both:

1. No red tape — anyone who needed a procurement tool could simply download and deploy the open-source package.

2. No cost barrier — teams could try the product without needing budget approvals.

Now, the next challenge is reach.

SourceForge

SourceForge was the go-to destination for open-source projects back then. It offered everything from downloads to forums to issue tracking.

At the time, SourceForge had 1.5 Million registered users. It gave Coupa the visibility it needed.

Coupa’s SourceForge presence became their initial growth engine — 460+ downloads in the first month, and consistently 500+ downloads every month after that.

By the time they launched the on-demand (SaaS) version, they already had a user base familiar with Coupa — and many became their first paying customers.

Dave’s Procurement Network

Dave had deep roots in the procurement space from his Oracle days. He ran a popular blog called Procurement Central and was widely respected in the online procurement community.

When Coupa launched, his network responded.

Writers from the procurement blogging scene — like Jason Busch from Spend Matters — covered Coupa’s updates, early versions, and SaaS launch.

Coupa also got coverage from procurement trade publications after its launch. After all, who wouldn’t want to write a story about an underdog taking on the big players with a fresh approach?

This visibility drove further downloads, brand awareness, and curiosity — whether people were skeptical or hopeful, they were paying attention.

The Impact

Being a free, open-source platform with plenty of buzz in the procurement space, Coupa racked up over 10,000 downloads in its first year combining both website and SourceForge.

They finally launched the paid version of the product a year later — and even a modest 10% conversion rate, with an early ACV of $15K, would’ve pushed them past $1M in ARR.

Coupa’s Growth Engine

Conclusion

Every successful product we’ve studied so far has had a unique advantage — Coupa’s was open-source. Whether it was a strategic bet or an early conviction, it gave them a powerful wedge into a mature, enterprise-dominated market.

The real genius? They didn’t try to outspend the incumbents — they simply made procurement accessible. In a category where total cost of ownership used to be sky-high, Coupa brought it down to 10% of the norm.

That’s how they created momentum — by opening the gates to a market that was otherwise closed to most.

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In this week’s Startup Marketing series, I covered Jotform — and it was a pretty unique one.

Digging into its early-stage marketing was like opening a time capsule from the pre-social media and early web application era. Twitter and Facebook had only launched in the second half of 2006.

About Jotform

Jotform is an online form builder platform founded in 2006. Today, it brings in $145M+ in revenue, but the early growth was slow and steady. Based on available data, it took around 4 years to hit $1 million in ARR.

The Team

Aytekin Tank started Jotform as a solopreneur and for the first year, he built Jotform alone. He hired Rustu Seyhun as employee #2 to help with the development. Over the next 5 years, he added just one employee per year — slow scaling in every sense.

The Premise

• Bootstrapped from day one

• One man team for the first year.

• First web-based WYSIWYG (drag-and-drop) form builder

• Launched pre-social media and Hacker News era.

• Back then blog search engines like Technorati were a thing.

Jotform’s Marketing Strategy

Jotform’s marketing strategy was to target webmasters and web designers — people who routinely needed to create forms for websites. The goal was to get them using Jotform and encourage feedback and sharing.

So how did Jotform go about it?

• Leveraged ‘blogosphere’ and tech communities forums

• Made the product open and friction-free

  • No signup required to use it

  • Free for all users

• Shareable links for forms

The Launch

Aytekin positioned Jotform as a new kind of web-based form builder — a showcase of what was possible with JavaScript. While other form builders were clunky or code-heavy, Jotform offered a visual, drag-and-drop experience.

With this unique narrative, he reached out to peer bloggers and posted in tech community forums where his target audience hung out.

Blogosphere

Before social media, blogging was how ideas spread. And it wasn’t a one-way monologue like today — people engaged in conversations through comments and shared it in their blogs.

Internet users relied on blog search engines and RSS readers to stay updated with the blogs they followed.

Why the internet history lesson? Just to give you a sense of what getting covered in blogs meant back then — it was the equivalent of going viral on social media today.

Aytekin maintained his own blog and was an active member of the technical blogging community. He used this ecosystem as the launchpad.

He wrote a sequence of posts around the launch - build up, release, and post launch - and each of them garnered great responses.

He also got his peer bloggers to cover Jotform launch.

Online Software Communities

Aside from blogs, Aytekin shared Jotform on forums like Business of Software — one of the top tech communities at the time.

Frictionless Product Access

Aytekin focused on making it as easy as possible for users to explore the product. That mindset led him to break the status quo and do things differently.

