How Miro wins by guiding users to success

• Growth breakdown: How Miro uses templates to flip how innovation is done and generate millions of organic impressions.

• Cool things I saw to take your business to the moon.

• Top tools for your business.

🏆 The one thing:

If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

When using a new product users are often overwhelmed (especially if your product has multiple use cases and a blank slate of possibilities).

You need to remove this feeling, increasing activation and retention rates, by guiding new users on how to get started and be successful with your product.

One of the best ways to do this is with clear and easy-to-use templates so your users can hit the ground running and have the confidence that your product will deliver as promised.

📚 The tactic:

A brief explanation of the tactic.

Miro creates a world of infinite visualized possibilities for its users (if you haven’t used it, it’s truly limitless).

For most new users, the specific use case of a blank Miro canvas is confusing. It can do anything, and seemingly everything. So where to start? And where to go?

By lifting the guardrails of possibility Miro created this battle between unlimited potential and the first step.

Users struggle to comprehend just how many use cases are possible with Miro (a common problem for everything tools such as Airtable or Notion), they can think of so many, but there are multiples more.

But at the same time, because of this literal blank canvas of possibility, users can become overwhelmed, leading to inaction, and ultimately churn.

Although on opposite ends, Miro solves them the same way: Free Templates.

Templates? Seriously?

I hear you. I know on the surface templates don’t seem worthy of a deep dive. But Miro’s unique strategic thinking behind theirs does.

Let’s make a deal, if you get to the end and you think I’m right, you’ll leave your feedback by clicking “Great”. If you get to the end and think I’m wrong, send me your startup and I’ll feature it in a community section next week. Deal?

So without further ado…

🎯 The execution:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🧍‍♂️: 1. Each to its own

Miro gives each of its templates its own landing page.

You might think this is excessive. But it serves a critical purpose.

To demonstrate it, we’re going to run an exercise: Think about how you search on Google (or Bing - surprisingly there are ~100 million of you out there using Bing daily).

I’m willing to guess you aren’t regularly searching terms like “whiteboard tool for growth marketers”.

You’re probably more vague in your searches. Something like “GTM templates”.

Miro understands this.

So they use individual landing pages for each template to drive massive top-of-funnel value. These template pages make up less than 3% of their organic pages, but drive ~30% of traffic value.

This is a massive competitive advantage for them.

As with each new template, there is an SEO-optimized landing page attached to it.

Plus, every user who creates an account with Miro after landing on a template page skips the problem of not knowing where to start.

They start with the template they landed on.

Meaning the activation rate is a lot higher and the user is more likely to become a paying customer for the long-term.

💡: 2. Open source innovation

This was actually where this newsletter was originally going to focus on (before I decided to move one level higher).

This is because Miro’s use of community is, in its own right, deserving of being studied (let me know if you’d like to see it in a future deep dive. And if you’re interested now look at this awesome breakdown from my fellow South African Jaryd).

Miro doesn’t only leave template creation to its internal team. They empower their users to create a more successful community with the Miroverse.

An innovation hub for user-generated templates - of which they have thousands (substantially more than their internally built templates).

The Miroverse has been the center of Miro’s community building. With profiles (from Zoom to your neighbor’s cat), likes, views, awards, challenges, and more, Miro has facilitated a community dedicated to helping each other and creating awesome Miro boards.

The Miroverse has become a platform to open source use case expansion - Reversing the tables on the traditional dictating to users how to use the product.

Creating a self-sufficient machine, bigger than would be possible internally, that consistently increases Miro’s TAM (Total Addressable Market) as these new use cases are added by users.

To make this even better, the SEO boost from point 1 applies here too. But with another added benefit.

Community boards are ripe for back-links.

Think about all the template creators, YouTubers, and Bloggers linking their (and other) Miro templates for their audience.

To make this last point tangible. Imagine a YouTuber starts using Miro Boards to brainstorm YouTube ideas - they can easily share this as a template with their audience - giving Miro more backlinks and boosting their SEO.

So what are you waiting for, invite users into your innovation process.

🎯: 3. Double down on what works

The last pillar of Miro’s template strategy is to use templates to generate data.

One of the problems with a product like Miro is that it can do anything. It is a whiteboard at the end of the day, just virtual.

This can lead to disjointed marketing that is vague and trying to appeal to everyone.

To avoid this, Miro uses the data they generate from their (and user-generated) templates: how popular each template is, if it leads to sticky users (a user with a high retention rate), if a use-case is prone to sharing, etc.

By doing this, Miro can target use cases it identifies as popular and high-value. Helping with their positioning, their messaging, and their product roadmap.

And also giving Miro potential lead magnets to draw new users in - using popular templates to increase the chance of giving users that aha moment and turning them into evangelists.

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• How to use powerful storytelling to create a unique pitch deck (link)

• How to upsell with a stacking formula (link)

• The habits of effective remote teams (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• Scout: All-in-one sales prospecting platform.

• Clay: Uplevel your data enrichment. Scale personalized outreach.

• PhantomBuster: More leads, less effort.