How to use 'shareable features' to grow SaaS products
Hey there,
Charlie here 👋
I'm a full-time product manager in B2B SaaS and an indie hacker on nights and weekends.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to grow SaaS products and thought I'd share my thoughts on how to do this using shareable features.
Lets get into it...
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What are shareable features?
Shareable features are those that your customers derive success from and therefore feel naturally compelled to share with others or promote in some way.
Every time a customer shares this with their audience it's free marketing for you and a free recommendation of your product.
There are lots of ways to engineer this behaviour and I've broken down the top 3 below:
The best examples
1. ProductHunt
The most relevant example for SaaS founders is the ‘Featured On ProductHunt’ (PH) widget:
Every time a founder includes this widget on their page, not only are they adding social proof, but they are marketing PH too.
And with over 50,000 companies launching on the platform - it generates a lot of free marketing!
2. GummySearch
GummySearch is a Reddit audience research tool.
It helps you find subreddits and get more conversions from marketing on Reddit.
All GummySearch users can publically share audiences they create to show off their marketing tips.
For example, here’s an audience I made earlier with subreddits discussing topics related to startup founders.
Potential customers can view this page without signing up and see the value GummySearch provides.
You'll notice how the page contains multiple calls to action to sign up.
3. Beehiiv
Beehiiv is a SaaS platform for newsletter creators. They are masters of shareable features and creating hype.
But their strategy can be applied to pretty much any platform that tracks a key metric.
I myself am a newsletter creator and have participated in the shareable nature of the platform. Take this tweet I shared earlier this month.
This was me sharing how many of my readers clicked on links in my email. It's an important metric that Beehiiv tracks for me.
I included a screenshot of the UI widget within Beehiiv that displays this metric within the tweet. There are hundreds of these types of posts from newsletter creators every month.
Over time others online will start to recognise the UI and think that Beehiiv is where they need to be hosting their newsletter.
It’s a very clever but subtle ‘social engineering’ strategy that is helping all kinds of platforms grow online and it's 100% down to Beehiiv making their metrics into a hyper-shareable feature.
Can your SaaS use shareable features?
Most likely - yes! To find out, you need to pin down the unique value users get from using your product.
You need to determine what success looks like for them. That could be:
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A time or cost-saving
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Earning additional revenue
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Achieving entertainment value
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Adding social proof/validation
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or one of countless others…
Once you know this then it becomes about finding ways to engineer users to share that with others.
But there is one key aspect to bear in mind…
The more users you have, the more powerful the ‘network effect’ of shareable features becomes. So if you’re still finding your first users - perhaps keep this one in your back pocket for now.
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