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- SaaS Product Virality using Product-Led Growth
SaaS Product Virality using Product-Led Growth
How to create internal virality bottom-up from selling to one individual user then upselling the whole customer's organization. And learn how to create external virality that compounds and drives growth.
SaaS companies nowadays require a new approach to growth, one where your product is the primary engine for acquisition, driving traffic, activating customers, and expanding and upselling existing users.
Products led Growth strategy has changed how B2B and prosumer SaaS companies scale. Success involves designing through a deep understanding of viral loops, growth mechanics, bottom-up acquisition, and the design elements that turn your free users into the most viral and powerful marketing channel.
See more how Word of Mouths drove PLG sign-ups:
Every SaaS founder dreams of catching fire and achieving adoption across their market. However, that kind of adoption is not easy; it’s not as simple as just saying, “Let’s go viral.”
It isn’t about luck, and virality isn’t just having some big phenomenon, like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” or a trending hashtag like “#BlueDressGoldDress.” Virality is a product-led growth strategy that is both predictable and compounding.
Virality for SaaS means building viral loops where existing users and customers naturally bring in new users through product actions. This could be as simple as direct invitations, such as sharing documents, inviting teammates, collaborating on knowledge, or exposing anonymous users to the product, like sharing a link with a signature.
The key is that the new user's first interaction with your product is through the product itself, not through a marketing ad or a sales pitch. Virality involves engineering the product to empower users and incentivize them to take actions that attract new users.
The product is such a good deal and such a great experience that it becomes memorable and spreads through word of mouth. It is even coming up in everyday conversations.
Ultimate step to product virality: Hone in on early user feedback and what makes users want to organically share your product. People want to share products that they love and feel connected to.
Read how to improve retention in your Product led Growth SaaS:
How does Product-Led Growth generate Virality?
Product-led growth has shifted the customer acquisition model. Instead of the traditional sales approach, which constantly involves pursuing prospects and negotiating deals, PLG allows users to experience the value immediately through a self-serve experience. By reducing friction and activating users quickly, we create a product so compelling that users want to share it through word of mouth, recommending it to others, including their colleagues, friends, and communities.
What are the Characteristics of a Viral SaaS Product?
A viral SaaS product shares several defining characteristics:
User-Driven Value Sharing
The product becomes more valuable as users interact or collaborate with others, making sharing a natural part of the workflow.
Slack: Chatting is better when your whole team is there.
Figma: Design is easier when you can work together in real time.
Tally: Sharing forms with teammates or clients helps everyone get more out of it.
Read more about Tally’s growth strategy:
Network-Enabled Use Cases
The product improves when users connect with colleagues, customers, and friends who benefit from having a shared knowledge base.
Asana: Having more tasks by inviting other teammates builds up the knowledge base and becomes the fundamental place where everyone works out of.
Granola: Meeting notes and AI summaries are shared across teams, making them a powerful source of knowledge based on calls.
ClarityInbox: Email productivity improves when colleagues are invited to create a shared email knowledge base and communication hub. The AI email companion becomes increasingly smarter with access to that collective knowledge.
Built-In Triggers
The product with “invite,” “share,” or “assign” artifact motivates new users to engage.
Notion: You can invite others to view or edit documents in just a click.
Shortwave: Sharing a summary or email thread lets others see the product’s value instantly.
Tally: Every form you share has a link so others can join or try it out.
Read more about Shortwave’s Product Led Growth strategy:
Fast, Simple Onboarding
New users can get started and see the value quickly, no complicated setup.
Wisper Flow: Invitees can join a voice chat right away.
Figma: New users can jump into a design file and start working in seconds.
Granola: Shared meeting summaries are easy to open and use.
Read more about Granola’s strategy to $250M valuation:
Uses Your Existing Network
The product is made to help you invite people you already know, so it spreads faster.
Slack: Makes it easy to add your whole team or company.
Tally: Forms can be shared by email or social media, reaching more people.
ClarityInbox: The more coworkers you invite, the more helpful it becomes.
There are 2 ways to think about virality:
Internal Virality occurs when a product spreads organically within an organization, starting with individual users and expanding across departments. This is really a bottom-up approach used by many B2B SaaS and product-led growth companies, because B2B workflows often require collaboration to complete work.
The internal virality mechanism really requires one user to adopt the product and become activated for personal productivity. By the nature of work, it also requires collaboration, such as sharing documents, assigning tasks, and collaborating on projects. These are the viral internal triggers that bring colleagues, who are new users, to the platform.