Application as the Homepage

The #1 reason people abandon a product page?

They don’t know if it’s worth their time and effort.

Aytekin took this seriously. The result?

Jotform’s homepage was the application itself.

It stayed that way for the first 5 years, until 2011. Users could land on the site and immediately start building a form — no signup forms, no fluff, no marketing distractions.

You expect web users to trust you and invest their time. But why should they? They just met you — and they’re in a rush. They are always in rush because they have been burned many times before by spending hours on sites like yours without getting anything accomplished.

- Aytekin Tank, Founder, CEO, Jotform

The irony? Aytekin built a form builder that didn’t require you to submit a form to use it.

Freemium by default

The #2 big friction point? Paywalls.

Aytekin addressed that by making the product completely free for the first year.

The freemium model also encouraged sharing — users didn’t have to think twice before recommending Jotform because there was no cost barrier. A premium plan was introduced only in 2007, a year after launch. Even then, the freemium plan stayed — and it still exists today.

This opened the door for wider adoption and organic reach through word of mouth.

The Impact

All the early coverage and frictionless product experience gave Jotform the traction it needed.

• 3,611 forms were created in the first five days after launch.

• 562 users signed up to the product.

• It gave Aytekin valuable early feedback on both the product and the business model.

Built-In Virality

Initial traction was great — but what kept the momentum going without ad spend and with a lean team?

Shareable form links.

People used Jotform for everything: contact forms, event registrations, surveys, lead generation — and every form came with its own unique link. Users could copy the code or just share the URL.

So every time someone ran a survey and shared the link in their network, they were also spreading awareness of Jotform.

It was subtle — but powerful.

Jotfom’s Growth Loop

Conclusion

No matter the era or tech trends, the fundamentals of go-to-market haven’t changed:

• Build something that solves a real problem

• Identify and take it to the niche

• Make it ridiculously easy to try

• Give users a reason to share it

We’ve seen the same playbook in companies like Figma, Webflow, Flodesk, Miro — and now, Jotform.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. But it does work.

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In my quest to understand how SaaS products targeting mid-market and enterprise companies approach early-stage marketing, I analyzed Gong.io this week.

To address the elephant in the room - yes, content marketing played a huge role in their growth, and nothing I found suggests otherwise. But I focused on how they executed it and the key decisions that made their strategy work.

I’ve also skipped Gong’s branding campaigns since those came later—around 2019—when they had already crossed $1M+ ARR. Bold moves like employee billboards and Super Bowl ads certainly fueled further growth, but they weren’t critical in the early days.

About Gong

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform. It was launched as a conversational intelligence platform that helped sales leaders review sales conversations at scale and coach their teams.

They achieved $1 million in revenue within 12 months of their public launch. Currently, they are at $300 million ARR with 5,000+ customers. Gong is valued at $7.25 billion.

The Team

Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef co-founded Gong.

The Premise

• Gong entered a new category - conversation intelligence for sales.

• The majority of their audience was not actively looking for a solution, as people weren’t even aware that a solution existed for their problem.

• Gong needed to differentiate itself as a one-of-a-kind tool, rather than being seen as just another sales enablement or coaching software.

• Their target persona were sales and revenue leaders.

• Lean marketing team (with just 3 members).

Marketing Strategy

Considering they entered a new category with a complex solution, Gong’s marketing strategy was to educate sales leaders about the problem it solved to build trust and credibility for their brand and product.

So how did they go about it?

• Evangelised sales conversation intelligence.

• Focused on good old outbound cold calling.

• Hired a product marketer with sales background.

• Created Gong Labs, a data-backed content series.

• Focused on one distribution channel.

• Stayed on top of the mind through email nurturing.

• Contextually outreached to targeted companies.

Outbound to Target List

Before they got traction through content marketing, they focused on cold outbound campaigns to a targeted list of accounts which matched their ideal customer profile.

Amit Bendov onboarded Brendon Cassidy as Gong’s sales advisor/consultant. It was a great decision because Brendon was already passionate about the concept of conversation intelligence for sales and been very vocal in the sales forums.

Brendon helped Gong with their go-to-market motion and helped them close the first 50 customers. The outbound efforts helped Gong gain initial traction before their content marketing efforts gained momentum.

We had a list of companies we knew were our ideal customer profiles, and we did some outbound sales." – Amit Bendov, CEO & Co-Founder, Gong.io

Sales Manager as Product Marketer

Similar to how Figma hired designers as Design Advocates for their GTM team, Gong brought in Chris Orlob as its product marketer. Again a great hiring decision!

