Growth loops

If you want to grow your product’s user base, remember that scalable growth is driven by “loops”. And each loop is deeply embedded in the “DNA” of your company.

Today we will discover 3 things:
1. That your “growth DNA” is the systems that you build
2. How these systems create growth loops
3. A shortlist of exactly which systems you need—because there are 6 of them

But let’s start with an example growth loop: The USG-SEO growth loop
“USG” stands for “user-generated content”, and SEO of course stands for organic search traffic. This is a growth loop that’s used by companies like LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, and StackOverflow… and many others.

StackOverflow is a Q&A website for developers. If you do anything with development, it’ll be your bible and holy Source-o-Truth. On StackOverflow people, post questions (related to development), and other developers answer them. Simple enough.

Here’s the simple mechanic of how StackOverflow drives growth…
1. Create question — users post (very specific, dev-related) questions
2. Ranking — StackOverflow makes sure that those question pages are perfectly SEO-optimized. Google loves that and quickly starts ranking the page for its specific keyword
3. SEO traffic — other people with the same question find the page in Google and click on it
4. Funnel — people love how the site answers their question, so they sign up as a user
5. Activation — Finally, that new user decides to post another question…

And that completes a cycle.

You wouldn’t really call this “viral growth” because the user doesn’t have to share anything. He’s not recommending the product to his friends. In fact, he can be an anonymous user and doesn’t even know the people that will find his question page in the future.

And yet…

There’s certainly that viral dynamic here.

And that’s the cool part.

Because even though there is no “viral sharing”, the growth curve of StackOverflow is viral nonetheless. But it’s not “traditional” virality (think: Facebook or Dropbox), but rather it’s some sort of engineered virality.

Now, surely there are more aspects to the success of StackOverflow (spoiler: they have multiple growth loops, that feedback into each other)… but let’s focus on their “growth DNA” for just this part.

What makes this loop work?
1. The right architecture: this is not a hack. There’s a strategy here—a deep connection between the product and the distribution process. All the pieces fit together. Content-heavy sites and Google… are meant to be together