How Carrd got its users

Publish the free user's output to a public URL on a subdomain you own, the way Carrd puts every free site at name.carrd.co. The address bar is the first impression and it carries your name before the visitor reads a word. Do not ship the free-tier output as a downloadable file or as a screen inside your app: nothing escapes that way, because the recipient never sees an address at all.

done whenSend your own free-tier output to a friend exactly the way a real user would, as a bare link in a DM. Count how many times your brand name is visible to them before they scroll or tap anything. If the answer is zero, your output carries nothing.

Put your mark inside the artifact's own footer, as plain crawlable text, pointing at your builder rather than your homepage. Carrd's is literally <a href="https://carrd.co/build?ref=auto">Made with Carrd</a> sitting in the site's footer element: no image, no iframe, no rel=nofollow, and the destination is the "Choose a Starting Point" screen instead of a sales page. Text link means search engines count it; builder destination means humans act on it.

done whenView source on a page one of your free users published. Your mark should be readable text in the raw HTML with no rel=nofollow, and the href should land on the screen where a stranger starts making their own thing. If it is a JS-injected image pointing at /pricing, crawlers see nothing and humans see a pitch.

Let the click produce something finished before an account exists. The badge lands on dozens of templates sorted into Profile, Landing, Form, Portfolio and Sectioned, plus a blank page, and Carrd's homepage states it flat out: no signup required. The stranger who liked the page they just clicked from picks the template that matches it and is building within seconds, while the intent is still warm.

done whenOpen your own badge link in a private window and time how long until you have something that resembles what you clicked from. Every screen between the click and that moment is where the loop dies. If a signup form comes first, you are only converting people who were already sold.

Sell removal of the badge and removal of your domain as two separate purchases, and price the domain higher. On Carrd, Pro Lite at $9 a year removes the "Made with Carrd" branding but the site stays on a carrd.co address, sold back as "Premium URLs". Custom domains only start at Pro Standard, $19 a year. The cheapest upgrade buys quiet in the footer and leaves your name in the address bar of everything that user ships.

done whenRead your own pricing table. If any single tier hides both your mark and your domain, you sold two pieces of distribution for the price of one. Then check what share of your paying users sit on the tier that still shows your domain: that number is free reach you are being paid for.

Make the free tier permanent and cap it by count, not by clock. Carrd gives free accounts three sites with all core features and no expiry, and the 7 day free trial applies to Pro, not to free. A page someone published for free two years ago is still live and still carrying the footer link, which is what turns one afternoon of usage into a standing backlink that keeps working with no budget behind it.

done whenFind the oldest artifact a free user published on your product. Is it still reachable, and does it still carry your mark? If your free tier expires, archives, or unpublishes, count how many marks you took off the internet last quarter and treat that count as marketing you deleted.