Ask a marketer, “How does my product grow?” They'll reply:
Ads, affiliates, sales, social, yada yada yada
They’re describing top-down growth. Your classic funnel. Pour more in. Get more out. Here’s the problem.
The best marketers think less about funnels. More about loops.
Loops feed themselves. The actions of one user create an output which create a new user.
Let's look at some examples.
Some products improve with more users. So there's a personal incentive to invite new users.
e.g. Fantasy football, Slack, Trello
Some products have financial incentives to invite new users.
e.g. Dropbox, PayPal, Tesla
Some products are so good, people just like talking about them.
e.g. DoubleTree, Stripe, Game of Thrones
Some products leverage users content to grow their own organic traffic.
e.g. Quora, Reddit, Stack Overflow
Some products attract new users simply by being noticeable. Lime's bright green is not a coincidence.
e.g. Lime, Square, ChargedUp
Some products incentivise users to promote their content for them.
e.g. Meetup, ProductHunt, Typeform
Some products grow by embedding themselves on other platforms.
e.g. Trustpulse, Intercom, Algolia
Most people think you build the product then you market it. Thinking in loops means you build the marketing into the product.
The product doesn't precede the marketing. The product is the marketing.
Writing this just now I realised all the different loops at play at Indie Hackers:
Each one leverages existing users to create new users!
Big credit to Brian Balfour and Casey Winters. They've written a load of great stuff on this topic. This article is really just text book notes. Brian's actually been on the IH podcast and discussed Growth Loops Indie Hackers Podcast
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Thanks for reading — Harry
Sent from my iPhone
Just delightful to read as always @harrydry
Cheers Gordon. Appreciate it.
Good stuff Harry.
Distribution of a product is generally underrated.
Thinking in feedback loops is a useful mental model for that.
Cheers Anthony. Don't quite get the last line. Can you elaborate.
As in how quickly you can get feedback on you're ...
oh, by feedback loops what I mean is rewarding users for their actions to incentivize them to continue that action.
it doesn’t entirely relate to everything you just wrote
but if you want users to market your product for you then one way to do that is by rewarding them somehow
Great content as always, Harry.
I remember "embeds" used to be a great way to increase your backlink profile/SEO with the right keywords across every site that has you embedded. A lot of calculator sites still do this.
Ahh yes! A nice 2nd order effect on embeds. Do you know if it still works or if Google wise against it now?
Short answer: No.
What Google says ≠ What Google does
Most things that Google points out and wants to penalize, they end up not doing much. Look at unorganic links, guest blogging, etc.
The only grand problem this could have is if it contains keywords in every single embed due to Google's Penguin Update. But rotating keywords in embeds per ID would still probably work:
etc.
An old client of mine got a penalty for this, while another one keeps using this tactic and everything is fine.
I guess it all comes down to how risk averse you are 🙂
Marketing loops is the exact description of something I've been looking for for a while now!
I think this is one of the key factors which make one product stand out from another. Not only because it is in incredibly valuable marketing machine, but also because it's quite difficult to implement properly, both technically and conceptually.
What is nuru massage, lol. Great post harry.
Awesome Harry! Bookmarking.
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Yes. Great shout!
Reminds me of Apple's Sent with my iPhone which I just added to the piece.
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