How we acquired millions of users and majority Fortune 100 companies

Imagine this... You need to grow 10X but your budget is 1/10th. How would you win?

If I told you that was possible and then some more, you’d probably call me crazy.

In the past three years that I’ve worked at Streamline (an icons and illustrations library), we’ve grown to millions of users. The majority of Fortune 100 companies use/pay us, including customers like Vanguard, Twilio, Bloomberg, and Booking.com.

You’d probably find it hard to browse the internet without running into Streamline.

Streamline is bootstrapped, calm, and without a sales team. The company has a zero meetings culture and sometimes our founder will even promote competitors.

It is wild and beautiful at the same time.

So, hi. I’m Khushi. I lead growth and marketing at Streamline. In this article, I’ll go beyond the common knowledge that we’ve already seen with PLG and marketing. I’ll share counterintuitive learnings with some starting ideas to implement them in your own company.

Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn:

• Never market alone. You’re a small team. You need outsized impact. Find a horse to ride.

• Your free product should probably scare you.

• Don’t limit PLG to only the product. Expand it to your team’s time and everything else.

• Be shameless when asking for help and advice.

• and some more!

#1 Tip: Find a horse to ride

Finding a horse to ride is a concept from a book called Horse Sense.

It means that you need to find something bigger than yourself to climb the next mountain.

Maybe it is a rich dad. Or your successful partner. SurveyMonkey’s CEO was Facebooks’ COO husband, and that’s how they got the idea of a growth team (source). 

It is a concept similar to piggybacking in international business. Piggybacking is a market entry strategy where you partner up with someone local and ride on their back.

So, how did Streamline piggyback?

1. Piggybacked with channel partnerships

Streamline created a plugin for Figma. Eventually, we won Figma’s best graphic design award in 2022 and became a top 1% plugin of all times.

We also partnered up with Lucid. This gave us access to 60M users that could reach Streamline in 2 clicks.

Channel partnerships bring in users that retain. Unlike a paid ads campaign, you’re embedded in their workflow.

2. Piggybacked on end users with attribution

Every person that uses Streamline for free is required to attribute to us with backlinks.

Not everyone will honor these license rules but those that do helped us cross a domain authority of 74 with around 100k backlinks.

When you think of attribution or watermarks, you don’t need to have a singular use-case. There are more ways to incorporate them, even with paid users.

3. Piggybacked on adjacent products/competitors

On your post-purchase survey field, ask users which other products they use. You’ll better understand their buyer journey and know who to partner up with.

Partnering up with competitors has been done by companies like Adidas before, so it’s not a new concept.

4. Piggybacked on schools like Harvard

Streamline’s taught by educators at Harvard, ShiftNudge, and some of the top design courses in the industry.

Instead of simply offering an education program, we wanted to make sure it compounds.

Every student that uses Streamline attributes to us from their design portfolio. Portfolios are the most shared asset by any student.

We’re also a small team so we ask students to introduce us to their educators, instead of directly offering the license to a student.

Educators then distribute Streamline to their current students and all future batches. It also reduces abuse of the program.

Acquisition is done by a single student but the distribution is done by the educator by the hundreds. Plus, it’s taught by educators so product recall is much higher. Streamline is also embedded in the curriculum.

4. Piggybacked on trends like memes

Memes are very shareable and instantly recognizable. We created a vector meme set that went viral. It hit the front page on HackerNews and got us roughly a thousand backlinks.

Then, we doubled down on it. We drew people’s favorite memes if they’d share.

So, how can you piggyback?

• Piggyback on thought leaders, like Reforge piggybacked on Andrew Chen.

• Piggyback on celebrities by creating a variation of what they’ve said. Music covers is an example. Twitter did this with their “If you can dream it, you can tweet it” campaign.

• Piggyback on macro-economic trends.

• Piggyback on your employees similar to what Google did when they first launched Gmail.

• Piggyback on your end customers.

There are just so many different ways!

#2 Tip: Structure your free product such that it scares you

Too often, the free version is a lead magnet in disguise. It offers the bare minimum to incentivize a sign up.

Think of Notion, Figma, Canva. All of their free versions are awesome. Yes, it’s going to compete with your premium product but someone else is going to disrupt you if you leave that gap open.

That’s why companies like Procter and Gamble have similar products in different price ranges or targeting different segments.

How Streamline structures its free product?

I remember saying, “Hey, we’re probably giving too much for free”.

And our founder responded with, “That’s the threshold. If it scares you, let’s run with it. Anything less than that is not useful”.

• Our free library offers real vector icons. People don’t get non-editable PNGs that aren’t as useful.

• When Streamline was first launched as a side project, the founder created the largest ever icon set that the world had ever seen. He shared it for free and was an instant hit.

• Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s cheap. The free products are labor intensive to create. Pixel icon set took a very long time to create and is ungated.

• Lots of our sets are open-source. Think of open source as a distribution strategy, not a business model.

• The product is also ungated. No need to provide your email address to download thousands of assets. All features are ungated and free to use. Trial requires only an email, no card.

