20 business growth hacks that real companies used to get customers, keep them and grow, from scrappy founder moves to pricing and partnership plays. Each one says what they did, why it worked, how much effort and money it takes, and links to the source so you can check it yourself. Last updated 30 October 2026.
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Showing 20 of 20 matching hacks (20 in total)
Product-ledEmailAdded 30 October 2026
Superhuman
Ask users how they'd feel if your product vanished tomorrow
Rahul Vohra asked Superhuman users one question: how would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman? Only 22% said very disappointed, well short of the 40% benchmark Sean Ellis found in companies with real traction. So he segmented the fans, studied what they loved and what held everyone else back, and built the roadmap around both. Over about three quarters the score climbed to 58%.
Why it works
It turns a fuzzy feeling into a number the whole team can push on. Vohra recommends surveying people who used the product at least twice in the last two weeks, and says around 40 responses already gives you a directional read.
Effort
Low
Cost
Free
Best for
Early startups that are not sure if they have product market fit yet
Build a search page for every single thing people want to make
Canva created thousands of template pages, one for each design people search for, like resume templates or certificate templates, plus create pages and feature pages, all in the same structure. Then it translated most of them into dozens of languages. When remote work hit, it quickly spun up Zoom background templates, which still pull in about 85,000 organic visits a month.
Why it works
Each page matches someone who already wants to make that exact thing and drops them into the product. A 2025 analysis estimated about 21,000 template pages alone bring in over 13 million organic visits a month.
Effort
High
Cost
Medium
Best for
Tools with many use cases that people describe in their own search words
Instead of trying to get everyone to write reviews, Yelp put most of its energy into attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers. The site was built to motivate them with praise and attention, let members follow reviewers they liked, and started throwing social events for its frequent reviewers. It also spent its first year focused on San Francisco.
Why it works
For the right people, recognition beats cash. Stoppelman said people come to write reviews as a hobby and to meet other people, and the San Francisco focus built enough critical mass that others joined in.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Medium
Best for
Marketplaces and content platforms that depend on user contributions
Call it a preview, not a beta, and make people ask to get in
Slack spent months handing the product to friendly teams, fixing what they hated, then handing it to bigger groups. When they went public in August 2013 they deliberately avoided the word beta, called it a preview release, and asked people to request an invite. Around 8,000 people did on day one and about 15,000 within two weeks.
Why it works
"Beta" signals flaky. "Preview" signals exclusive. Pairing invite requests with a strong press push meant early users arrived curious instead of skeptical, and every wave of teams sharpened the product before the next one.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Low
Best for
B2B tools that need real teams using them before a full launch
Can't find enough customers? Help new businesses exist
Stripe noticed that founders outside the US had a painful, expensive time setting up a company that could take payments globally. So it launched Atlas, which bundled a US company, a US bank account through Silicon Valley Bank, a Stripe account, tax guidance from PwC and legal guidance from Orrick. Beta pricing was $500, waived for the first 100 founders.
Why it works
Instead of fighting for existing merchants, Stripe grew the pool of new ones, and every Atlas company starts life on Stripe. Bundling launch partners like Silicon Valley Bank, PwC, Orrick and Amazon made the offer bigger than Stripe could build alone.
Effort
High
Cost
Medium
Best for
Platforms and infrastructure businesses whose customers are other businesses
Don't send a link. Grab their laptop and set it up right there
When someone told the Collison brothers they'd try Stripe, they didn't say "great, we'll email you a link". They said "right then, give me your laptop" and set it up on the spot. Y Combinator liked it so much it gave the move a name: the Collison installation.
Why it works
Every "I'll try it later" is a quiet no. Doing the setup for them kills the gap between interest and actual usage, and Paul Graham notes Stripe was famous inside YC for exactly this kind of aggressive early recruiting.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Free
Best for
Founders selling to other founders, developers or small teams they can meet in person
Chamath Palihapitiya told Facebook's growth team to stop obsessing over virality and focus on getting people in the door, to their aha moment fast, and back often. The single rule they landed on: get any new user to 7 friends in 10 days. It became the topic of every Q and A and every all hands.
