Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Two years ago, I was sitting in a client meeting watching a startup founder explain his perfect marketing funnel. Beautiful slides, clear stages, conversion rates at each step - it looked flawless on paper. But when I pulled up their analytics, the reality hit hard: they were spending $50,000 monthly on ads with barely any repeat customers or referrals.
That's when I realized the fundamental flaw in how most businesses think about growth. We've been building linear funnels - one-way journeys that end when someone converts. But the most successful companies I've worked with? They don't build funnels. They build marketing loops.
The difference is profound. A funnel is a leaky bucket where you constantly need to pour in new prospects at the top. A loop is a self-reinforcing cycle where today's customers become tomorrow's customer acquisition engine. It's the difference between renting attention and building a compounding growth machine.
After implementing loop frameworks across dozens of client projects - from SaaS startups to e-commerce stores - I've learned that sustainable growth doesn't come from optimizing conversion rates. It comes from turning your customers into your marketing team.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience building loops instead of funnels:
Why traditional marketing funnels create expensive, unsustainable growth
The three types of marketing loops that actually compound over time
How I helped a B2B SaaS replace $30K/month in paid ads with organic loop-driven growth
The specific framework I use to identify and build loops for any business model
Why most "viral" strategies fail and what actually works for sustainable virality
Spoiler alert: the most effective loops aren't the obvious ones everyone talks about. They're often hidden in plain sight, embedded in your product experience and customer journey in ways your competitors won't think to copy.
Industry Reality
What growth experts preach about marketing funnels
Walk into any marketing conference or scroll through any growth blog, and you'll hear the same mantra: "Optimize your funnel!" The industry has been obsessed with this linear thinking for over a decade.
Here's what every marketing guru will tell you to focus on:
Top-of-funnel optimization - Drive more traffic through better targeting, content marketing, or paid ads
Middle-funnel conversion - Improve landing pages, lead magnets, and nurture sequences
Bottom-funnel closing - Perfect your sales process, pricing, and onboarding
Retention tactics - Add email campaigns and customer success to reduce churn
Referral programs - Bolt on incentives to get existing customers to refer others
This conventional wisdom exists because it's measurable and logical. You can track each stage, calculate conversion rates, and show clear ROI on optimization efforts. It gives marketers and founders a sense of control - if conversion from visitor to lead is 2%, let's make it 3% and double our growth!
The problem? This thinking treats customers like they move through a predictable, one-way journey. But real customer behavior is messier. People don't move linearly from awareness to purchase to advocacy. They bounce around, research extensively, get influenced by peers, and make decisions in complex, multi-touch cycles.
Even worse, funnel thinking creates acquisition addiction. When growth slows, the only solution is to pour more money into the top of the funnel. You're always one algorithm change, competitive shift, or budget cut away from your growth engine breaking down.
The companies that achieve sustainable, compound growth think differently. They don't just optimize conversion rates - they build systems where growth feeds on itself.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I learned this lesson the hard way while working with a B2B SaaS client who was burning through their Series A funding faster than they were acquiring customers. They had what looked like a solid acquisition strategy on paper - multi-channel approach, decent traffic, trial signups coming in regularly.
But when I dug into their analytics, I discovered something that changed my entire perspective on growth strategy. They were getting tons of "direct" traffic conversions with no clear attribution. Most consultants would have started throwing money at paid ads or doubling down on SEO content. Instead, I got curious and started investigating.
What I found completely shifted how I think about sustainable growth: a significant portion of their highest-quality leads weren't coming from their marketing funnel at all. They were coming from the founder's personal content on LinkedIn.
Here's the thing - these weren't "direct" conversions in the traditional sense. These were people who had been following the founder's content for months, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were finally ready to evaluate solutions. The "funnel" completely missed this multi-touch, relationship-driven journey.
Meanwhile, the cold traffic from their expensive paid campaigns? Most trial users logged in once and never came back. We were treating SaaS like an e-commerce impulse purchase when it's actually a trust-based service that requires time and multiple touchpoints to build confidence.
That's when I realized we weren't just optimizing the wrong metrics - we were using the wrong mental model entirely. The founder's LinkedIn content wasn't part of a funnel. It was part of a compound loop where valuable content attracted the right audience, built authority, generated leads, and created customers who became advocates for more content reach.
