Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Everyone wants that viral moment. You know, the one where your content explodes overnight, your app gets millions of downloads, and journalists are calling you the "next big thing." I used to chase that dream too.
The reality? After working with dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce brands, I've seen what actually drives sustainable growth. And spoiler alert: it's rarely the viral campaigns everyone's obsessing over.
Most businesses are burning cash and time chasing viral strategies that sound sexy in theory but fail spectacularly in practice. Meanwhile, they're ignoring the unglamorous tactics that actually compound over time.
In this playbook, I'll share what I learned from helping clients build real, sustainable growth engines - and why I now actively discourage viral marketing approaches. You'll discover:
Why viral marketing fails 95% of the time (and what to do instead)
The retention reality that kills most viral successes
My framework for building compounding growth loops
Real case studies from clients who chose sustainable over sexy
How to spot when viral tactics might actually make sense
This isn't about being anti-innovation. It's about building growth strategies that work in the real world, not just in Silicon Valley fever dreams.
Industry Reality
What every growth expert preaches about viral marketing
Walk into any startup accelerator or read any growth hacking blog, and you'll hear the same viral marketing gospel repeated like a broken record.
The conventional wisdom goes like this: viral marketing is the holy grail of customer acquisition. Why? Because it's "free," it scales exponentially, and it can turn your startup into an overnight success story. Every growth expert has their favorite viral case studies - Dropbox's referral program, Hotmail's email signatures, TikTok's algorithm magic.
Here's what the industry typically recommends:
Build viral loops into your product - Make sharing a core feature, not an afterthought
Create "shareable moments" - Design experiences that users naturally want to broadcast
Gamify referrals - Use points, badges, and rewards to incentivize sharing
Optimize for the algorithm - Whether it's Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn, chase those platform mechanics
Go big or go home - Swing for the fences with bold, attention-grabbing campaigns
This advice exists because viral success stories get all the attention. When a company hits it big with viral marketing, it becomes a case study that gets taught in business schools and shared in every marketing newsletter.
But here's what nobody talks about: for every viral success story, there are thousands of companies that burned through their runway chasing viral dreams. The industry obsesses over outliers while ignoring the statistical reality that viral marketing has an extremely low success rate.
The real problem? Most businesses treat viral marketing as a strategy when it's actually just an outcome. You can't reliably engineer virality - but you can definitely waste a lot of time and money trying.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I used to be a true believer in viral marketing. Hell, I was practically evangelizing it to every client who walked through my door.
The wake-up call came from working with a B2B SaaS startup that was absolutely convinced they needed to "go viral" to succeed. They'd raised a decent seed round and were burning cash on every viral tactic in the playbook - influencer collaborations, elaborate social media campaigns, even a stunts involving their founder doing increasingly ridiculous things on LinkedIn.
The results? They got some attention, sure. A few thousand followers, some likes, even a mention in a startup newsletter. But when we looked at the actual business metrics, it was brutal. Their customer acquisition cost was through the roof, retention was terrible, and most of their "viral" audience had zero intent to actually buy their product.
Meanwhile, I was working with another client - a boring B2B software company that sold inventory management tools. No sexy viral campaigns. No influencer partnerships. No TikTok presence. Instead, they focused on unglamorous acquisition tactics like SEO, content marketing, and building genuine relationships with their target customers.
Guess which company was still around six months later?
The inventory management company was quietly growing 15% month-over-month with solid unit economics. The "viral" startup? They ran out of money and shut down.
That's when I realized I'd been selling my clients a dangerous fantasy. Viral marketing wasn't just ineffective - it was actively harmful because it distracted them from building real, sustainable growth engines.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that experience, I completely flipped my approach to growth strategy. Instead of chasing viral moments, I started helping clients build what I call "compound growth systems" - boring, predictable, sustainable tactics that actually compound over time.
Here's the framework I now use with every client:
Step 1: The Retention Reality Check
Before we even talk about acquisition, we audit retention. Because here's the thing about viral marketing - even if it works, it's useless if you can't keep the customers you acquire. I've seen too many companies get a viral spike, celebrate the traffic numbers, then watch their churn rates destroy any real value.
