Lenny DistilledGrowth → Acquisition
It's very hard to manufacture product network effects if they aren't there from the get go. So if you have inherent product network effects, that's when I think layering on referral loops and viral loops... then it's really powerful.
If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? And if the answer is no, then why would they tell other people about it?
You want to be thinking about how your product can grow scalable pretty early on... It's not about getting a bunch of users before you have a product that works. It's about thinking strategically about how this product's going to grow itself when it's ready to do so.
New users, they'll sign up for Snyk, they'll connect their GitHub accounts, Snyk will scan their code, will find vulnerabilities, will automatically create Snyk-branded pull requests to fix those vulnerabilities. Other devs in the repo will see and interact with those PRs, and some of them will follow links to Snyk, create accounts and some of them will connect their own repos, and so the loop continues.
Seventy percent of our signups come through that viral loop. And then, of those signups, then they're usually solo users and then they start to invite team members in and then the team starts using Calendly and then usually the head of that team either inbounds to us or we have some sort of PQL data to know we should go after that team lead.
If I'm going to pay you money I owe you for splitting dinner on Venmo, or a business expense that I'm paying you, you're my vendor on PayPal, or anything that's allowing me to just pay you money I owe you and I have to use a product to do so, whoever is collecting the money from me is going to make an account on that product if necessary to claim their hard earned money.
People mistake product-led acquisition for referral programs, which it is not. Because the referral programs are a tact on incentive trying to give people something to encourage them to invite because they otherwise are not inviting.