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The Breakdown

How To Grow Your SaaS With Shareable Features

Growth on autopilot is what we all dream of.

But in reality, it’s not something we ever truly achieve.

However, there are ways you can boost your efforts by leveraging your existing customers.

And one of the best ways to do that is with shareable features.

What are shareable features?

Shareable features allow your users to share the success they achieve by using your product.

It’s UGC (user-generated content) - and it’s free marketing for you.

But the best part?

It’s also a free recommendation which is far more valuable than any blog or 𝕩 post you could write.

The best examples

ProductHunt

The most relevant example for SaaS founders is the ‘Featured On ProductHunt’ (PH) widget:

(Image from the #1 product of the day - Flowla)

Every time a founder includes this widget on their page, not only are they adding social proof, but they are marketing PH too.

And with over 50,000 companies launching on the platform - it generates a lot of free marketing.

GummySearch

GummySearch is a Reddit audience research tool.

It helps you find subreddits and get more conversions from marketing on Reddit.

All GummySearch users can publically share audiences they create to show off their marketing tips.

For example, here’s an audience I made earlier with subreddits discussing topics related to startup founders.

Potential customers can view this page without signing up and see the value GummySearch provides.

Beehiiv

Beehiiv is a SaaS platform for newsletter creators.

They are masters of shareable features and creating hype.

But their strategy can be applied to pretty much any platform that tracks a key metric.

Take this tweet I shared earlier this month:

Notice the image in the tweet?

It’s a screenshot of a UI widget within Beehiiv showing how many subscribers click on a link in my emails.

(Thank you to everyone who does - it really helps the platform!)

There are hundreds of tweets like this posted by newsletter creators every month.

As this culture gains traction, people start to recognise the UI and instantly associate it with achieving success.

Potential customers will see this and think that Beehiiv is where they need to host their newsletter.

It’s a very clever but subtle ‘social engineering’ strategy that is helping all kinds of platforms grow online.

Can your SaaS use shareable features?

Most likely - yes!

To find out, you need to pin down the unique value users get from using your product.

You need to determine what success looks like for them.

That could be:

• A time or cost-saving

• Earning additional revenue

• Achieving entertainment value

• Adding social proof/validation

• or one of countless others…

Once you know this then it becomes about finding ways to engineer users to share that with others.

But there is one key aspect to bear in mind…

The more users you have, the more powerful the ‘network effect’ of shareable features becomes.

So if you’re still finding your first users - perhaps keep this one in your back pocket for now.