We look at cohort retention, usage patterns, and time-to-value. If your product can't retain customers who come in through warm channels, viral traffic will be even worse.
Step 2: Build Distribution Before Product-Market Fit
This is where I break from conventional wisdom. Most advice says "build the product first, then figure out distribution." I've learned it should be the opposite. Distribution is harder than building product, so start there.
Instead of viral campaigns, we focus on owned distribution channels. For one SaaS client, this meant building a newsletter around their industry before they even launched their product. For an e-commerce client, we started with SEO content targeting their customer's problems.
Step 3: The Compound Growth Engine
Rather than swinging for viral home runs, we build systems that get slightly better every month. This usually involves:
Content loops - Where your content creation process gets more efficient over time
Referral systems - Not viral referrals, but genuine word-of-mouth from happy customers
SEO compounding - Where each piece of content makes the next piece more effective
Network effects - Where your product genuinely gets better with more users
Step 4: Test Small, Scale What Works
Instead of betting everything on one viral campaign, we run lots of small experiments. For a recent client, we tested 12 different acquisition channels with $500 budgets each. The winner? A boring email outreach strategy that nobody would write a viral case study about - but it consistently generated qualified leads at a profitable CAC.
The key insight: viral marketing is about playing the lottery. Sustainable growth is about building a money-printing machine.
Core Framework
Build compound growth systems instead of chasing viral moments. Focus on retention first, then distribution channels you own and control.
Retention Reality
Viral traffic is worthless if you can't retain customers. Audit your retention metrics before investing in any acquisition strategy.
Distribution First
Start building distribution channels before achieving product-market fit. It's harder than building product and takes longer to compound.
Small Experiments
Run many small tests instead of betting everything on one viral campaign. Scale the boring tactics that actually work.
The results from this approach have been consistently better than any viral marketing campaign I've ever seen.
Take my inventory management client. Over 18 months, they:
Grew from 50 to 500 customers with a 95% month-over-month retention rate
Achieved a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio within six months of launch
Built organic acquisition channels that now drive 60% of their new customers
Created predictable revenue growth of 15% month-over-month for 12 straight months
Compare that to companies chasing viral moments. According to industry data, less than 5% of viral marketing campaigns generate positive ROI. Even when they "work," the customer quality is usually terrible because viral audiences are entertainment-seekers, not problem-solvers.
The compound approach isn't sexy, but it's predictable. You're not dependent on algorithm changes, viral moments, or hoping your content gets picked up by influencers. You're building an actual business.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After working with 50+ companies on growth strategies, here are the biggest lessons I've learned about viral marketing versus sustainable growth:
Viral marketing optimizes for vanity metrics, not business metrics. Reach, impressions, and social media followers don't pay the bills. Revenue and retention do.
The quality of viral traffic is usually terrible. People who discover you through viral content are typically entertainment-seekers, not customers with real problems to solve.
Viral success is impossible to replicate. Even if you nail it once, you can't build a business model around repeatedly going viral.
Distribution beats product quality every time. A mediocre product with great distribution will always outperform a great product with no distribution strategy.
Boring tactics compound better than exciting ones. SEO, email marketing, and content creation might not get you featured in TechCrunch, but they build actual businesses.
Focus on the math, not the magic. Sustainable businesses are built on predictable unit economics, not hoping for viral lightning strikes.
Retention is the real growth lever. If you can't keep customers, no acquisition strategy - viral or otherwise - will save you.
The hard truth? Viral marketing is appealing because it promises to solve the hardest problem in business - getting customers - with one magical campaign. But building a real business requires doing the unglamorous work of understanding your customers, solving their problems, and building distribution systems that compound over time.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Focus on product-led growth loops within your app rather than external viral campaigns
Build content marketing engines around your customer's workflow problems
Invest in customer success to drive genuine referrals from happy users
Create integration partnerships that provide distribution within your target market
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores specifically:
Build SEO content hubs around your product categories and use cases
Develop email marketing workflows that turn one-time buyers into repeat customers
Focus on customer lifetime value optimization rather than viral acquisition spikes
Create user-generated content systems that showcase real customer success stories