USER-GENERATED DISTRIBUTION: THE HIDDEN GROWTH ENGINE BEHIND TODAY'S FASTEST STARTUPS

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

User-generated distribution (UGD) drives growth by turning user actions into marketing, as seen with Notion, Duolingo, Canva, and Figma. Notion scaled from 1M to 100M users by making templates shareable, while Canva's 90% user-created templates led to over 13B designs shared. Duolingo leveraged volunteer-built courses and streak-sharing to attract learners, and Figma's collaborative files turned invites into new sign-ups. Successful UGD loops require seeding initial content, incentivizing quality contributions, making outputs easy to share, and continuously curating and iterating to sustain growth.