Leverage Your Customers’ Network to Increase Product Relevance and Reach

Learn how to harness the power of positive network effects to drive SaaS growth.

Originally shared at The Good.

You have plenty of assets at your disposal to drive the adoption of your tool. Traditional marketing tactics and product-led growth strategies are likely both built into your plans for 2025.

But have you thought about how you might leverage your current user base to increase product relevance and reach?

This can be a low-cost, high-impact way to improve product quality, re-engage dormant users, or get in front of some new eyeballs.

It’s hugely beneficial to both your tool and the users by creating positive network effects. The more people that use your product, the more valuable it becomes. It’s a self-propelling mechanism to drive growth.

What is a positive network effect?

A positive network effect is when the value of a SaaS tool increases as the user base grows.

Take LinkedIn, for example. It becomes more valuable for users if their peers, colleagues, and dream employers use the tool. You can make more connections, learn more from the user-generated content, hunt for more jobs, and generally get more out of the tool.

For SaaS companies, larger networks can lead to several competitive advantages, such as:

• Are more trustworthy
• Entice advertisers
• Encourage referrals and word-of-mouth
• Build more unique user-generated content that can’t be copied by competition
• Increase retention

Understanding network effects is only the first step. The real challenge lies in building strategies that activate and sustain these effects. Creating positive network effects typically starts by leveraging your current user base, so let’s explore five proven ways to mobilize your users for growth.

5 ways to mobilize your user base to drive growth

Products like Pinterest, SurveyMonkey, or LinkedIn use network effects to grow. Each new user or engagement encourages more new users or engagements.

Tools target different objectives with their efforts. Some might prioritize user acquisition, while others reinforce retention, monetization, or product quality.

The most effective SaaS companies often find a couple of different ways to leverage current users as part of their growth strategy. Here are some examples to inspire your efforts.

1. Increase reach with shareable features

One way to leverage your current users’ network is to build product features that encourage natural sharing and engagement. To maximize reach, they need to be easy to use, helpful, and solve a real problem for users.

Pinterest allows users to create shared ‘boards’ to collaborate on home decor, event planning, and more. This either re-engages current users or prompts new sign-ups by sharing their board with both current and new users.

Here’s how it works:

1. A current user returns to Pinterest, ready to explore new content.
2. The user creates a ‘board’ to collect commonly themed content in support of a goal (redecorating their home, brainstorming for a trip, planning an event).
3. The user saves, pins, or repins content to their board.
4. The user shares the board with a collaborator (decorator, travel partner, event planner, etc) either directly on Pinterest or via a messaging tool.
5. The collaborator is either re-engaged or prompted to sign up for an account to collaborate on the board.
6. If the board is public, other users can stumble upon a piece of content and pin to their own boards.

Another example is Calendly, which builds natural sharing into the user journey. They incorporate simple scheduling and the speed of using invitation links. It’s also brilliant in that you don’t need an account to add yourself to a user’s schedule.

Here’s how Calendly includes shareable features to increase reach:

1. A Calendly user sends an invitation link to book a meeting. The invitee can select a time without the usual back-and-forth emails.
2. The invitee schedules a meeting without the typical friction of the scheduling process.
3. If an invitee schedules a lot of meetings themselves, they’re likely to sign up for Calendly to streamline their own scheduling.
4. As new users share Calendly links, more people experience the simplicity, driving additional sign-ups.

2. Drive referrals with growth loops

While shareable features focus on increasing reach, growth loops create a self-reinforcing cycle of engagement and referrals.

Think of a growth loop framework like a flywheel: Once it’s moving, it picks up speed and sustains momentum. For example, a user finds your product, interacts meaningfully, and creates content or engages in a way that attracts other users who repeat this cycle.

The goal here is to maximize viral reach without high acquisition costs. For a viral loop to succeed, the incentive needs to resonate with the users and align naturally with the product.

DocuSign’s growth loop leverages the need for digital document signing. Every document sent for a signature serves as an introduction to the platform.

