Hatching Growth #2: How We Chose Our Growth and Acquisition Channels
Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way. While we prefer not to use the term "user," please note that we’ll use it here for convenience 🙇♂️
In the first series of Hatching Growth, we peeled back the curtain on our manual, one-to-one outreach that propelled us to 1,000 users in three months. In this installment, we’ll go deeper, showing how we crystallized a sustainable growth framework built around low-cost content marketing (our “SEO++”) and word-of-mouth. We’ll share the strategic thinking, product design choices, core metrics, and high-level execution that set the stage for compounding, product-led growth.
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Why Share This Now?
By mid-2021, we were living in back-to-back Zoom onboards and LinkedIn DMs, learning invaluable lessons about user behavior but burning founder bandwidth. We knew that reaching our next milestone (10K, 100K, or beyond) wouldn’t be possible by manually sending personalized DMs or running dozens of calls. We needed a repeatable, asset-building strategy that would earn attention once and pay dividends over months and years. That strategic pivot from purely linear outreach to a content-powered growth engine is what this post unpacks.
1. Framing the Growth Problem: CAC vs. LTV
Before choosing tactics, we asked ourselves two fundamental questions:
What acquisition channels cost almost zero per user?
How do those costs compare to the lifetime value (LTV) of a typical Glasp user?
As a B2C/prosumer app, we anticipated modest per-user revenue, mostly driven by a small percentage of paid subscriptions and ancillary services. That meant any channel with a customer acquisition cost (CAC) higher than a few dollars would be tough to justify over the long run.
Of course, one can raise venture funding and deploy that capital into paid marketing. However, it’s critical to consider your fundraising strategy and the founders’ stance and, above all, to determine whether users acquired through paid marketing will remain engaged and whether their lifetime value will grow over time. Without fully accounting for these factors, you risk failing to achieve the expected results and undermining the sustainability of your growth.
Also, since Glasp didn’t monetize until October 2024, there was no actual revenue to speak of, but we proceeded based on projected figures.
The Four-Tier Channel Model
We mapped out acquisition options into four tiers by increasing CAC:
Tier 1 (Near-Zero CAC): Organic search (content marketing), word-of-mouth/social sharing
Tier 2 (Low-Cost Paid): Search and social ads (Google Ads, Facebook/TikTok Ads)
Tier 3 (Referral Incentives): Paid invites or credit for bringing friends
Tier 4 (Sales-Driven): Dedicated account or enterprise sales
For Glasp, Tier 1 offered the only sustainable path: our product and resources couldn’t support enterprise sales or expensive ad budgets in the early days.
2. Building Our “SEO++” Content Engine
When we say “SEO,” we’re talking about evergreen content marketing, creating user-centric articles and tutorials that rank for queries in our niche (knowledge management, highlighting workflows, productivity tips). The key advantages:
One-Time Effort, Multi-Year Impact: A well-optimized tutorial can drive traffic for years with minimal upkeep.
Deep User Value: By teaching real use cases, we attracted users who were primed to appreciate Glasp’s core features.
Scalability: Unlike manual outreach, content creation scales with team bandwidth (and eventually with community contributors).
2.1 Evergreen Tutorials on Medium and Beyond
We kicked off by publishing detailed “how-to” guides on Medium, covering topics like:
“How to Export Web Article’s Highlighted Sentences into Obsidian”
“How to Import Kindle Highlights & Notes into Glasp & Export them as a File”
Each post walked readers step-by-step, included annotated screenshots of the Chrome extension, and ended with a clear call-to-action to install and try Glasp. Medium’s existing audience meant we tapped into search traffic immediately without building our own CMS.
2.2 Guest Contributions on Niche & Tech Blogs
Alongside owned content, we reached out to productivity and tech publications, positioning our founders as industry practitioners sharing best practices. Typical topics included:
By contributing high-quality drafts and thought-leadership pieces, we earned placements in newsletters and blogs read by product managers, designers, and engineers, our ideal early adopters.
2.3 Multi-Language Amplification via Community
Our early users spanned the globe. We enlisted enthusiastic power-users to translate the interview article that appeared on the Ness Labs (published by Anne-Laure Le Cunff) into Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, and Filipino. These localized versions were then published on regional platforms. This grassroots localization broadened our reach far beyond English-only channels, all without paid agencies.
2.4 User case article through user interview
We also conduct regular user interviews, and whenever an interesting Glasp use case emerges, we ask the user’s permission to turn that interview into a “use case interview” article and share it as part of our content. Some users then share these interview articles within their own networks on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It creates a virtuous loop where our content spreads and drives further product use. Examples include how users integrate Glasp with Obsidian, how someone leveraged Glasp to land a product manager role, and how Glasp proves valuable for CX designers.
3. Designing the Product for Viral Sharing
A crucial realization: every highlight is itself a piece of content, and every share of that highlight is a viral hook. To capitalize on that:
Public-By-Default Highlights
Users’ highlights and notes are published instantly to their profile pages. However, at that stage, these profile pages were not indexed by Google, so they did not yet appear in Google search results. We’ll cover how we later leveraged these highlights as user-generated content for SEO and content marketing in a subsequent Hatching Growth series.
One-Click Social Sharing
We added buttons on each highlight for Twitter, LinkedIn, and copy-embed so that users could effortlessly share snippets across channels.
Profile Embeds & Widgets
A small embed script lets any blog or site display a user’s curated highlight list, turning every blog post into a mini demo of Glasp.
These design decisions meant core user actions generated marketing assets, fueling both organic search and social discovery.
4. Defining Core Metrics & Feedback Loops
As noted above, retention is everything for our product. Our primary goal was therefore retention—not just raw visits. At this stage, a user who returns without highlighting doesn’t meaningfully engage (it might boost ad impressions later, but it doesn’t grow our core usage). So we defined our two north-star metrics as:
Retention Rate – the percentage of users who go from “highlight” to “highlight,” i.e. make a second highlight within one month of their first.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) – where “active” means performing at least one highlight.
From there, every experiment and initiative was judged by its ability to move those two needles.
5. Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned
Economics First: Choose growth channels where CAC ≪ projected LTV. For most prosumer apps, that means content and community, not sales teams or massive ad spends.
Leverage Core Actions: Make your product work for itself as marketing: every highlight, share, and embed fuels discovery.
Build Evergreen Assets: Prioritize tutorials and thought-leadership that rank long after launch day.
Empower Your Community: Early adopters can extend your reach through translation, guest posts, and social advocacy.
Summary
In series 2 of Hatching Growth, we moved beyond hustle to a repeatable, low-cost strategy: “SEO++” content marketing and word-of-mouth amplification. By aligning our product design with user actions (public highlights + sharing), defining clear north-star metrics, and executing a steady cadence of tutorials, guest articles, and community localization, we built assets that compound over time.
Stay tuned for Hatching Growth #3, where we’ll dive into our content-marketing playbook, such as how we created content, secured high-value backlinks, boosted our domain rating and authority, and systematically improved word-of-mouth. Although these tactics were challenging to execute, we’ll share exactly what we did and how we did it. If you’d like more detail on any particular approach or metric, leave a comment below. We’re eager to dive in!
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Thank you for reading! I hope this series is helpful, especially for early-stage startup founders!
Let us know if you have any topics you'd like us to share about 🤝
Really enjoyed revisiting this chapter of our journey. I like how clearly we laid out the shift from one-to-one outreach to a repeatable growth engine rooted in content and community. The four-tier channel model is especially helpful for framing why we chose SEO and word-of-mouth as our foundation. Excited for the next installment where we’ll dive deeper into the content-marketing playbook and share the behind-the-scenes of how we scaled those efforts.