What's the most interesting "growth loops" you have seen in tech products?
Lisa Dziuba
13 replies
Recently I spent a lot of time learning about growth loops.
What is a Growth Loop? Simplified version: new users create a sequence of steps that leads to acquiring more users & repeating the loop.
Loops can be viral, content, paid, or sales. Slack, Airtable, Figma, and Product Hunt use loops 🙃
For example, for Product Hunt:
The user creates the product page → % of users launch their product on PH → % user shares Product Hunt page among the community → % people from the community registering on PH to upvote → % new people launch their projects at Product Hunt → the loop repeats. It’s a user-generated content (USC) loop, shared by the user.
Any other cool examples of growth loops you saw?
If anyone is curious, I can share my thoughts on loops which I recently shared in Linkedin long-read.
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Alex Gvozden@alex_gvozden
This is a great post and the question Lisa.
In 2009 we have launched a simple image slider and put a loading logo that was linked to our homepage. Loader was only showing if you had free version. As simple as this is, since slider was really innovative, we constantly had a growth loop. People would see slider on someone else’s site, clicked the logo, got their own free version, put on site, then other people would see it and download. We had tens of millions of downloads and 3 million websites using it, abd really good amount of sales. For a long time only difference between paid and free version was removing that logo :)
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@alex_gvozden
> We had tens of millions of downloads and 3 million websites using it, abd really good amount of sales. For a long time only difference between paid and free version was removing that logo :)
Awesome results :)
I would be definitely interested to learn more about this topic.
@imtiyaz922 Sure!
You can check my article here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/up...
It covers more examples from other startups. More about practice rather then theory.
HubSpot uses behavioral loops for retention. They create manufactured triggers to make users return to the tool more often. For example, you send camping, and then you get an email with a campaign performance after 24 hours
G2 uses content loops. User shares review -> G2 distributes vis SEO and other channels -> new users sign up and loop repeats
@olya_zabalkanskaya thanks for sharing!
> G2 uses content loops. User shares review -> G2 distributes vis SEO and other channels -> new users sign up and loop repeats
This is interesting. One of the founder I know is trying to build content loops with answers to questions. However, he told me that it takes a very long time to get many answers achieve top results in Google.
@olya_zabalkanskaya
> HubSpot uses behavioral loops for retention.
I recently got emails about being not active for a while in HubSpot academy. In case of not activating it, my account would be deleted :) Not a loop but pretty effective.
@lisadziuba I think this is the reason why G2 make pages like top 10 best software that are generated based on user reviews
The original growth loop by hotmail. Free email for everyone and every sent email had the footer "Get your free email at Hotmail". I guess this was the first original viral product. Users signed up for free email, started sending email, recipients saw the footer and signed up on hotmail.
They had 20K users in a month and a million with in 6 months. Note this was way back in mid 90s in the early days of internet and a million was huge back then
@archisman_das This is a great example. I didn't know about this one!
It goes under "the casual contact viral loop", when customers casually invite new customers via normal usage.
@archisman_das great examples of this casual contact viral loop:
Intercom with their chat form
Mailchimp with its branding in their emails