How Hotjar got its users
A badge on free-tier customer sites, seen by all of their visitors. The free plan was a media buy.
Read from signals. Consistent with what is publicly observable, but nobody confirmed it. Check before you quote it.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- An acquisition cost that trends toward zero
- Growth that survives you cutting the budget
- A moment where the user has a selfish reason to share
- Zero friction for the recipient
- A product that is multiplayer by nature
Viral product in 2026
The best channel when it exists. But it is decided in product design, not in marketing.
Everything on this channel →The play
Generic version of this channel. The detailed card is not written yet.
- 1
Find the moment where sharing serves the user, not you
done whenYou can name the exact moment sharing helps the user, not you.
- 2
Let the shared artifact carry the brand, quietly
done whenThe artifact carries the brand and nobody has complained about it.
- 3
Remove every mandatory signup on the recipient side
done whenA recipient can use the thing before creating an account.
- 4
Measure new users per active user. Everything else is secondary
done whenNew users per active user is a number you check weekly and can say out loud.
The product itself
read from hotjar.com, live“Hotjar has evolved into something more powerful”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Acquired by Contentsquare
What else they ran
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.