Hello from a flight that just left Bozeman, Montana!
There is something awesome about being in the mountains for a total reset. You land and immediately realize you’re in a different culture: flannels, fishing gear, and dogs that would take one glance at Central Park and turn around.
It’s like there’s a secret memo everyone got, rooted in mimicry. Same clothes, same mountain town vibe (which I love, as a major skier/ourdoorsy girl who used to live in Breckenridge, CO).
This is exactly how I decided on the topic for today’s epic newsletter that I’ll fill with awesome tips and tricks:
How do you seed top user behavior throughout your product to have it multiply?
You need to make it easy, obvious, rewarding, and repeatable:
Model the behavior — Show that people understand the product and purpose through top user behavior and content
Make it easy to copy — Your UI and copy are first-grade level, so it’s super obvious how to mimic and take action
Make it rewarding + repeatable — People find a recurring value in it, like showing off to their friends
Bonus: There’s stimulation — Task completion, the product provides interesting content, discovery loops, etc.
At Citizen, I built our first creator program, seeding tens of thousands of top videos across the app and socials to show users exactly what we wanted them to do.
It worked so well that within a year, we expanded to have creators in every major US city, and it’s a key part of market launches. Even in competitive markets like LA, we found that once we seeded strong creator content, users noticed, emulated the behavior, and started producing 10x+ better content themselves.
I’ll show you exactly how to seed top user behavior so it multiplies.
Your product will only reach massive scale if you get this right.
1. Show Your Users Exactly What Works
Identify your gold standard: What exactly do you want users to do? How does this benefit the product? Root your gold standard in metrics that drive growth and revenue.
Example: Creating videos that are 10s long (TikTok), submitting a bunch of forms (Turbotax), uploading documents and then auditing them (Docusign), writing something controversial and newsworthy (X)
Make it visibly obvious how to rank gold content against others: Your customers need to immediately know why this is top content. Maybe it gets 1M likes vs. 10, brings time to complete a task down 50%, and accomplishes the product + user goal faster/better.
Example: Rilla produces content that shows reps using their software close deals X% faster
Example: Polymarket showing people massive winning bets on their leaderboard
Show winning gold examples immediately: People get overwhelmed fast in a new product. Show them the gold content first so they know exactly what they’re trying to reach.
Example: On TikTok, you’re hit with an endless feed of top user content before you even create, seeding ideas for what you should make.
2. Make It Easy to Copy
Users should be able to quickly create and replicate top content via:
Clean UIUX: Aim for first-grade level. Next time you use a new product, see how quickly you barely read and literally just tap buttons as fast as possible. Your customers do the same.
Example: Southwest app crushes this with clean design and simple copy. Fewer words = better
Tool tips that guide the user: If you want your users to hit the right buttons as they fly through your product, nudge them. Don’t make them guess what’s going on. This is really cheap and simple to build.
Example: Docusign ($15B market cap) is so ugly yet so beautifully filled with tool tips
Plug and play features
Example: Autopilot ($750M invested on this app, 5 years old) is a trading app that lets you instantly invest in curated portfolios that track and mimic the trades of government officials like Nancy Pelosi. They recently launched an index that pools stocks with unusual, strong buying activity from multiple officials, making it dummy-proof to jump in and copy.
Example: TikTok purchased CapCut so that users can easily use and copy trending video templates
3. Make It Rewarding & Repeatable
Let people know they did the right thing and make them want to do it again. People love to feel successful + be recognized. Rewards don’t have to be anything crazy; they can be as simple as having an animation explode on a screen.
The goal is to create a loop where taking the action once leads to people wanting to do it again, building muscle memory and habit.
Example: Community badges at Citizen are given if your live videos reach a # of views and comments
Well, How’d I Do?
Seeding top content is one of my favorite low-to-medium effort, high-impact hacks for B2B and B2C. You can do this at stage zero with no users because you can make the first pieces of gold content yourself.
You need to reserve product real estate for this.
After I flooded our socials with top creator content and generated ~1.5B+ online views, we built News Tab — an in-app feed of videos and incidents that literally mimicked our social feeds. It performed so well (DAU engagement, user retention, etc) that it is now the default tab for a large % of our users, vs. the Citizen map. Proud of the team for this one.
Top products are designed so users can easily mimic gold content. You should build for that, too.
I hope this newsletter helped you focus and guide your thinking for the upcoming week. Reply and let me know your thoughts!
Have the best week!
Julia
