The PM — Product Manager
Your product's output MUST be its marketing — otherwise, no growth hack will save you.
Kfir, we've talked about this before — the core principle hasn't changed: *your product has to create value when shared, not just when used solo. That's the non-negotiable foundation. Everything below builds on that. Let me lay out the strategies that actually work when the founder's face and personal network are completely out of the equation. --- Build the Viral Loop Into the Product's Core Job-to-Be-Done The product output itself must be the marketing. Think about what Loom, Calendly, and Figma got right — every time a user uses the product, someone outside the product sees it. A Calendly link in an email is an ad. A Loom video shared with a colleague is a demo. If your product's output lives inside a dashboard nobody else ever sees, you have zero viral surface area. The person who benefits here is the recipient — they get value before they ever sign up, which is the strongest acquisition hook that exists. Challenge: This requires you to architect virality into the product from day one, not bolt it on later. If your core use case is solo and private, you'll need to rethink the workflow to include a shareable artifact. --- Freemium With a Strategic Constraint, Not a Crippled Product Give away enough value that users become dependent, then gate the thing that scales. The data is clear — PLG companies are driving CAC below $300 versus 3-5x higher in sales-led models. But here's where most founders mess this up: they cripple the free tier so badly that nobody gets to the "aha moment." The user who benefits is the one who gets real value for free. The user who converts is the one who hits a natural ceiling — team seats, storage, advanced analytics — not an artificial wall. Challenge: Getting the free/paid line wrong is existential. Too generous and you never monetize. Too stingy and nobody sticks around to tell anyone. --- Embedded Referral Loops With Tangible, Immediate Rewards Reward the referrer with something they actually want — not a badge, not "karma." 62% of SaaS companies report that referrals drive 10%+ of their business, and 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations over any ad. Dropbox's extra storage for referrals worked because storage was the thing users actually needed more of. The reward has to be inside the product's value chain. Challenge: Referral fraud is real. You need abuse detection from day one, or you'll burn through credits rewarding bots. --- Make User-Generated Content the Distribution Engine Let users create templates, workflows, or assets that live on the open web. Notion's template gallery is the gold standard — users create templates, share them publicly, and every template is a landing page that drives signups. The person who benefits is the creator (they get status and audience) and the discoverer (they get instant value). This is a two-sided flywheel that compounds without any founder involvement. Challenge: You need a critical mass of quality content before this works. Early on, you may need to seed it yourself or incentivize power users heavily. --- API and Integration-First Architecture Be where your users already are — inside their existing tools. When your product shows up inside Slack, inside Notion, inside a CRM, you're getting distribution through someone else's platform. Every integration touchpoint is a "Powered by [YourProduct]" moment. The stakeholder who wins is the user who doesn't have to context-switch. The stakeholder who loses is any competitor who built a walled garden. Challenge: Integrations are expensive to build and maintain. As a solo founder, pick the one integration where your target user already spends 80% of their day, and nail that first. --- Community-Led Growth Through Self-Selecting Channels Launch on Product Hunt, build a Discord or community space, and let early adopters become evangelists. But here's the key — the community has to be about the problem space, not your product. If you build a community around "people who struggle with X," your product becomes the natural answer. The humans who benefit are the members who get genuine help; the product benefits because every conversation is organic demand generation. Challenge: Communities take 6-12 months to compound. This is a long game, and it requires someone (or something automated) to keep the space alive and valuable in the early months. --- AI-Powered Onboarding That Gets Users to Value in Under 60 Seconds The fastest path to sharing is the fastest path to value. Current data shows AI-driven onboarding is pushing activation rates above 50%. If a user can't articulate what your product does for them within the first minute, they'll never tell anyone about it. The person who benefits is the new user who doesn't waste 20 minutes configuring settings. The person who loses is the competitor with a 14-step setup wizard. Challenge: "Fast onboarding" doesn't mean "skip onboarding." You still need to collect enough context to personalize the experience — you just need to do it invisibly. --- My Honest Assessment Kfir, here's the thing I keep coming back to with you: the strategies above only work if the product's core loop is inherently shareable. If it's not, no referral program or community will save you. That's not a marketing problem — it's a product architecture problem, and it has to be solved before you write a single line of growth code. The highest-leverage move you can make right now is to answer one question: "When my user finishes using my product, what artifact do they create that someone else needs to see?" If you can't answer that clearly, that's your #1 priority — not growth tactics. If you can* answer it, then the freemium + embedded viral loop + one killer integration combo will get you further than any amount of founder tweeting ever would. The data backs this up: PLG companies are growing ARR 40% faster with dramatically lower acquisition costs. The market has spoken. Build the growth into the product itself, and the product does the selling for you.