Why it works
A simple, measurable activation target gives hundreds of people one direction. Chamath's advice is to study your most engaged users, see what they did early, and work backwards to get everyone else there.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Free
Best for
Social, collaborative or network products where value grows with connections
In September 2024 Perplexity gave students who signed up with a .edu email three months of Pro free. The twist: if 500 people from the same school signed up by September 15, everyone at that school got a free year. Purdue hit the goal, so its students, faculty and staff got Pro free for a year.
Why it works
A shared target turns users into recruiters, because everyone wins only if their friends join too. Purdue's IT team even announced the reward itself, which is free distribution you can't buy.
Effort
Medium
Cost
High
Best for
Apps targeting students, offices or any tight group that talks to each other daily
When Gmail launched in 2004 with a then huge gigabyte of storage, you couldn't just sign up. Beta testers could invite a few friends each, and that was it. Within weeks people were bidding on Gmail invites and accounts on eBay, with some going as high as $30.
Why it works
Scarcity makes a free product feel like a prize, and every invite comes from a friend. The waiting list itself became the marketing story.
Effort
Low
Cost
Free
Best for
Products with real capacity limits or a clear wow factor people want to show off
In September 2009 Mailchimp launched its Forever Free plan: up to 500 emails per campaign and 3,000 a month at no cost. Co founder Ben Chestnut pitched it as power to the people, aimed at artists, nonprofits, small businesses and crafters who couldn't justify paying for email software.
Why it works
Free removes the hardest yes. As a customer's list grows past the limits, upgrading feels like a sign of success rather than a sales pitch.
Effort
Low
Cost
Medium
Best for
Tools where usage naturally grows over time, like lists, seats, storage or projects
Booking.com turned A/B testing into a company habit, not a specialist job. HBR reports the company runs some 25,000 tests a year, and that in December 2017 just before the busy holiday season, its director of design proposed a radical experiment: testing an entirely new layout for the homepage.
Why it works
When data beats opinions, small wins stack up week after week. Most tests fail, but the volume means the winners keep coming, and nobody has to win an argument in a meeting first.
Effort
High
Cost
Medium
Best for
Sites and apps with enough traffic to test small changes quickly
Let other businesses get rich building on top of you
Shopify's agencies, app developers and service partners build stores and tools for its merchants and earn from it. In July 2026 Shopify said the app ecosystem earned $1.3 billion last year, 40,000 partners referred a new merchant, and it reworked partner rewards so agencies earn more when the merchants they launch sell more.
Why it works
Partners become a sales and support army you don't pay salaries for. Shopify says that in 2025 the ecosystem generated $6.86 for every dollar Shopify earned.
Effort
High
Cost
High
Best for
Platforms with enough customers that third parties can build real businesses serving them
Warby Parker launched a home try on program so people could test frames without a store. After features in GQ and Vogue, they ran out of try on inventory within 48 hours and had a waitlist of 20,000. Their fix was wonderfully scrappy: the cofounders invited customers to their apartment to try glasses on the dining table.
Why it works
Removing the try before you buy objection made buying glasses online feel safe. Fast Company reports they sold a pair to everyone who visited the apartment, a strong hint that seeing glasses in person still mattered.
Effort
High
Cost
Medium
Best for
Online brands selling things people normally want to touch or try first
Make every use of your product a demo for someone new
Calendly's growth has been mostly organic for a simple reason: when you send someone your Calendly link to book a meeting, they use Calendly too. People who like the experience start using it themselves. The founder had raised just $550,000 before a $350 million round valued it at over $3 billion.
Why it works
The person receiving the link gets value before signing up for anything. TechCrunch reported Calendly was already profitable and had about 10 million monthly users, up 1,180% in a year.
