Find the growth loop

To: Sam Okoro, Head of Growth From: [PM], Pollen Subject: Growth loop and where the two engineers go next quarter

Recommendation

Put both engineers on replacing the badge with "Make a form like this" and rolling it out to every form, with a holdout to measure it. Paid search and template pages don't need engineers. Referrals should wait until we have badge results.

Our primary loop

Creators publish forms. Respondents see the badge. Some click and sign up. Some of those sign-ups publish, and their forms bring in more respondents. Last month the badge drove about 4,750 sign-ups (4.8M respondents × 0.9% click rate × 11% sign-up rate) and about 1,800 new publishers. It has the best publish rate (38%) and next-month retention (85%) of any channel.

Is it compounding?

Not yet. Compounding requires each cohort to bring in more new creators than churn removes. Last month:

• New publishers: about 1,800 from the badge, 840 from template pages, and 440 from paid search, roughly 3,100 in total.
• Churn: 22% of 18,000 active creators, roughly 4,000.

At current rates the base shrinks about 5% a month, and paid and template pages are what keep it from falling faster. The badge is our best channel but a leaky one. It returns about 0.1 new publishers per active creator per month, against 22% churn.

Paid search is expensive. At $38 per sign-up and 21% publishing, a new publisher costs about $180. The average publisher is worth about $25 in Pro revenue (9% upgrade × $20 × 14 months). It only pays back if those publishers' forms keep feeding the badge. Finance has approved the budget, so it needs no engineering, but we should treat it as paid acquisition, not growth.

What the pilot changes

The copy-form badge raised clicks from 0.9% to 1.6% and publish rate from 38% to 52%. Applied to all forms, that's about 4,400 badge-driven publishers a month instead of 1,800. Total inflow would be about 5,700 against roughly 4,000 churn. That moves us from shrinking to growing, which is the difference that matters for this quarter.

The caveat is sample size. The pilot covered 500 forms: about 960 clicks and around 55 publishers. That's too small to bank on, which is why the rollout needs a holdout.

Where the engineers go

• Engineer 1: ship the badge replacement to all forms. This covers the copy-to-editor flow, production hardening, instrumentation, and a 10% holdout of forms that keep the old badge.
• Engineer 2: shorten the time from copy to publish. This means pre-filled editors, easy save-and-share, and prompts to publish the copy within the first week. Publish rate is the conversion step most worth improving in this loop.

Not engineering priorities this quarter

• Doubling paid search: Finance-approved and needs no build. Watch cost per publisher closely, given the Pro economics above.
• 200 template pages: This is content work for our team. Template sign-ups publish at 14%, the lowest of the three channels, but search traffic compounds over time. Start once the badge result is in, if capacity allows.
• Referral programme: The $10 credit could become a real loop, but we have no data on referrals per user, and it carries fraud risk. Revisit in Q2 with a small test cohort.

How we'll know it worked

Measured against the holdout after eight weeks:

1. Click rate: at least 1.6% of respondents on treated forms, against about 0.9% on control.
2. Publish rate: at least 50% of copy-form sign-ups publish within 30 days, against 38% today.
3. Net growth: new publishers exceed churn (about 4,000 at today's base), so the active base grows month over month.
4. Quality: copy-form publishers retain at 85% or better into the following month, so they aren't one-off users.
5. Revenue: Pro upgrade rate among new publishers is at least 9%.

Revert if the click lift against holdout is not clear, or publish rate falls below 38%, the old baseline.

To: Sam Okoro, Head of Growth From: Product Subject: Put both engineers on the respondent-to-creator loop

Recommendation

Use both engineers to ship and validate “Make a form like this.” It strengthens our existing growth loop, has encouraging experimental evidence, and attracts creators who historically activate and retain better than creators from other channels. Don’t double paid search or build a referral programme next quarter. Keep existing SEO acquisition running, but don’t call 200 team-written pages a growth loop.

Our primary loop—and whether it compounds

Our loop is:

Creator publishes → respondents encounter Pollen → some become creators → those creators publish → more respondents encounter Pollen.

The badge connects product usage to new acquisition. SEO and paid search feed creators into that loop; they are not themselves loops. Team-written template pages don’t automatically generate more template pages.

At last month’s volume, 40,000 forms × 120 respondents implies 4.8 million respondent encounters. Applying the badge funnel gives:

Assumes pilot conversion rates hold at scale and new creators retain at the historical badge cohort’s 85% rate. These are illustrative ceilings if some of the 4.8 million encounters are on Pro forms without badges; actual forecasts must use badge-visible encounters.

The loop recurs, but we have not demonstrated self-sustaining compounding. Each existing active creator generates approximately 0.10 new publishing creators per cycle under the current funnel, or 0.085 who remain active the following month. Meanwhile, 22% of existing active creators lapse—about 3,960 of an 18,000-creator base.

The proposed experience raises those figures to approximately 0.244 new publishers and 0.207 subsequently retained creators per existing creator. That approaches churn replacement, but does not establish durable compounding. Activation and retention occur over different windows, so this is a replacement diagnostic, not an exact monthly growth forecast. Pro upgrades also remove badges, reducing future distribution.

Why this beats the alternatives

• Paid search is economically unattractive on the supplied numbers. Its $38 sign-up cost becomes approximately $181 per publishing creator. Expected lifetime revenue per publishing creator is only $25.20: 9% upgrade × $20 × 14 months, before costs. Finance approval doesn’t fix that gap.
• SEO produces useful acquisition, but the marginal return is unknown. Existing pages generated 840 publishers, versus roughly 1,806 from the badge. We don’t know what 200 additional pages would deliver, and their production remains dependent on our team.
• Referral credit rewards the wrong milestone. Paying for sign-ups invites low-intent referrals and abuse. We have no evidence of referral demand or incremental retained creators.
• The badge pilot improves two stages: clicks rise from 0.9% to 1.6%, and publishing from 38% to 52%. Together, that is 2.43× more publishers per respondent, not merely better click-through.

