Hatching Growth #2: How We Chose Our Growth and Acquisition Channels

Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way. While we prefer not to use the term "user," please note that we’ll use it here for convenience 🙇♂️

In the first series of Hatching Growth, we peeled back the curtain on our manual, one-to-one outreach that propelled us to 1,000 users in three months. In this installment, we’ll go deeper, showing how we crystallized a sustainable growth framework built around low-cost content marketing (our “SEO++”) and word-of-mouth. We’ll share the strategic thinking, product design choices, core metrics, and high-level execution that set the stage for compounding, product-led growth.

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Why Share This Now?

By mid-2021, we were living in back-to-back Zoom onboards and LinkedIn DMs, learning invaluable lessons about user behavior but burning founder bandwidth. We knew that reaching our next milestone (10K, 100K, or beyond) wouldn’t be possible by manually sending personalized DMs or running dozens of calls. We needed a repeatable, asset-building strategy that would earn attention once and pay dividends over months and years. That strategic pivot from purely linear outreach to a content-powered growth engine is what this post unpacks.

1. Framing the Growth Problem: CAC vs. LTV

Before choosing tactics, we asked ourselves two fundamental questions:

1. What acquisition channels cost almost zero per user?
2. How do those costs compare to the lifetime value (LTV) of a typical Glasp user?

As a B2C/prosumer app, we anticipated modest per-user revenue, mostly driven by a small percentage of paid subscriptions and ancillary services. That meant any channel with a customer acquisition cost (CAC) higher than a few dollars would be tough to justify over the long run.

Of course, one can raise venture funding and deploy that capital into paid marketing. However, it’s critical to consider your fundraising strategy and the founders’ stance and, above all, to determine whether users acquired through paid marketing will remain engaged and whether their lifetime value will grow over time. Without fully accounting for these factors, you risk failing to achieve the expected results and undermining the sustainability of your growth.

Also, since Glasp didn’t monetize until October 2024, there was no actual revenue to speak of, but we proceeded based on projected figures.

The Four-Tier Channel Model We mapped out acquisition options into four tiers by increasing CAC:

• Tier 1 (Near-Zero CAC): Organic search (content marketing), word-of-mouth/social sharing
• Tier 2 (Low-Cost Paid): Search and social ads (Google Ads, Facebook/TikTok Ads)
• Tier 3 (Referral Incentives): Paid invites or credit for bringing friends
• Tier 4 (Sales-Driven): Dedicated account or enterprise sales

For Glasp, Tier 1 offered the only sustainable path: our product and resources couldn’t support enterprise sales or expensive ad budgets in the early days.

2. Building Our “SEO++” Content Engine

When we say “SEO,” we’re talking about evergreen content marketing, creating user-centric articles and tutorials that rank for queries in our niche (knowledge management, highlighting workflows, productivity tips). The key advantages:

• One-Time Effort, Multi-Year Impact: A well-optimized tutorial can drive traffic for years with minimal upkeep.
• Deep User Value: By teaching real use cases, we attracted users who were primed to appreciate Glasp’s core features.
• Scalability: Unlike manual outreach, content creation scales with team bandwidth (and eventually with community contributors).

👉 Want to read the full story, including our secret to make content engine and key lessons? Read the full article here on Glasp Post.