I once burned through $76,000 in ad spend in a single quarter and got almost nothing to show for it. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It was early in my career, and I was convinced that if I just poured enough money into Google and Facebook, the customers would come flocking. I was wrong. Dead wrong.
That painful experience taught me a lesson that has since been worth millions: you can't buy growth. You have to build it into your product. After that expensive failure, I threw out the old playbook and started from scratch. What emerged was a simple, almost counterintuitive framework that I’ve used to grow multiple companies, including my last startup, RemoteTeam, which was acquired by Gusto. This framework led to 5x growth in just 12 months. This is the story of how it works.
The Vanity Metric Trap
Most startups are obsessed with the wrong things. They chase vanity metrics like website traffic, social media followers, and email subscribers. These numbers look great in a pitch deck, but they don't actually mean anything. They don't tell you if your product is any good or if your customers are happy. They're just a distraction.
I fell into this trap myself. I was so focused on getting more eyeballs on our website that I completely ignored what those eyeballs were doing once they got there. Were they signing up? Were they using the product? Were they telling their friends? I had no idea. And because I wasn't measuring the right things, I was making all the wrong decisions.
The One Thing That Matters
If you're serious about growth, you need to focus on one thing and one thing only: the core action that creates value for your users. That's it. That's the secret. Everything else is a distraction.
For Dropbox, that action was adding a file to a shared folder. For Facebook, it was connecting with a friend. For Slack, it was sending a message to a channel. For RemoteTeam, it was a manager approving a team member's time off request. What's the one action that, once a user takes it, they "get" your product? That's your North Star.
Once you've identified that core action, your entire company should be organized around getting more users to take it more often. That's the only thing that matters.
The Viral Marketing Framework
This framework is all about building a self-perpetuating growth engine around that core action. It consists of four simple steps:
Step 1: Identify the Core Action
As I said, this is the most important step. To find your core action, you need to talk to your users. Find the ones who are getting the most value out of your product and ask them what they're doing. What's the one thing they couldn't live without? What's the feature that made them recommend your product to a friend?
At MovieLaLa, my second company, we thought the core action was rating a movie. We were wrong. After talking to our most active users, we realized the core action was adding a movie to their watchlist. That was the "aha!" moment. That was the moment they understood the value of our product. So we rebuilt the entire app around that one action.
Step 2: Build the Viral Loop
A viral loop is a process where every new user brings in at least one more new user. It's the holy grail of growth. And the key to building a successful viral loop is to bake it into your product.
Think about the Dropbox example. When you add a file to a shared folder, you have to invite other people to that folder. And when they join, they have to install Dropbox. And when they install Dropbox, they'll start adding their own files to their own shared folders. And so on, and so on. It's a brilliant, self-perpetuating loop.
At RemoteTeam, our viral loop was built around our time-off approval feature. When a manager approved a team member's request, that team member would get an email notification. And in that email, there would be a small, subtle link that said "Powered by RemoteTeam." It wasn't pushy. It wasn't salesy. It was just a simple, helpful attribution. But it was enough. Every time a manager approved a request, they were unknowingly planting a seed for a new user.
Step 3: The Referral Engine
A referral program is a great way to supercharge your viral loop. But most referral programs are terrible. They're either too complicated or they offer the wrong incentives. A good referral program should be simple, generous, and aligned with your core action.
At RemoteTeam, we offered a simple, two-sided referral program. If you referred a new company, both you and the new company would get a $100 credit. It was a win-win. And because the credit was tied to our core action (paying for the service), it was a powerful incentive for users to spread the word.
Step 4: SEO and Content
SEO and content are the fuel for your viral engine. They're how you get new users into the top of your funnel. But you can't just write a bunch of blog posts and hope for the best. Your content strategy needs to be tightly integrated with your product and your viral loop.
At RemoteTeam, we created a whole library of content around the challenges of managing a remote team. We wrote articles about everything from running effective remote meetings to building a strong remote culture. And in every one of those articles, we found a way to naturally and organically mention our product. We weren't just writing about the problem; we were offering a solution.
The Results
By implementing this framework at RemoteTeam, we were able to 5x our growth in just 12 months. We went from a handful of early adopters to thousands of paying customers. And we did it all with a marketing budget of less than $1,000 a month. We didn't need to spend a fortune on ads. We just needed to build a product that people loved and a growth engine that was built to last.
So if you're tired of wasting money on marketing that doesn't work, I urge you to give this framework a try. It's not a magic bullet. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's just a simple, proven way to build a business that grows itself. And in the end, that's the only kind of growth that really matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.