• Although, instead of throwing people directly in the app, we realized it was better to show a welcome modal window educating them about Streamline. Instead of clicking on a CTA, they can also close the welcome modal which is more of a Systems 1 thinking.

But it should still compound. It’s a business, not a charity.

#3 Tip: Compound everything.

In simplest of terms = PLG means the product grows itself. It’s a compounding loop. More users bring more users.

What if you applied this compounding loop to other parts of the business as well?

Compounding your team’s time

Let’s take an example. Say you could pick one of the GTM opportunities. A one-off newsletter sponsorship with a big influencer or run ads on a small website.

Assume that the setup time for both projects is nearly the same.

Which one would you pick?

• One-off newsletter sponsorship
• Ad banner on website

I’d pick option 2. The ad banner. 

Newsletter is a one-and-done project. It requires time and discussions. When you set up an ad on a partner website, you don’t need to have a second conversion. Once it is set up, it can last for years if things go well.

This way, you compound your time. With every new partner, I add up. This means, partners are only brought on after research because I want it to last for years.

Our sales process is also PLG of sorts

People fill out a form with what they need. And we send a quotation over to them. That’s it. There are no meetings. We’ve closed large contracts by just a few emails. Even governments have bought from us simply after exchanging a few emails. The product is very visual, so that definitely helps.

Compound even a referral campaign 

We don’t ask users to share with other users. Instead, we ask users to share with influencers. We try to max out distribution with every campaign.

#4 Tip: Solving churn

Churn will always be something to consider with self-serve companies. Streamline can’t lock data in. Plus, you aren’t forced to call someone to cancel a subscription.

How we’re addressing churn?

• Better ICP targeting to freelancers, knowledge workers, and agencies. There are companies that get a subscription when they have a major redesign coming up but after that, they don’t anymore.

• Create a one-time purchase product for individual brands that only needed one set. This helps us get larger AOVs with more satisfied customers. Plus, it increases word of mouth. Once someone downloads an icon set, it will live forever in their design system and helps optimize for internal team shareability.

How you can handle churn?

• Shift your ICP targeting to users that spread more word of mouth or retain longer. Learn how to calculate your word of mouth coefficient and monitor it.

• If your ICP has an on-and-off use case, consider offering trial extensions, pauses, discounts before they cancel. We used Churnkey but you can evaluate Profitwell, Baremetrics and a few others if churn’s an issue worth solving.

#5 Tip: Have influence over the product

Many growth teams are asked to market, activate, retain and do all sorts of things while having no real influence over the actual product.

When the product tanks, this team is usually the scapegoat.

You can’t expect to be given influence without putting in the hours. I’ve spent my own money to learn the subject before I tried to market it. I remember taking 6-month long courses on product design and UX that cost thousands of dollars.

Eventually, I was given a proper growth pod with devs, designers, and support resources. The founder actively asks for my feedback on every new feature/product we build. And I do give (a lot!) of feedback/suggestions.

The team is excited to work on growth problems. I remember asking the company for an additional 15% of engineering capacity and they gave me far more than I asked for.

You can’t grow a product you don’t believe in. Growth teams deserve a skin in the game.

One of my favorite matrixes is the shareability matrix. How shareable is your product? Internally within a team and externally. You can apply this to all features and products.

Although, I do step out of conversations very often. Streamline is more of an art than it is a science. The design team has a very high bar.

For example, Streamline’s entire library is drawn multiple times over. They spend an obsessive amount of time harmonizing and re-harmonizing a set, even years after its drawn.

Look at that ampersand (&) icon from our chunky Plump icon set that was inspired by cartoons.

This level of attention to detail resonates with our target audience. And I don’t think a single competitor can match that.

The lesson here is to step in and give feedback, but also step out when working with creatives.

#6 Tip: Be shameless when asking for help

The more you know, the more you’ll realize what you don’t know.

I remember cold-dming execs at billion dollar companies who were ready to extend an hour of their time to help me out.

Hillary Miller who was the Head of Whimsical and now at Calendly mentored me every month for over a full year, for nothing in exchange.

People like Aazar Shad, Mike Taylor (ran a 50+ growth agency), Foti and Jessica (founders at GrowthMentor), Katelyn Bourgoin, bet on me in the early days.

I remember reaching out to Michael Pici (ex VP of Product, Revenue at HubSpot), Adam Fishman (ex-Head of Growth at Lyft), and Nick Lafferty (ex-Head of Growth Marketing at Loom). I asked them to critique and poke holes in my strategy. I asked them why I’d fail. 

I even chain-smoked 60+ courses from Reforge, CXL to learn as much as I could.

There are lots of people who have helped me get here. The journey is not easy but it’s fun when you have great friends/family/advisors to help you along the way. It also helps to have a good founder like Vincent!

Thank you for reading and I hope this article helped!

Disclaimer: These are my insights and hypothesis. These opinions are mine alone, and not of the company’s. However, I made sure to get approval from the company to share this article.