How Arc got its users

The format is one gesture on screen, not a feature list. Arc's shareable unit was a single motion: the gradient Spaces sidebar sliding away, or the pinch in Arc Search that folds a page origami-style into a summary. Find the one moment in your product where something visibly changes state in under three seconds. Record it at phone size, no cursor trail, no voiceover, no logo card. That clip is the post. The caption is one plain line under it.

done whenCan you name the one moment in your product that reads in under three seconds with the sound off? If your best clip needs a voiceover to make sense, you have a demo, not a post.

Rhythm: Arc's Release Notes went out weekly as a video of the founder talking to a webcam in a room, closer to a vlog than to an ad. Copy the cadence, not the production. Pick one weekday, keep it, and post two lines on what changed plus one clip of it running, shot on the laptop camera you already own. Publish on weeks the change is tiny. People subscribe to the beat, and a skipped week costs more than a boring one.

done whenLook at your last four weeks. Did a public update go out on a fixed day each time, or only when the change felt big enough? Silent weeks are the failure mode, not small ones.

Give the artifact a URL that escapes the app. Arc Easels let you drag a live tab onto a canvas, then hand out a public link that opens in any browser while editing stays inside Arc on macOS. Build the cheap version: whatever a user makes in your product gets a public page, readable with no install and no account, carrying your name. The user writes the post for free, the link does the selling.

done whenOpen something a user made in your product from a private window with no account. If it 404s, asks for a signup, or needs your app installed, it cannot travel.

Let people vandalize it. Arc shipped Boosts: restyle any site's colors and fonts, Zap out the elements you hate, then browse the community Boosts Gallery and install someone else's in one click. Ship the smallest version of that, one surface users can make theirs and screenshot. Then repost their versions from your own account. With no audience of your own, other people's feeds are the only feed you have.

done whenCount the screenshots of your product posted in the last month by people who do not work for you. If the answer is zero, nothing in it is worth showing off yet.

Turn replies into the page. arc.net runs a user quote as its headline and stacks testimonial cards credited to X handles like @beebomco and @markfishman_XYZ. Do the same: screenshot every unprompted post about you, ask the author, put it on your homepage, then send them the live link. Most repost it. One compliment becomes two posts, and your landing page stops sounding like you wrote it.

done whenSearch your product name on X and TikTok. If there are posts you have never replied to or reused on your own site, your only free distribution is sitting there unused.