How Miro Grows 3x Annually

The product led growth strategies used to build viral loops

Founded in 2011 by CEO Andrey Khusid, Miro helps remote teams get work done. When the pandemic hit, they quickly became a necessity for many companies.

Miro offers a digital equivalent to the office whiteboard and leveraged the theme of collaboration for virality and product led growth.

Strategy 1: Customer Centricity

Miro is constantly learning from their users, understanding how they use the product, and gathering insights. They evaluate their core audience and use cases regularly.

Miro recognized that different users have different needs, and they are constantly changing. They didn’t just acknowledged this, they set up systems to always understand their users and how the product was being used.

This helped them scale their product led business. By identifying what made people sign up or churn, it helped them constantly iterate and improve.

They focus on customer empathy and putting themselves in the customer's shoes - which is how they identify growth opportunities

Strategy 2: Simplicity + Short Time to Value

A key to growth is making it as easy as possible for users to get started with the product. You want the product to deliver value ASAP.

It must be flexible, with a low learning curve. If the product or set up process is too complicated, users will look elsewhere.

Miro uses a freemium model to provide value first, receive money later. However their freemium offers a lot of value upfront, allowing an unlimited number of teammates to get started. This was designed to get teams hooked as quickly as possible, fuelling an internal viral loop.

For Miro, the more people on a team to integrate, the sooner they experience the value, the more “sticky” it becomes within a team, getting them hooked (increasing their chances of upgrading). Once teams started spending time creating boards, adding notes, and collaborating together, they were less likely to churn.

The quick speed to value experience, gets teams integrated and invested right away. This is what accelerates their growth flywheel and leads to such high adoption.

A key takeaway from Miro is that it’s not only the fast speed to value, but the level of time and energy put into using the product by the user from the start. Miro board creators are team managers or leaders who want to create well made and fully functioning boards so the team can understand them and collaborate. Therefore the immediate investment people make with the product has a big impact in retention.

Strategy 4: User Engagement

People use Miro for a variety of use cases. They wanted to make users aware of the various types of uses for the product, so they created product tutorials and a learning centre to help people use the product more effectively.

This helps users have more success with the product, learn how they can use it for multiple purposes, improve their overall experience, which helps create growing champions.

Champions leads to word of mouth, an organic acquisition channel that can carry a companies growth to new levels.

Strategy 5: viral Loops

Miro makes it easy to invite others, with the goal of getting teams hooked ASAP. Even on the free version, you can choose who has access to the board, invite new members, or share it with whoever. This creates a runway for an efficient viral loop.

All it takes is one person to invite another colleague before the entire team is onboard. These internal loops drive adoption and retention. Then when an agency or company shares the board with a client and that client experiences the value of Miro, an external viral growth loop begins.

Strategy 6: North Star Metric

The growth team identified 1 key metric to focus on. Miro mission is to empower teams to create the next big things by providing the best solution to collaborate, therefore ‘active collaborating boars’ is the metric that indicates teams are getting value in a way that aligns with their mission.

Their most important activities are driving this metric by finding ways to get users to create more boards and sessions to drive stickiness, then focusing tests around activation and conversion.

Miro built a data driven testing culture, helping them move faster. The faster they learn, the more tests/experiments, the more they were able to learn, and the faster they were able to acquire customers more effectively.

Miro Today:

- 7M+ users

- 20K paying customers

- $57.2M revenue

- Raised $76.3M over 3 rounds

Keys to Growth Success:

- Quick time to value

- Understanding of viral loops

- Gather customer insights and data to fuel decision making

- Simple adoption

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