Effort
Low
Cost
Free
Best for
Any product that people use with someone outside their company: scheduling, forms, payments, e-signing
Make the free plan full featured and cap only the group
Zoom's free plan wasn't a crippled demo. One to one calls had no time limit, and only when a third person joined did the 40 minute cap kick in. Marketing head Janine Pelosi said the number came from the average time people spend in meetings.
Why it works
A weak free plan makes your brand look bad in front of the other person on the call. Keeping it great means every free meeting is a good advert, and the cap only bites when a group, usually a team, gets real value.
Effort
Low
Cost
Medium
Best for
Collaboration tools where the free user's guests see the product too
Duolingo noticed that people with ambitious daily goals were actually less likely to be on a streak, even when they showed up every day. So they split the two: one lesson now keeps your streak alive, and the bigger daily goal is tracked separately. They A/B tested it like they test almost everything.
Why it works
Lowering the bar for "you showed up today" builds the habit first. Duolingo says the change lifted Day 14 retention by 3.3% and daily active learners by 1%, and that learners on a 7 day streak are 2.4 times more likely to come back the next day.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Free
Best for
Any habit app, learning product or subscription where daily return visits matter
Costco's hot dog and soda combo has cost $1.50 for decades. When Craig Jelinek told cofounder Jim Sinegal they were losing money on it, Sinegal reportedly told him that if he raised the price of the hot dog, he would kill him, so figure it out. In 2022, with inflation near a four decade high and Jelinek now CEO, his answer to whether the price would rise was one word: no.
Why it works
A famous, never changing price is a promise customers can see and remember. CNBC notes most of Costco's profit comes from membership fees, so the hot dog does its job by keeping members loyal.
Effort
Medium
Cost
High
Best for
Membership, retail and subscription businesses where trust drives renewals
For years Atlassian was known for having no sales team. Everything starts free, people try it, and when they hit seat limits (10 users for most products) or the trial ends, they pay with a card. Admins add seats in a few clicks. Sales only steps in once a customer crosses a strict annual spend threshold.
Why it works
Self serve removes the ceiling of how many reps you can hire. Atlassian says the model lets it spend about 15% of revenue on sales and marketing and 35%+ on product, roughly the reverse of most software companies.
Effort
High
Cost
Medium
Best for
B2B SaaS with lots of small and mid sized customers and a product people can learn alone
Before Robinhood had an app, it had a simple site: commission free trading, stop paying up to $10 per trade, sign up with your email. After signing up you saw how many people were ahead of you and behind you. A Hacker News post sent it viral overnight, and they got about 10,000 signups the first day, 50,000 the first week and almost a million before launch.
Why it works
A visible queue turns waiting into a game and makes people want to move up. Robinhood's founders say they borrowed the idea from the Mailbox app's waitlist.
Effort
Low
Cost
Free
Best for
Consumer apps with a sharp, easy to explain promise that are not ready to launch yet
Turn superfans into ambassadors and let them build your templates
Ben Lang started out as a Notion fan tweeting his templates, and later became its founding Head of Community. To launch the Ambassador program the team simply tweeted a form asking superusers to get involved, and around a thousand people applied within the first few weeks. Ambassadors ran local groups, events and YouTube channels, and the community's own templates became Notion's template gallery.
Why it works
Users teaching users solves onboarding and spreads the word at once. Notion paid ambassadors back with early access to features, AMAs with the team, a private Slack group, swag and grants to host local events, and the gallery now holds tens of thousands of mostly community made templates.
Effort
Medium
Cost
Low
Best for
Flexible tools with a blank page problem and a passionate early user base
Every hack is written up from the linked source, checked on the day it was added. Numbers are as reported by that source, often by the company itself, so treat them as claims, not audited results. Effort and cost are our own rough judgement. Some of these are from years ago and the platforms have changed since, so test before you copy, and stay within each platform's rules and local advertising law. Company and product names belong to their owners, and we are not affiliated with any of them.
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