How did Calendly go from 0 to 10M users?

Calendly is a $3B powerhouse with over a 10M user base. What is the secret sauce for Calendly’s success? 1. PLG The key to growth for most SaaS companies lies in mastering product-led growth (PLG). Here's how it works: your product takes center stage, and your marketing follows. Think back to how you first discovered Calendly. More often than not, you probably stumbled upon it when someone asked you to book a call on Calendly. In this scenario, your introduction to the product came first, establishing a connection between you and the product. Companies relying on product-led growth to get initial success to spend most of their efforts on designing an unparalleled user experience than on marketing or sales. 2. Unique Proposition Calendly's proposition is straightforward: book calls without going back and forth to find the right time, with a simple UX. But how did they achieve success? The initial success came from creating a viral network effect supported by the freemium model. Users shared the link across their network to book calls, creating a network effect. As the product is initially free to use, new users explore the product and eventually become regular users. 3. Go-to-market strategy How did Calendly acquire its first 1000 users? The founder reached out to former colleagues and schools to use Calendly to schedule parent-teacher meetings. 4. Website traffic breakdown Monthly the website receives 37.12 M monthly traffic, with 70% of traffic coming from direct sources and 30% from other sources. One of the major traffic sources is their blog, which brings in organic traffic of 498.3k, saving millions in marketing costs. Over time, Calendly built a massive backlink setup of 171.2M backlinks, giving it a strong authority score of 67, with 440k domains referring to its site and helping it grow. 5. Speaking of social media, Linkedin brings the majority of the traffic to the site. The user base for both Linkedin and Calendly is primarily made up of sales reps, recruiters, and customer service personnel. Calendly's team understands this and creates content around sales and recruiting to resonate with their target audience. If you liked this case study do follow me on Twitter at @Prantish_ai where I will share more such marketing case studies.