Here’s how it works:

1. A user uploads a document to DocuSign and sends it to recipients for signature.
2. Recipients receive an email with a link to the document. They review and sign without needing an account. This helps them experience the platform’s convenience.
3. Impressed, recipients often sign up for their own accounts to send and manage their own documents, especially if they frequently need to get things signed.
4. As new users send their own documents for signatures, they introduce even more users to the platform. Each document sent by a new user brings in additional recipients.

3. Improve product quality and engagement with user-generated content

In addition to growth loops, user-generated content can amplify engagement and improve product quality by turning users into contributors.

Content engagement relies on user-generated or brand-created content to attract and retain users. This thrives when content shared or created by users on the platform is accessible to non-users. New visitors become intrigued and decide to join or engage.

GitHub, for example, leverages network effects to improve product quality. The collaborative coding and open-source project visibility encourage the use of their tool. Developers join to contribute to existing projects and then end up hosting their own projects.

Here’s how Github’s engagement of their customer network works to improve product quality:

1. Developers upload projects or contribute to open-source repositories.
2. Other developers discover these projects and contribute code, fix bugs, or fork the project for personal use. Each interaction boosts the project’s visibility on GitHub.
3. Developers who were attracted by the collaborative environment sign up to host their own code. This contributes to the platform’s network effect.
4. These new projects become additional attractors that bring in new developers.

4. Drive acquisition with incentives

A way to incentivize current users to aid in acquiring new users is through referral programs. Build shareable moments, incentives, and visibility into the user journey. Each new user not only becomes a customer but also a potential referrer by making sharing a natural part of the user experience.

The best referral programs provide support and education to users, making sharing about the product as simple as possible.

A great example is Airtable, which credits $10 to your account automatically when you invite new users to the tool.

Here’s how it works:

1. Current users invite new users to Airtable or share your unique referral link.
2. When a new user signs up and verifies their email address, $10 is automatically credited to your account.
3. You can see the credits on your account page and apply them to your charges.
4. Users can accumulate the credits, so the incentive to invite new users continues.

5. Re-engage dormant users

Social community features and push/message notifications prompt dormant or inactive users to re-engage with your tool.

For example, Venmo builds social engagement into its payment tool and uses these features to drive engagement. Each transaction re-engages the network of contacts with ‘reminder’ functionality and social engagement features.

Here’s a breakdown of how Venmo re-engages users:

1. A user requests payment from a friend, roommate, or coworker. If they don’t pay promptly, the user can ‘remind’ their contact about the pending payment.
2. Once complete, Venmo posts this transaction to a public or semi-public feed. This visibility serves as social proof.
3. Friends see the transaction and can like or comment on the payment.

Tools can leverage multiple strategies

From shareable features to re-engagement tactics, each strategy leverages your users’ networks in unique ways. By combining them, you can unlock exponential growth.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example again:

• Referrals: New LinkedIn users are encouraged to invite their friends to the tool. This creates a positive network effect by increasing acquisition immediately with each new user.
• Re-engagement: When users join LinkedIn, they’re encouraged to connect with their contacts. Each connection re-engages current users on the platform. Users post updates, share articles, and comment on others’ posts. This drives users back to the platform frequently, increases time spent, and encourages interactions that deepen the network’s value.
• Registrations: Companies post job listings on LinkedIn and widely share the URL. There is a ‘quick apply’ function for LinkedIn users, which incentivizes applicants to sign up for their own profile.

These are just a few examples of how a tool might incorporate multiple strategies leveraging their customer’s network.

Start growing with support from your user base

Ready to start leveraging your customers’ network to increase product relevance and reach? Start by defining your goal and key metrics. Do you want to improve referral rates? User activation? New registrants?

Monitor these metrics to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to improve. If a specific action isn’t driving the desired results, you may need to adjust the user engagement structure, incentives, or experience.

Other best practices for leveraging your customer’s network to increase product relevance and reach:

• Segment customers
• Leverage social proof
• Make it easy
• Celebrate success and loyalty

Ready to amplify your SaaS growth through positive network effects? Our Digital Experience Optimization Program? can help you identify and implement strategies tailored to your user base.