Prior to joining Gong, Chris was a regional sales manager before founding a conversational analytics software, Conversature, similar to Gong. So, when he decided to shut down his product, Amit reached out to him and onboarded him as the ‘Director of Product Marketing’.

Chris’s sales background made a significant difference in Gong’s growth and content strategy. Having been a salesperson himself, he deeply understood the challenges, needs, and mindset of Gong's target audience - sales professionals.

Hiring people who have "walked in the shoes of your target audience" is crucial for creating effective content.

- Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist (Former CMO), Gong.

It especially helped Gong in making the best out of data-backed sales insights. Chris’s deep understanding of their ICP helped him to build compelling stories using raw data that resonated with sales executives.

Content Strategy

Gong’s content strategy mirrored its product, which analyzed customer conversations to provide data-backed sales insights.

Their first major initiative was a data-driven ebook, but Chris Orlob saw its viral potential and pushed to ungate the content, turning it into publicly accessible articles. The first piece, published across multiple platforms, received overwhelming engagement, shares, and replies.

Why did it work? Sales advice had traditionally been opinion-based—Gong provided hard data, and people wanted more. This success led to Gong Labs, a dedicated content series focused on helping sales professionals close more deals.

Rather than chasing volume, they prioritized quality over quantity, publishing just 1–2 high-impact articles per month for two years—cementing their reputation as thought leaders.

Content Distribution

Gong’s first data-backed article was published in SalesHacker, Medium Publications (related to sales), LinkedIn, and few other websites.

Later they zeroed down on LinkedIn as their primary content distribution channel.

Why LinkedIn?

Sales professionals spend most of their time there - for education, prospecting, networking, hiring, and job hunting.

Email List and Nurturing

People found each piece of content shared through Gong Lab’s valuable and super actionable. It made them to sign up to Gong’s email list to stay up to date with data-driven sales insights.

As they started building the email list, Gong used email as the second distribution channel to share their latest data driven long form content.

It helped them to nurture leads, build trust, and position Gong as a thought leader in the sales space.

So, by the time leads were ready to buy, they were already raving fans of Gong and people directly reached out to the sales team for demo and quotes.

Contextual Sales Outreach

In addition to email nurturing, Gong’s SDR team did contextually outreached to individuals based on the content they engaged with.

If someone interacted with a sales cheat sheet, instead of a generic cold call, an SDR could reference the material, leading to warmer conversations and a higher likelihood of engagement.

For example:

"Hey Ty, I noticed you downloaded our cheat sheet about Zoom calls yesterday. I wanted to see if it was helpful and if I can answer any questions."

This approach made Gong’s outbound efforts much more effective, as SDRs could initiate conversations on a pretext rather than calling out of the blue.

Wrapping up

Gong’s growth was driven primarily by content marketing and outbound efforts. Their content strategy wasn’t just about building brand awareness - it also generated demand.

Looking back, Gong’s strategy might seem simple and methodical. But I doubt they had it all figured out on day one. It wasn’t a straightforward playbook like:

• Build a sales intelligence product

• Use the product to create marketing content

• Hire a sales manager to write and distribute it

Instead, their success came from hiring the right people, deeply understanding their target persona, and continuously iterating to identify high-leverage growth opportunities. Once they found what worked - Gong Labs - they doubled down.

Unlike other companies we’ve analyzed, Gong achieved virality through content. The takeaway? Find virality within your GTM motion, whether through product (Figma, Flodesk), content (Gong), or demo (Webflow).

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This week, I’m covering Webflow. Unlike other products I’ve analyzed so far, Webflow didn’t have built-in virality. Yet, they managed to gather 20K+ waitlist signups in a week and onboard 10K+ users within three weeks of their beta launch.

About Webflow

Webflow is a website experience platform that empowers modern marketing teams to visually build, manage, and optimize stunning websites that offer both the consumer experience teams expect and the enterprise-grade performance and scale they need.

The Team

Webflow is founded by Vlad Magdalin in 2012. He tried and failed three times before attempting the fourth time after watching the speech "Inventing on Principle" delivered by Bret Victor.

Realizing the complexity of the product, soon he brought in his brother Sergie Magdalin and colleague Bryant Chou (from Intuit) as co-founders.

Currently, Webflow is valued at $4 Billion, with an annual revenue of $212.5 Million and 300K+ customers across the globe.

The Premise

Webflow ventured into empowering designers to build professional websites without writing code.

The challenges:

• It’s a technical product for non-technical users.

• No built-in virality.

• No social media following for the founders.

