2 builders who never spoke to each other

Take every step out of the sharing path

Each extra action between wanting to share and having shared loses most of the people who were willing. Never make a subscriber visit a page and retype their address to retrieve their own link, track referrals across every signup form rather than one embedded widget, and refuse tooling that leaves you syncing two lists by hand every day.

The method

1. 01

   Never make a subscriber visit a landing page and retype their email address just to retrieve their referral link, because the extra steps lose most of them before they share.

2. 02

   Track referrals across every signup form you run, not only through an embedded widget, or you will lose credit for anyone who follows a referral link and then subscribes from a different page.

3. 03

   Bolting a referral tool onto a platform with no integrations leaves you syncing two lists by hand every single day, which is not sustainable growth work.

4. 04

   If your product depends on a network effect, strip out anything that adds friction to the sharing step, because those extra steps cap growth.

What it returned

• Packy McCormick described his Not Boring routine as exporting the list daily, pasting it into a spreadsheet, then pushing those addresses back into Substack.

Sources

• Want an email referral program? Don't use SubstackManuel Frigerio · sparkloop.app · Poor User Experience · undated
• The Myth of The Finished Product – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · Three Ways to Think About Features · 2020-02-27