This discovery led me to completely restructure how I approach growth strategy for clients. Instead of building better funnels, I started looking for opportunities to build self-reinforcing loops.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood the difference between funnels and loops, I developed a systematic approach to identify and build these compound growth engines. The key insight? Most businesses already have the components of powerful loops - they just don't recognize or optimize them.
Here's the framework I now use with every client, broken down into the three types of loops that actually drive sustainable growth:
1. The Content Loop
This is what my LinkedIn SaaS client had stumbled into accidentally. The cycle works like this: Create valuable content → Attract target audience → Build authority and trust → Generate qualified leads → Convert to customers → Customers become advocates and inspiration for more content.
The key difference from traditional content marketing? You're not just creating content to fill a funnel. You're using customer insights, success stories, and challenges to fuel better content that attracts more of the right people. Each customer makes your content more valuable and relevant.
2. The Product Loop
Your product experience can become a growth engine itself. The cycle: New user has great experience → Shares or invites others → Network effects make product more valuable → Attracts more users → Product gets better with more users.
Think Slack (more teammates = more valuable), Figma (collaboration brings in whole teams), or even simple referral triggers built into your onboarding. The product itself becomes the marketing.
3. The Community Loop
This is the most underutilized but powerful loop. Happy customers → Engage in community/content → Help other prospects → Build trust and social proof → More people convert → Community grows and becomes more valuable.
I've seen this work incredibly well for service businesses where customers naturally want to share their transformation, and for SaaS products where users love helping others succeed with the tool.
My process for building loops:
Audit existing customer behavior - Where are customers naturally talking about you? What makes them want to share?
Identify the compound opportunity - How can today's customers make tomorrow's marketing more effective?
Remove friction from the loop - Make it easier for customers to naturally share, refer, or contribute
Measure loop strength, not just conversion rates - Track how much new growth comes from previous growth
Compound Effect
Most funnels leak. Marketing loops multiply. Each customer strengthens the entire system rather than just filling a quota.
Loop Identification
Start by mapping where your best customers naturally want to share your value. These organic moments become your loop foundations.
Friction Removal
The best loops feel effortless to customers. Remove every unnecessary step between customer success and natural advocacy.
Measurement Shift
Stop measuring just conversion rates. Track second-order effects: how many new customers came because of previous customers?
The transformation in how I approach growth strategy has been dramatic. Instead of constantly optimizing funnel conversion rates, I now focus on building systems where growth compounds over time.
The most powerful insight? Loops take longer to build but create exponential rather than linear growth. A funnel might give you predictable 10% month-over-month growth as long as you keep feeding it. A loop starts slower but can create 50%+ growth that sustains itself.
The businesses I work with that have successfully implemented loop thinking report several key changes:
Reduced customer acquisition costs - Less dependency on paid channels
Higher customer lifetime value - Customers become part of the growth engine
More predictable growth - Less vulnerable to external changes like algorithm updates
Better product-market fit - Loops only work when customers truly love what you're building
The biggest change in my consulting practice? I spend way less time on traditional conversion optimization and way more time understanding what makes customers genuinely excited to share their experience. That enthusiasm becomes the fuel for sustainable growth loops.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Building marketing loops instead of funnels has taught me some counterintuitive lessons about sustainable growth:
Start with customer obsession, not funnel optimization - Loops only work when customers are genuinely excited about their experience
Measure compound effects, not just direct conversions - Track how many customers came because of other customers
Patience pays exponentially - Loops start slower than funnels but create lasting competitive advantages
Your product is your marketing - The best loops are built into the core experience, not bolted on afterwards
Community beats campaign - Sustainable growth comes from people who want to help you succeed
Authenticity is the only scalable strategy - Loops depend on genuine advocacy, which can't be faked long-term
Less control, more momentum - Give up some control over messaging to gain exponential reach through customers
The biggest mistake I see? Trying to build loops while still thinking in funnel metrics. You have to fundamentally shift how you measure success - from linear conversion optimization to compound growth tracking.
This approach works best for businesses where customers have transformational experiences and natural reasons to share. It's harder to implement for commodity products or purely transactional relationships.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups looking to implement loop thinking:
Build sharing and collaboration into your core product experience
Create customer success content that attracts similar prospects
Track second-order metrics: referrals, organic mentions, user-generated content
Design onboarding to create "aha moments" worth sharing
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores building marketing loops:
Focus on products that create natural "before/after" sharing moments
Build community around your customer transformations, not just products
Use customer stories and UGC as your primary content engine
Create unboxing and usage experiences designed for social sharing