Why the Best Growth Strategy Starts with a Product People Want to Share
For a long time, I thought growth was mostly a marketing question. Like many founders, I watched acquisition numbers closely. I wanted to understand where new users came from and what convinced them to try the product. Those metrics mattered because they were visible and because they gave us something to improve.
Eventually, I found myself paying more attention to a different part of the customer journey. It wasn't the moment someone decided to try a product that interested me most. It was the point weeks or months later when they decided it was worth recommending to someone else.
People are careful about the software they recommend because they're attaching a bit of their own credibility to it. If the experience falls short, they'll hear about it. If it consistently solves a problem, they'll remember that too.
Watching those moments changed the way I think about growth. Marketing introduces people to a product. Whether they come back or recommend it later is decided by the experience they have once they arrive.
After nearly a decade building software, one lesson has become difficult to ignore: sustainable growth often begins long before a marketing campaign. It begins when a product solves a problem well enough that people feel confident sharing it with someone else.
Feature requests accumulate naturally. Customers ask for new capabilities, competitors introduce them, and product roadmaps grow longer almost on their own. Early on, I assumed that adding more functionality would naturally make a product more valuable. Years later, I realized I was wrong.
The products people continue using over time don't necessarily offer the most features. They remove friction from work people already do every day. When software quietly saves people time or simplifies recurring tasks it becomes part of their routine instead of another thing they have to manage.
Our conversations about product development gradually changed. Instead of asking what we could build next, we spent more time asking how we could make the experience simpler and more intuitive.
Building software for a diverse user base made this challenge concrete. We needed to support a wide range of features, but adding functionality created a new problem: the more we built, the harder it became for users to find what they actually needed.
A better approach is to grow products around clear, modular groups of related features. Instead of continually adding new functionality to a single interface, teams should create distinct categories or modules that make it easy for users to find what they need. Experienced users should be able to go directly to the relevant functionality, while newer users should be able to browse and discover additional capabilities. This allows the product to expand over time without making the overall experience feel increasingly complex.
Launches create momentum, but the more important question is what happens after the excitement fades. Products that become habits tend to get recommended. That recommendation usually isn't immediate. It comes after weeks or months of consistent use, when someone has enough confidence in the product to suggest it to another person.
That's a much slower signal than acquisition, but I've found it to be far more revealing.Trust develops through repeated experiences. A product works the way someone expects, updates improve rather than complicate the experience, and feedback leads to thoughtful changes. None of those moments stand out individually, but together they determine whether someone recommends what you've built.
The launch is where the learning begins.
It's easy to think of a product launch as the finish line after months of planning, building, and testing. Experience has taught me it's usually the beginning. No matter how much research goes into a product decision, people will always use software in ways you didn't anticipate. Sometimes they ignore the feature your team debated for months. Other times they discover a use case nobody considered during development.
At one point, we had three new features ready to ship. I was convinced the first would be a hit. My co-founder was betting on the second. Neither of us expected anything from the third. We even debated whether it was worth pushing to production at all. We shipped all three. The two we believed in were complete flops, with barely any usage. The one we almost cut was massively successful.
It was a useful reminder that product teams are often poor predictors of what users will value. Since then, I've tried to treat our assumptions as hypotheses rather than conclusions and let customer behavior determine what deserves more attention.
Marketing plays an essential role in helping people discover a product.
One thing that surprised me over the years is that the strongest marketing doesn't always begin with a campaign. Sometimes it begins with customers who are already finding enough value in a product to tell someone else about it. When that happens, marketing becomes less about creating excitement and more about amplifying momentum that's already taking shape.
One time, we launched a plugin that automatically announced in a community whenever a creator posted on Twitch or Reddit. Communities immediately asked for more, so we kept going: YouTube, Kick, one platform after another. Our marketing didn't change during that stretch. No campaigns, no extra spend. Yet each new connector brought a visible wave of installs. Part of it was structural; every announcement the bot posted was seen by an entire community, including people who ran servers of their own. When the install curve tracks your release schedule instead of your marketing calendar, the conclusion is hard to miss: the product itself was doing the acquisition.
That realization also changed how I think about marketing. Rather than trying to create demand on its own, I see its role as helping more people discover a product that's already earning trust through the customer experience.
Recommendations rarely feel like marketing from the customer's perspective. People don't recommend a product because they're impressed by its feature list. They recommend it because it has quietly become reliable and fits naturally into the way they work. Sharing it feels less like making a sales pitch than passing along something genuinely useful.
Looking back, the biggest change in my thinking has been learning to pay attention to recommendations instead of just acquisition. By the time someone tells a friend to try something, he's already answered the question every product team is trying to solve: Is this useful enough to put my own reputation behind it?
Today, I still care about launches, acquisition, and marketing. But I pay just as much attention to whether people come back, and whether they recommend the product to someone else. For me, that's one of the clearest signs you're building something that creates lasting value.
Anis Belkacem is co-founder and co-CEO of MEE6, a Discord bot provider. A lifelong builder, he began launching digital products as a teenager, gaining early insight into what drives user adoption and engagement. He later co-founded MEE6 with Brendan Rius and helped grow the company into a profitable platform serving more than 300 million users worldwide.