Engineering allocation and success criteria

Assign one engineer to the copy-to-editor experience and one to experimentation, instrumentation, and rollout safeguards, working as a single team. Copy only reusable form structure—not responses or sensitive data—and provide appropriate creator controls.

Run a persistent randomized experiment, assigned by creator to avoid mixing experiences across their forms. Measure actual badge-visible encounters, not total respondents.

Primary metric: incremental next-month-active creators per 100,000 badge-visible encounters. The baseline is approximately 32; the pilot implies 78, if retention holds. Track clicks, sign-ups, and 30-day publishing as diagnostic metrics, not the final win.

Wait for the activation and subsequent retention windows to mature. Check respondent completion, creator complaints, copied-form publishing quality, Pro conversion, and badge exposure lost through upgrades. Attribute downstream acquisition consistently and test for cannibalization of other channels.

Success means a statistically credible increase in retained creators without material guardrail deterioration. At full illustrative exposure, the opportunity is roughly 2,200 additional retained creators per monthly cohort. Separately, claim compounding only when observed cohort reproduction—including repeat publishing, churn, and badge removal—demonstrably exceeds replacement.

To: Sam Okoro, Head of Growth From: [PM], Growth Re: Our growth loop, and where the two engineers should go next quarter

Summary: Our primary loop is the badge. Today it does not compound, and the active creator base is shrinking. The "Make a form like this" pilot is the only one of the four ideas that could make it compound. Both engineers should ship it properly, with a holdout. We should not double paid search.

1. The loop

Creators publish forms → respondents see the badge → some respondents become creators → they publish forms.

Last month the loop worked like this: - 40,000 forms × 120 respondents = 4.8M respondents - 0.9% clicked the badge = 43,200 clicks - 11% of clicks signed up = 4,752 sign-ups - 38% of sign-ups published = 1,806 new publishing creators

The badge is our largest source of creators. Templates produced 840 publishers and paid search 441. Badge creators also retain best: 85% are active the next month, against 71% for templates and 64% for paid.

2. Is it compounding? Not yet.

Each active creator produces about 267 respondents a month, which yields 0.10 new publishers per creator per month. With 78% monthly retention, a creator stays about 4.5 months. Over that lifetime, each creator brings in about 0.46 new creators.

A loop compounds only when this number exceeds 1. At 0.46, the badge amplifies our other channels by about 1.8×, but it cannot sustain itself.

The overall picture is worse: - We keep 14,040 of last month's 18,000 active creators. - We add about 3,100 new publishers. - That gives about 17,100 active creators, a 5% monthly decline. - At current rates the base settles at roughly 10,700 creators.

This assumes the 78% retention figure covers the whole base, which is how I read the data.

3. The four ideas

Double paid search: no. - Each sign-up costs $38. Only 21% publish, so each publishing creator costs about $181. - Each publisher is worth about $25 in revenue (9% upgrade × $20 × 14 months). - Adding the loop's downstream creators raises that to only about $46. - Doubling spend would add about 440 publishers a month for an extra $80k a month, and cost per sign-up usually rises with spend. - This idea doesn't need engineers. I'd ask Finance to hold the budget rather than spend it because it's approved.

200 more template pages: not now. - This is not a loop, because new creators don't create more pages. Our team writes them, so output grows only as fast as we write. - We don't know how many pages produce today's 6,000 sign-ups, so we can't estimate the yield. - Templates publish at only 14%. - This is mainly content work, not engineering work.

Referral credit: no. - It rewards sign-ups, not publishing, which invites low-quality and fake sign-ups. - $10 of Pro credit means nothing to the 91% of creators who never upgrade.

"Make a form like this": yes. The pilot changed every stage of the loop:

At network scale, that would mean about 4,400 badge publishers a month instead of 1,800. Each creator's lifetime yield would rise from 0.46 to about 1.1, so the loop would start to compound. Next month's active base would be about 19,700 instead of 17,100.

The margin is thin. The loop reaches the break-even of 1.0 at 0.83 publishers per 1,000 respondents. The pilot beat that by only about 10%. We also need to treat the pilot result with caution: - It covered 500 forms, which may not be representative. - It ran for two weeks, so check whether the 30-day publish window had fully elapsed. - We have no next-month retention data for these creators. People who copy a form may be less committed than people who build one.

4. What the engineers build

1. Staged rollout with a 20% holdout of forms on the old badge, randomised by form and run for at least 8 weeks so we see 30-day publishing and next-month retention. 2. Creator controls and safety: - Copies take the form structure only, never responses. - Creators can turn off copying for sensitive forms. 3. Instrumentation for each stage: click, sign-up, publish, next-month activity, and Pro upgrade. Results should be split by form type so we learn which forms spread best.

5. How we'll know it worked

Primary metric: new publishing creators per 1,000 respondents, treatment vs holdout. - Ship to 100% if it stays at or above 0.83, the level needed for the loop to compound. - Below about 0.6, the change is still positive but the loop won't compound. We would keep it and look for other levers.

Quality checks: - Next-month retention of copy sign-ups should be at least 70%. If it falls much lower, the extra volume won't last. - The upgrade rate of these creators to Pro should be close to 9%.

Guardrails: - Form completion rate is unchanged. - Creator complaints and copy opt-outs are low. - Pro upgrade rate across the base is unchanged.

Business outcome: the active creator base grows month on month by the end of the quarter, instead of falling about 5%.

Bottom line: paid search and templates rent growth one sign-up at a time. The copy-this-form change is our one realistic chance to make growth compound, and a proper rollout will tell us within a quarter whether it does.