How Fireflies.ai got its users

Make the act of using your product create an object other people have to accept. Fireflies is not switched on inside a settings panel: you add fred@fireflies.ai to the guest list of the calendar invite, and the host has to click Admit entry on a participant sitting in the room. The product name is in the invite before the call and in the participant panel during it. Find the moment in your own product where a user does the main thing, and make that moment produce something a second person sees and clicks.

done whenOpen your product's main action and ask who else sees anything. If nobody outside the account sees a single object with your name on it, you have no channel yet, only a feature.

Name that object after the product and after the person who brought it. The participant reads "Fireflies.ai Notetaker" plus the inviter's name, which tells the room what it is and who is responsible for it. Fireflies also documents that the bot stays visible in the participant list and cannot join silently. Do the same: the thing your users put in front of other people carries your name, not a neutral label, and free accounts get no option to strip it.

done whenLog into a free account and try to rename or hide the thing recipients see. If you can, the free plan is paying you nothing and telling nobody.

Set the after-the-fact email to go to everyone who was in the room, not only your user. The Fireflies default is "Everyone on the invite", which includes external guests, and the message carries the summary in the body plus a link to the full notes. Ship your output the same way: your domain in the From field, the useful part readable without a click, the rest behind the link. Keep "Only me" as a setting the user has to go find.

done whenCount the distinct email addresses your product sent to last week against your number of accounts. If the ratio is near one to one, your default is set to "only me" and you should change it this week.

Let a stranger read the output with no account, and put the actions behind the signup. On Free and Pro, a non-user who opens a shared Fireflies recap gets the full transcript and audio playback without logging in, but AskFred, AI Skills, Soundbites and comments need them to log in or sign up. That is the split to copy: reading is instant and free, doing anything with what you read costs an email address.

done whenOpen one of your share links in a private window and time it. If you cannot get something useful before being asked for an email, the link is a signup wall, not a channel.

Cut one small piece of the output that a user would forward on its own. Fireflies turns a moment of a call into a Soundbite, created with access set to Public, shared by copying a link that works for people who have no Fireflies account, and pasted into Slack instead of a whole recording. Build the equivalent snippet in your product, public by default, so the link travels into group chats where nobody involved is a customer yet.

done whenLook for one URL your product creates that a user would paste into a group chat with no explanation attached. If the only pasteable link you own is your homepage, that snippet is the next thing to build.