Make your product sign its own work
Every email, invoice or page your product sends to non-users can introduce you to your next customer.
Hotmail had a free product and not much money for marketing. Investor Tim Draper suggested an ad at the bottom of every email users sent: “P.S. Get your free email at Hotmail.” It was contentious. Would people hate a plug stuck onto their private messages? The team compromised by dropping the “P.S.” and setting the line clearly apart from the message.
It worked because, as Draper’s partner Steve Jurvetson wrote, every outbound message still carried an ad plus a subtle endorsement from the sender. According to the investors’ write-up, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users in its first year and a half while spending less than $500K on marketing, advertising and promotion. Their firm called the pattern “viral marketing.”
Look at what your product already sends into the world: emails, invoices, shared docs, embeds, exports, booking pages. Add a small, honest credit with a link to the one non-users see most. Make it useful and easy to spot, never sneaky, and consider letting paying customers remove it. Distribution doesn’t get much cheaper than this.
The example
- Instead of
- “Invoice #1042. Thanks for your business!”
- Try
- “Invoice #1042. Thanks for your business! Sent with Plunger, free invoicing for freelancers.”
Before you flush
List every email, file or page your product sends to non-users, then add a small “Made with [Product]” link to the one seen most often.