• Limited financial runway.

• A lean team.

To survive, they needed time and money - which meant finding early traction fast.

Webflow’s Marketing Strategy

Webflow focused on freelancers and agencies - people who built websites for others.

Their strategy was simple: Reach as many people as possible organically to validate the product idea and generate interest.

The goal is to use that early interest to raise additional funds and extend their runway.

How they did it:

• Create a prototype of the product.

• Launch it in relevant communities.

• Get people to share it.

• Build and launch the initial product.

• Focus on user adoption.

The Prototype

With limited resources, building the full product wasn’t feasible. So, Webflow team created a front-end demo - a simple playground that gave users a glimpse of a visual site builder.

Here is that prototype: Webflow Playground

As expected, it garnered a lot of attention, sparked curiosity, and people started asking for a full product.

The Demo Launch

They initially launched on Reddit, Facebook, and Digg communities. But all them fell flat without much engagement.

As a last-ditch effort, they posted on Hacker News - even though it’s a tech community, and Webflow was for designers.

To their surprise, it exploded. That single Hacker News Post generated 5,000+ signups.

Many startups fall into the perfection trap, thinking they need a fully built product before launching. But time and again, we see that people don’t care about perfection - they care about whether you value their feedback and iterate accordingly.

Referral Program

Since Webflow lacked built-in virality, they engineered a way to make it shareable.

They used KickoffLabs to gamify their waitlist:

• Each signed up user got a unique referral link.

• Sharing the link moved them up in the waitlist.

• More shares = earlier access to Webflow.

The impact?

• Hacker News post → 5,000 signups.

• Referral program → 20,000+ additional signups in a few weeks.

Our Hacker News post brought in 5,000+ waitlist signups overnight, but the real growth came afterward. With KickoffLabs' viral mechanism, users shared their referral links to move up in line - driving over 20,000 additional signups in just a few weeks.

- Vlad Magdalin, Co-Founder, Webflow

The Product Launch

After the overwhelming response to the prototype, Webflow applied to Y Combinator (YC) for the second time and got accepted. Participating in the YC Program made a huge difference in Webflow’s existence,

1. Funding extended their runway and eased financial struggles.

2. They built a working product in 11 weeks before YC’s Demo Day.

3. "YC-backed" credibility helped them raise more capital.

4. TechCrunch covered their public launch, boosting visibility.

User Adoption

Webflow onboarded 10,000+ users from a 30K+ waitlist in just three weeks.

But the challenge? Only 50 users became paying customers in the first month.

To retain and convert early adopters, they focused on:

• Product education.

• Building credibility.

Product Education

Webflow helped users make most out of the product by offering: tutorials, templates, and courses.

Tutorials - basic guides on how to use the product.

Template marketplace with pre-built website templates to minimize effort for new users. It also created monetization opportunities for power users, allowing them to create and sell their own templates.

Within two months, they launched ‘Webflow University,’ offering a course on "Building Responsive Websites Without Coding."

Social Proof

People hesitate to invest time in a new tool. Webflow solved this by:

1. Building their own website using Webflow - showcasing its power.

2. Launching a "Built with Webflow" gallery - featuring 1,000+ user-created websites.

All these helped Webflow to grow their revenue at a study phase 7%-8% per month in the early years. They focused on survivability (cash-flow positive) rather than growing at all cost.

Conclusion

Webflow’s growth journey proves that you need less than you think. For startup founders and marketers, the key takeaways are,

• A deep understanding of your target audience is a superpower. Webflow’s Go-to-Market strategy is tailor-made for them - from demos and tutorials to courses and a template marketplace.

• Constraints force innovation. Without their early limitations, Webflow might not have prioritized prototyping, early product releases, or user adoption strategies.

and the key lessons?

• If your product lacks built-in virality, create shareability.

• If your audience struggles with complexity, build guided education.

• If early efforts fail, pivot fast.

Webflow’s story is a playbook in testing, adapting, and making traction happen even without a finished product.

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This week, I covered Miro in the ‘Startup Marketing’ series. I just realized that all the products I’ve analyzed so far accidentally share one thing in common: built-in virality or shareability.

But each one made their product organically shareable in unique ways - and Miro is no exception.

About Miro

Did you know that Miro was RealtimeBoard until 2019?

Founded in 2011 and launching its beta in 2012, Miro has grown into a unicorn startup valued at $17.5 billion, generating $290 million in revenue with over 90 million users.

There are many parallels between Figma and Miro. Like Figma—a collaborative design tool—Miro offered an online collaborative whiteboard solution.

