Growth & Strategy
After 7 years of building websites and running marketing campaigns for SaaS and e-commerce clients, I made a discovery that changed everything. Most businesses are obsessed with traditional marketing funnels — acquisition at the top, conversion in the middle, retention at the bottom. Linear, predictable, expensive.
But here's what I learned the hard way: the most successful products I've worked with weren't using funnels at all. They were using loops.
When I started analyzing why some clients saw explosive growth while others plateaued, the pattern became clear. The winning companies had accidentally built systems where their existing users became their acquisition channel. Their product experience drove more product usage, which drove more users.
This realization forced me to completely rethink how growth loops fit into product marketing — and why most teams get this relationship backwards.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Let's dive into why sustainable growth comes from loops, not linear funnels.
Walk into any SaaS company and ask about their product marketing strategy. You'll hear the same story: "We drive awareness through content and ads, convert visitors through optimized landing pages, onboard users with email sequences, and retain them with feature announcements."
This is the traditional product marketing playbook, and it's everywhere:
It's the AARRR funnel, and every marketing team knows it by heart. The problem? This approach treats growth like a manufacturing process — raw materials (prospects) go in one end, finished products (customers) come out the other.
Why does this exist? Because it's measurable, predictable, and feels controllable. Marketing teams can optimize each stage, sales teams can forecast based on funnel metrics, and leadership can budget for growth by increasing input spend.
But here's where conventional wisdom fails: sustainable growth doesn't come from perfecting a linear process. It comes from creating systems where your existing users generate your next users. Every dollar you spend on acquisition is a dollar you'll need to spend again tomorrow. Every user who refers another user is working for you forever.
Traditional product marketing optimizes for conversion rates. Growth loop thinking optimizes for compounding effects.
Who am I
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS
and Ecommerce brands.
I discovered this the hard way working with a B2B SaaS client who was burning through $50K monthly on paid ads with mediocre results. They had a solid product, decent conversion rates, and all the standard product marketing pieces in place. But their CAC was climbing and retention was flat.
During our strategy sessions, I noticed something interesting in their analytics. Their highest-value customers weren't coming from our carefully crafted acquisition funnels. They were coming from referrals and organic mentions.
Digging deeper, I found that when users achieved success with the platform, they would naturally share their results on LinkedIn, mention the tool in industry forums, and recommend it to colleagues. But this was happening accidentally — we weren't doing anything to encourage or amplify it.
Meanwhile, we were spending thousands optimizing landing pages for cold traffic that converted at 2%, while ignoring the warm introductions that converted at 40%.
That's when I realized we were thinking about product marketing backwards. Instead of focusing on how to market TO users, we should have been focusing on how to market THROUGH users. The product experience itself needed to become our primary marketing channel.
This wasn't about adding a referral program or social sharing buttons — those are just features. This was about fundamentally restructuring how we thought about the relationship between product and marketing. Instead of marketing driving product adoption, the product needed to drive marketing amplification.
The conventional approach treats product and marketing as separate functions that hand off to each other. Growth loops require them to become a single, integrated system.
My experiments
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood that our best acquisition was happening organically, I shifted our entire approach from optimizing conversion funnels to building and amplifying natural sharing loops.
Step 1: Loop Discovery
Instead of starting with buyer personas or customer journey maps, I analyzed our highest-retention users to understand what made them naturally share. I found three distinct patterns:
Step 2: Experience Architecture
Rather than building separate marketing campaigns, I restructured the product experience to amplify these natural behaviors. For the success broadcasting loop, we added easy-to-share result visualizations right into the product interface. For the problem-solving loop, we created public case studies from user wins. For collaborative workflows, we built sharing mechanics directly into key features.
Step 3: Loop Measurement
Traditional product marketing measures conversion rates and cost per acquisition. Growth loops require different metrics:
Step 4: Integration Strategy
The key insight was treating every product feature as a potential marketing touchpoint. Instead of separate product roadmaps and marketing campaigns, we created integrated experiences where product improvements directly enhanced viral potential, and marketing insights informed product development priorities.
This approach required close collaboration between product, marketing, and engineering teams — something that's impossible with traditional funnel thinking but essential for effective distribution strategy.
The transformation was dramatic. Within six months, our organic acquisition increased by 300% while our paid acquisition costs dropped by 60%. But the real revelation was in the retention numbers.
Users who came through growth loops had significantly higher lifetime value than those who came through traditional acquisition. Why? Because they understood the product's value before they even signed up. They'd seen real results from people they trusted.
More importantly, these users became part of the loop themselves much faster. While traditional acquired users took 3-4 months to become advocates, loop-acquired users started sharing within 2-3 weeks.
The compound effect was remarkable. Each month, our existing user base generated more new users than the previous month, creating exponential growth that didn't require proportional increases in marketing spend. We'd moved from renting attention to building a growth system that got stronger with every user.
But perhaps the most significant change was strategic. Instead of quarterly campaigns and funnel optimization, we now focused on product experiences that naturally encouraged sharing. Every feature discussion included "how does this enhance the loop?" Every user interview explored "what made you want to tell others?"
The growth loop didn't just change our marketing approach — it transformed how we thought about product development, customer success, and even hiring priorities.
Learnings
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this loop-first approach across multiple client projects, here are the seven critical lessons I learned:
The biggest shift was realizing that sustainable growth comes from building systems, not optimizing campaigns. Traditional product marketing treats each quarter as a fresh start. Growth loops create momentum that builds over time, making year two easier than year one.
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For SaaS companies, focus on collaborative features that require invitations, success sharing mechanisms that broadcast results, and integration points where your tool becomes part of users' public workflows.
For e-commerce stores, build loops around user-generated content, referral mechanics tied to purchase behavior, and social proof systems that turn customers into ambassadors through their natural buying patterns.
What I've learned