6 Product-led user acquisition strategies to supercharge your SaaS growth
Episode #67
Hola amigos!
In today’s issue, we talk about the 6 product-led user acquisition strategies to supercharge your SaaS growth.
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Friends,
Product-led user acquisition is when you’re using your product to generate more users/leads. In simple terms, your users bring in more users.
It’s super scalable and efficient as you can probably imagine. So much so that billion-dollar companies like Slack, Calendly are built on top of this strategy. These are known as Growth Loops.
Here are 6 product-led user acquisition strategies you can steal from the big guys.
1. Word of mouth - Example: Jira. Product managers who use Jira tell other product managers about Jira. You collect and build your tribe around the product.
2. Invitation - Example: Figma - When someone sends you a Figma file, you receive an invitation to sign up to the platform. Works best for a freemium pricing model. Not so much if you offer a free trial.
3. Watermarks - Example: Mailchimp - Anytime the user sends an email via mailchimp, the recipient sees the watermark and signs up to check out the product. Modern products like Beehiiv, Substack, Loops follow this strategy.
4. User-generated content - Example: Webflow - Webflow incentivizes creators to build templates which end up being powered by Webflow (watermark). These are also indexed by Google driving even more traffic and more visibility towards Webflow.
5. Side-project marketing - Example: Ahrefs - Ahrefs has a free keyword checker which is indexed by Google. People check out the “side project” and in term check out Ahrefs. Hubspot also does something similar with its free CRM.
6. Integration - Example: Wordpress - WP plugins made on top of the product drive users towards the parent product. Integrations & API connectors are an underrated channel to utilize.
Pretty sweet amirite?
Take a screenshot of your GrowthShot
SaaS product marketing (finally) on autopilot
“Content is eating the world” - or should I say AI-generated content is eating the world?
Whatever the case, the written word isn’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the need to grab users’ attention towards SaaS products.
In fact, with the commoditization of content, the differentiating element becomes HOW companies use this commodity to grow their SaaS product.
On the road to finding PMF and profitability, customer acquisition costs are the biggest bottleneck.
This means there are opportunities to explore that not only help reduce SaaS CAC, but also optimize key metrics that improve SaaS unit economics like retention & churn.
While working with over 100 SaaS companies, I’ve realized that MarketCurve is best positioned to tackle a pressing need that every SaaS company has - creating good copy/content that is aligned with their product growth goals.
To solve this problem, we’re combining 3 big forces: (a) the power of the gig economy (b) The free distribution of internet market networks and (C) generative AI.
Using these 3 levers, we aim to connect SaaS startups with specialist SaaS product copywriters from around the world to execute and collaborate on their product marketing from a single place.
Think Uber but across the entire SaaS product growth/marketing spectrum - product acquisition, product engagement & product retention.
Collaboration is at the heart of this exercise - with streamlined progress reporting, feedback reviews, approvals and communication. All done from a single place.
The goal is to design a virtual 24*7 product marketing arm for SaaS companies that optimizes their unit economics at the grass-root level while enabling them to craft compelling narratives around their brand at scale on the macro level.
If this sounds like you (or you know someone who does) then shoot me a text at (sb@marketcurve.org). I’m all ears :)
Cheers,
Shaunaq