Slack is a very simple example. A single user invites colleagues to join channels, start messaging one another, and all of a sudden you have this communication knowledge base on the platform. The product's value increases exponentially as more team members join, creating a network effect that makes switching off increasingly difficult because all that knowledge has been saved on Slack.
How to implement SaaS Internal Virality Bottom-up Adoption?
Building internal virality really hinges on collaboration as one of the core product actions and most effective characteristics.
Collaborative Triggers: Design your user experience and product features around requiring multiple users. For example, assign tasks, share documents, manage approval processes, and enable sharing of comments and annotations. These are all natural ways of bringing in more users and inviting them onto the platform to engage.
Progressive Value Delivery: Each user coming onto the platform creates more artifacts, comments, annotations, documents, and assignments. This creates a feedback loop where users are constantly engaging, activating, bringing in, and CCing new users.
Frictionless Onboarding: New invited users must get immediate value, which could be seeing the comments, viewing the annotation, or accessing the knowledge base. If the onboarding is too complex, new users give up and this kills the viral momentum.
Internal virality is when a product spreads inside a company. It starts with one person or team and grows as more people join and use it together. Here are some simple examples:
1. Slack
One person invites teammates to a Slack channel.
Soon, everyone in the company is using Slack to chat.
The more people join, the better it works.
2. Figma
A designer shares a file with a coworker.
Then, product managers, engineers, and others join to work together in real time.
3. Asana
A manager assigns tasks to teammates.
Teammates join Asana to see and finish their work.
More teams start using it for projects.
4. Notion
Someone creates a shared document or workspace and invites others.
As more people join, Notion becomes the main place for company notes and knowledge.
5. Jira (Atlassian)
Engineers or managers invite others to work on tickets or sprints.
Jira spreads to product, QA, and support teams.
6. Granola.ai
A team shares AI meeting notes.
More coworkers join to see notes and work together.
7. Shortwave
Teams share email threads and labels.
This makes email work easier and more team-friendly.
8. Zoom
One user sets up a meeting and invites coworkers.
As more people join meetings, Zoom becomes the main tool for talking.
9. Tally
Teams work on forms and templates together.
They invite others to help, so more people use it.
10. Tana.inc
Someone starts organizing information or workflows in Tana and invites teammates to collaborate.
As more coworkers join, they add notes, tasks, or projects, making Tana even more useful.
The product spreads across teams as everyone contributes and relies on the shared workspace.
Learn more about Tana.inc’s building up 30,000 beta users:
In short: Internal virality happens when a product helps people work together. The more people join, the more useful it gets. This helps a product grow from just one user to many inside a company.
Read more about Product Led Sales, and how to close these bottom-up adoption accounts:
Product Led Growth drives natural external virality growth by attracting net new anonymous users from outside the customer's organization. This mechanism is powerful for prosumer and B2B tools that have public-facing outputs or natural sharing mechanics to gain new top of funnel acquisitions.
What’s the mechanics of SaaS External Virality?
The External Virality Loop focuses on users creating content, completing actions, and exposing non-users to the product. Calendly is a simple example; every meeting scheduling link sent to an external contact introduces someone new to the platform's value proposition.
Modern SaaS companies are increasingly sophisticated in their approach to external virality. Product Led Growth tools like Tally.so form carries Tally’s signature branding that prompts recipients to create their own forms, creating a self-reinforcing acquisition loop.
The most effective external viral strategies focus on making sharing intrinsic to product value:
Branded Outputs: Every piece of content or communication generated by the product should carry a signature and branding that drives curiosity and sign-ups.
Value-First Sharing: Recipients must get immediate value from shared content. A broken or confusing shared UX stops the virality.
Seamless Conversion: The path from viral exposure to product trial and freemium access should be frictionless. Any unnecessary steps dramatically reduce conversion rates.
Read more about freemium and upsells:
Growth Loops: The Compounding Engine
The external and internal virality loops, combined with top-of-funnel acquisition, flywheels, organic flywheels, and paid channels, create a massive growth loop. This compounding effect generates more content on your platform and attracts more users to join and engage.
Types of Growth Loops in SaaS
Direct Virality Loops: Users invite others to gain more value from the product. Slack, Figma, and Notion all excel at this model.
Referral Loops: Users are incentivized to invite others through rewards or additional functionality. Dropbox's storage rewards program remains the gold standard.
Exposure Loops: Product usage is inherently visible to non-users. Zoom meetings, DocuSign requests, and Calendly booking links all expose the product to new audiences.
Content Loops: User-generated content attracts organic traffic and new users. Substack newsletters and public Notion pages drive continuous acquisition.