Additionally, Miro adopted a bottom-up GTM strategy, similar to Figma.

But Miro’s growth is unique in its own way. As always, we'll deep-dive into its marketing strategy.

Miro’s Marketing Strategy

From the start, Miro was intentional about both its product and growth strategy, aiming to create a simple, easy-to-use tool with a bottom-up flywheel.

We were thinking how we can build as simple as possible product that can have a growth fly well and that's why we build it around mental model of a whiteboard which is super simple and could be optimized for the fly well of the viral loops

- Andrey Khusid, Co-Founder & CEO, Miro

Before building its whiteboarding solution, Miro operated as a design agency and struggled to brainstorm and share ideas remotely with clients. This gave the idea for them to build an online collaborative whiteboard tool as it met their primary criteria (simple + bottom-up flywheel).

Miro’s growth strategy was simple and solid: create a simple and user-friendly product, give a great product experience, and leverage viral loops.

Here are six marketing tactics that worked for them:

1. Personal network and online communities

2. Startup competitions and events

3. Review websites

4. Chrome extension

5. In-built collaboration

6. Templates

Online Communities and Network

Once they had a working product, they reached out to early adopters through their personal network - family, friends, business partners, and Facebook communities. Since whiteboarding is common for knowledge workers in both personal and professional settings, early users started actively using it.

This early traction helped Miro understand real-world use cases and iterate aggressively, making the product simpler and more valuable.

Startup competition and events

In the early days, Miro participated in multiple startup competitions, winning a few, which provided free PR and visibility in the tech community. These events also generated valuable backlinks as publications covered them.

Some notable competition and events they took part in:

• WebReady: Russia's largest startup competition in internet and mobile technologies. They secured 3rd place in 2012.

  

• Runet Prize: A prestigious national award recognizing contributions to Russia’s internet and IT landscape.

  

• TechCrunch Moscow: A startup event hosting the “Startup Battle.” RealtimeBoard was a finalist and ranked 6th among 44 startups.

  

• HSE Business Incubator: A competition for student business projects, where RealtimeBoard won HSE’s “Team of the Year” award.

  

• RIW 12 (Russian Internet Week 2012), it is a multi-stream three-day conference attended by 15K+ people from various domains.

  

• Cloud 2012: An industry award recognizing achievements in SaaS technology development in Russia.

  

• Creative Business Cup: An international competition and network for creative industries professionals. RealtimeBoard reached the semi-finals.

  

• Youth Innovation Convention, an annual all-Russia event designed to stimulate innovative scientific activity and formation of a community of young Russian science professionals.

  

Education Institutes

Miro strategically targeted the education sector by offering a free pro plan to educational institutions. More educators and schools adopted RealtimeBoard for teaching and brainstorming. This grassroots adoption created organic word-of-mouth growth. Here is a use case shared by a school for Realtime Board.

Reviews

Miro actively encouraged software reviewers to try and write about their product. This led to coverage on sites like MakeUseOf and WhatsNew, creating a domino effect where more reviewers started featuring them.

These reviews helped build credibility and increased search visibility for new users looking for online whiteboarding tools.

Chrome Extension

After gaining initial traction with early adopters, Miro launched a Chrome extension, leveraging Google Marketplace’s vast audience. The extension became one of their primary new user acquisition channels.

It allowed them to tap into users actively looking for productivity tools, driving additional organic installs.

Templates

A common challenge with platform-like solutions is the “blank canvas” problem -users don’t know where to start.

Miro recognized this early and introduced pre-built templates for various use cases, such as startup canvases, project boards, and calendars.

These templates not only improved user adoption but also boosted their SEO by ranking for popular search queries related to templates.

Collaboration

Like Figma, Miro is designed for real-time collaboration - whiteboarding, brainstorming, and planning.

To maximize organic adoption, Miro created viral loops by allowing users to invite teammates, peers, and clients directly into the tool.

Here are some of the ways they used:

• Peer-to-peer invitations via email

• Peer-to-peer invitations via Facebook

• Embed sharing at outer websites and blogs

• “Post to Facebook” option

Conclusion

Miro’s growth story is an inspiration if you're marketing a product with bottom-up potential. These three key initiatives helped them build on the early traction they have got,

• Participating in startup competitions to validate their product and gain free PR.

• Making the product organically shareable through built-in collaboration and viral loops.

• Leveraging Google’s marketplace with a Chrome extension.

Miro’s story reinforces that in the early stages, you need to focus on both scalable and non-scalable initiatives to gain momentum.