How to Build a Viral growth Loop in a Non-Viral B2B SaaS

The most effective growth loop is having a product that’s so good and so unique that users can’t help but tell everyone else about it. If you also happen to catch a hype cycle at the right moment, you can achieve breakout growth (e.g. Like lovable in 2025).

This is rare however, and depends on many circumstances that can’t be manufactured at will.

So instead of looking at word of mouth growth, I break down how we crafted a viral growth loop for the Sellics Benchmarker: A performance reporting tool for Amazon sellers.

I will detail the mechanisims behind it, so you can apply the same frameworks.

The advantage of virality as a channel

Virality is the only channel where each new user directly contributes to acquiring more users. Let’s have a look at paid channels for comparison. At Sellics, we heavily relied on paid search in order to acquire new customers. But at a certain scale some problems started showing up. 

While paid channels are a great way to get started (easy to get started, / fast feedback / time not a constraint for scale, since you can just increase spend), they have a number of drawbacks:

1. Paid marketing doesn’t compound well, because you’re not building an asset like you would with a community or a blog.

2. Non-linear cost scaling: Every bit of incremental growth becomes disproportionately more expensive, because other players with deep pockets are competing for the absolute top ad spots. 

3. Limited by search volume: If you’re dealing with a narrow topic (Amazon advertising in our case), the keywords that are both highly relevant and have significant search volume are limited. 

4. It’s a mature channel: Competitive and saturated.

Similar issues appear with organic search, paid social and so on. Virality on the other hand compounds with each user contributing to the acquisition of new users through sharing. Systematically getting people to share requires an understanding of why people share things in the first place. 

The principles of viral sharing

According to Jonah Berger’s book Contagious, there are six factors that contribute to viral sharing:

STEPPS Framework

Social currency: Anything that increases someone's perceived status

Triggers: A noticeable cue, can either be internal (boredom) or external (notification), that prompts a behavior

Emotion: People are motivated to share through high arousal emotions such as anger or surprise

Practical use: People share things that have been useful in some way, also to gain social currency

Public residue: If the result of sharing stays publicly visible,  more people see it. Can serve as a trigger as well. 

Stories: People tell, remember and are moved by stories. This is essentially an extension of the emotion part.

The three viral mechanisms for SaaS

Aside from word of mouth, there are some product categories that naturally drive viral growth, usually collaboration software (e.g. Miro, Slack). In fact, it’s often a core part of any product led GTM motion. (Bottom up, low friction → acquire lots of users → sell enterprise contracts as soon as more people are using it within a company)

Collaborative: A product that is only useful if it’s used together with other people, so inviting them is a natural step in the user journey. 

Examples: 

Miro, Pitch, Slack or games like Fortnite. 

But what if you don’t have a product that has virality baked into the user journey, for example by inviting teammates during the signup process? 

Incentivized: If there is no built-in need for collaboration companies may still achieve viral distribution by incentivizing users to share. Incentives can be monetary, but also enhance the usefulness of the product itself: 

Trello offers a free month for inviting others, Notion gives you additional credits, and Dropbox - probably the most cited case of a two sided referral program - users get more storage space.

Company	Incentive for inviting new users
Trello	Get a free month
Notion	Get free credits
Dropbox	Get free storage space

Even if it is often cheaper than performance marketing, incentivising users isn’t ideal if the incentive is not perfectly aligned with product usage.

Incidental: This means that the sharing is not intentional, but a side effect of using the tool. Examples are all the widget based softwares such as Drift, Intercom or Hotjar with their “powered by” link in the widget. Users who might also need the tool see it on someone's website, click the “powered by” link and end up using it themselves. 

Company	Referral mechanism
Drift	Chatbot widget & sharable certifications
SurveyMonkey	Link below each survey
Hotjar	Feedback widget

All three of these referral strategies fulfill at least some of the criteria from the STEPPS framework:

Factor	Collaborative	Incentivized	Incidental
Social Currency	No	No	Depends
Trigger	Yes	Yes	Yes
Emotion	No	No	No
Practical Value	Yes	Yes	No
Public Residue	No	No	Yes
Story	No	No	No