Product Growth Loops and Viral Mechanics

User acquisition is a tough nut to crack for many companies, often expensive and unpredictable. They pour money into ads and marketing, hoping it pays off. But the top products today? They’ve got growth built right in, like a flywheel. The product drives its own growth. It’s all about turning a marketing plan into a self-running growth machine.

That’s where Reuben Nkemjika Obasi comes in. He’s a senior product manager who designs products that get people talking.

He turns regular products into ecosystems that grow on their own. Each user action brings in another. He creates the plan for products to grow and spread.

Reuben believes in growth loops. Unlike funnels that end, a growth loop keeps going. What one user does, creates something, refers a friend, or sends an invite, brings in a new user. That new user does something, which brings in even more users.

This makes growth take off without spending more on marketing.

The trick is to add features that people share, like referrals and invites. These aren’t just extra buttons.

They’re part of how the product works. A tool for working together might make it easy to invite someone to a document. Reuben makes sure these features are important to the product, so sharing feels natural.

For growth loops to work well, you need good retention. New users need to stick around and do things. Reuben knows a product has to be useful to go viral. He designs features that fix problems so well that people can’t imagine life without the product. Happy users make the loop work, as they’re constantly creating stuff, sending invites, and making referrals.

Notion is a prime example. Instead of spending a fortune on ads, it grew fast – thanks to simple growth loops that Reuben would appreciate.

The first is embedded docs. People made docs in Notion and put them on their websites.

This showed off Notion’s design and features, bringing in new users who signed up. One user’s work got the word out and brought in more users.

The second is community templates, Notion users made templates for things like project management and shared them. Shared on social media, they attracted new users who got value right away. These users then made and shared their own templates, keeping the loop going and turning the community into a growth machine.

Reuben’s work shows that the best marketing isn’t bought, it’s made. By baking growth into the product, he makes the user experience drive sales. The result is products that people love and that grow on their own, becoming leaders through momentum, not just money.