How Unicorn Platform got its users

Make the thing your customer ships a public URL on a subdomain you own, not a file they download. Unicorn Platform publishes to `name.unicornplatform.page` (a real user site: `crowd-matter.unicornplatform.page`), and it opens with no login, no account, no app install. That address is the carrier. If your product's output is a PDF, an export, or a page behind a signup wall, nothing leaves the building and the rest of this playbook has nowhere to attach.

done whenOpen your product's output on your phone, in a private window, logged out. If it renders, you have a carrier. If it prompts for a login or downloads a file, stop and fix the output format before touching the badge.

Put your mark in the footer of the published page and tag the link. Unicorn Platform's badge says "Built on Unicorn Platform", sits at the bottom of the site, and links to `unicornplatform.com/?ref=user_website`. The `?ref=` value is the part most people skip: it names the surface (a customer's website), not a campaign, so this traffic never gets lumped in with direct or organic. Pick one parameter value per surface you stamp and never reuse it.

done whenIn your analytics, you can pull a single number for "visits from pages our customers published" and it is separate from direct traffic. If that traffic is invisible or merged into direct, your badge is untagged and you cannot tell whether the loop works.

Charge for removal and write the rule into your terms. Removing the badge is a listed feature of the paid tiers, and the Terms of Service state that removing it with custom code is prohibited, only from the dashboard. That sentence exists because the product lets people paste custom code into their page, so the users most able to strip the badge are told the paid switch is the only legitimate route. Your terms page needs the same sentence before your first free user finds the CSS.

done whenYour terms page contains one sentence naming the badge and stating removal is only allowed through your dashboard, and a free user who wants it gone has exactly one path: paying you.

Turn the badge into a clone button instead of a credit line. On template pages like `neon-dark-template.unicorntemplates.com`, a second badge floats at the bottom reading "Create website from this template", and it goes to `app.unicornplatform.com?template=neon-dark-template`. The visitor who liked that design does not land on a homepage and start from zero, they land in the editor with that exact design loaded. Encode what the visitor was just looking at into the badge URL and rebuild it for them on arrival.

done whenClick your own badge as a stranger. If you land on a generic homepage with a signup form, the click is wasted. If you land inside the product with the thing you were looking at already loaded, it is doing distribution.

Point your own marketing at live published pages, not screenshots. Unicorn Platform's homepage runs a "Made with Unicorn Platform" row that links to real, live sites on `unicorntemplates.com` subdomains, and their own translated marketing pages run on `de.unicornplatform.page`. Each of those pages is three things at once: a demo, a badge carrier, and a page search engines can index. Every showcase link is another copy of the loop running, which a PNG in a browser mockup never is.

done whenAt least three links on your homepage go to pages actually published by your product, live and clickable, rather than to images of them.