The Compounding Effect
The power of growth loops lies in their compounding nature. Each cycle completion brings in new users who themselves trigger additional cycles. When the viral coefficient (K-factor) exceeds 1.0, growth becomes exponential. Even with K-factors below 1.0, loops still provide substantial efficiency gains in customer acquisition cost.
While the goal is to get K-factor above 1.0, its not highly realistic. The philosophy is to keep stacking loops together, so growth keep compounding.
Case Studies: Modern PLG Success Stories
Tally.so demonstrates both internal and external virality in action. Internally, teams collaborate on form creation and data collection, driving adoption across departments. Externally, every published form carries Tally branding, acting as a viral payload that introduces new users to the platform.
The compounding effect is that as more forms are shared, more users are exposed to the product, leading to increased sign-ups and form creation. This creates a flywheel where growth accelerates as the user base expands.
Granola.ai leverages collaborative meeting workflows for internal virality. Teams share AI-generated meeting summaries and notes, expanding usage within organizations. The external viral component comes through shared meeting insights and "chat with this meeting" features that expose non-users to the product's capabilities.
Shortwave transforms email collaboration through shared templates and team features. The viral mechanism operates when recipients see enhanced email features and magic summaries, creating curiosity that drives external adoption.
What are the Critical Success Factors for PLG SaaS Virality?
1. Onboarding Excellence
Poor onboarding really kills viral potential. I recommend implementing superhuman onboarding so that you can continue to improve your user experience.
Some suggestions include:
Activation tooltips.
Helping people feel reassured so they move forward.
Conducting a 30-minute onboarding call.
Observing user behaviors.
Identifying any friction points that can stop onboarding and activation.
Read more about how to implement and learn from your 30-min onboarding calls:
Key insight: Users saying "Not sure what to do here" or "Does this really work?" means there is onboarding failure. Address each confusion point through improved tooltips, clearer documentation, and streamlined product UX.
2. Metrics That Matter
Successful PLG requires tracking the right metrics:
Time-to-First-Invite: Speed at which users trigger viral loops
Invite-to-Activation Rate: Percentage of invited users who become active
Expansion Rate: User growth within accounts (internal virality)
Net Revenue Retention: Revenue growth from existing customers
K-Factor: While not realistic, measuring the viral coefficient which measures how many new users each existing user generates, showcases the power of the viral loops
Read who owns Retention in SaaS org:
3. Customer Success as Growth Driver
Customer success teams identify patterns in user behavior, and resolve activation blockers typically not found via analytics. The most successful PLG companies use customer success to:
Identify upsell opportunities through usage patterns
Resolve at-risk customer situations before churn
Create advocates who drive word-of-mouth growth
Scale support through self-serve resources
Read more about customer success driving PLG growth:
4. Paywall Strategy
Effective paywalls create revenue while maintaining user experience. The key is making advanced features discoverable while keeping core value accessible. Users should hit paywalls naturally through expanded usage, not artificial limitations.
Read more about how to design Product Led Growth SaaS paywalls:
What are the Common Pitfalls and Solutions for building PLG SaaS Virality?
Challenge 1: Team Agility and Experimentation
Many teams struggle with the mindset required for PLG success. Engineering and design teams often view "experiments" as potential failures requiring cleanup. Reframing experiments as "learnings" helps teams embrace the iterative approach essential for PLG optimization.
Read more about how to influence product roadmap using data in SaaS:
Challenge 2: The First Six Months
The initial PLG launch is challenging due to insufficient data and unclear signals about purchase intent. This is normal… Teams are applying product-led approaches to markets previously served through sales-led motions. Success requires patience and continuous customer feedback collection.
Read more about the Top 5 challenges running a PLG SaaS Strategy:
Challenge 3: Balancing PLG and Sales-Led Strategies
Organizations often struggle with running parallel PLG and sales-led motions. The key is clearly defining customer segments and creating cohesive strategies that leverage both approaches effectively.
Read more about how PLG differs from SLG:
And read more about how to communicate PLG and SLG roadmap to stakeholders:
Conclusion: The Future of PLG SaaS Virality
The future of PLG SaaS virality is about building products that have inherent, natural sharing and invite others to create with frictionless onboarding. We're going to see AI improve and make things even more personalized and smoother, with collaborations becoming more engaging. There will be smarter sharing prompts and product led growth bumpers, making viral loops even more natural.
This actually creates competition and tension, and the best SaaS companies will continue to focus on real user value, where one user gains more benefit and compounding value when they invite their teams to the platform. True virality won't come from gimmicks; it's really about building strong retention in the product that people genuinely want to keep coming back to and love to use, creating word of mouth and referral.
The next wave of SaaS leaders will unlock growth from the product itself and turn every user action into a growth opportunity.

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.