Canva, Notion, Figma, Calendly and Loom sell very different products and grew in much the same way. Each turns what the product produces into something a non-user sees, uses and then wants for themselves. Strip away the famous names and four mechanics repeat: templates, sharing, collaboration invites and “powered by” exposure. Below is what each company has published about its growth, with the mechanics separated from the mythology, and a way to pick the loop that fits your own product.
The output is the advert
In a classic funnel, marketing brings people to the product. In a growth loop, the product brings people to the product. A user creates something, it reaches a new person, and some of those people become users who create more.
For all five companies, that “something” is the product’s normal output. Nobody bolted on a referral feature.
| Company | What the user creates | Who sees it | What the non-user experiences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canva | A design, often from a template | Social followers, colleagues, clients | A finished design and, for collaborators, the editor |
| Notion | A page, wiki or template | Teammates, public visitors | A working workspace they can duplicate |
| Figma | A design file or prototype | Developers, PMs, clients | The file in a browser, with comments |
| Calendly | A booking link | The person booking | The full booking flow, with branding |
| Loom | A video message | The recipient | The video in a browser page |
Read the last column. In every row the non-user uses the product, briefly and for free, instead of merely hearing about it. That is a demo nobody had to schedule.
Calendly: every booking is a product demo
Calendly is the cleanest case of “powered by” exposure. A user sends a link. The recipient picks a time on a Calendly page and gets the product’s core value, no back-and-forth emails, before ever signing up.
The branding is deliberate. According to Calendly’s Help Center, the scheduling page carries a small “Powered by Calendly” badge by default, and the same setting controls branding in alerts and booking confirmation emails. Only paid plans (Standard, Teams and Enterprise, plus the legacy Professional plan) can turn it off. So every free user’s link carries the brand to someone new.
Calendly’s about page says more than 50 million people across 240-plus countries use it and that more than 1.3 billion meetings have been booked through it, figures the company says come from its own research.
If someone outside the account uses what your product produces, put a small, useful brand mark on it and make removing it a paid feature. Our powered-by branding tactic covers how to do that without irritating paying customers.
Loom: the recipient is the next user
Loom runs the same play with video. You record, share a link, and the recipient watches in a browser. Announcing its investment in 2021, a16z wrote that “most Loom users first hear of Loom by receiving one”, and that Looms are free to receive and record. The same post said Loom had passed 100 million videos recorded as of February 2021, with 10 million users and 120,000 companies across 192 countries.
By the time Atlassian announced it was acquiring Loom in October 2023, Loom had about 200,000 customers, and almost 5 million Loom videos were being created every month.
Two details keep the loop turning. Watching needs no account, and any friction on the viewing side would cut the loop. And the natural reply to a Loom is another Loom, so a viewer who wants to answer has a reason to record, which makes the viewer a creator.
Design for the moment just after the recipient gets value. What would they want to do next, and could your product be how they do it?
Figma: collaboration pulls in the rest of the team
Figma’s loop runs on collaboration invites. A designer shares a file. A developer, product manager or marketer opens it in a browser, leaves a comment, checks a measurement, and over time starts working there too.
Figma’s 2025 S-1 filing documents that spread unusually clearly. In the three months ended 31 March 2025, Figma had more than 13 million monthly active users, and non-designers (developers, PMs, researchers, marketers, writers and others) made up two-thirds of them. Developers alone were about 30%. The filing credits “the product virality inherent to Figma’s collaborative and browser-based platform”, alongside marketing, for driving awareness and adoption, and describes “product-led, bottoms-up adoption” working with a direct sales team for larger customers. It also says 95% of the Fortune 500 used Figma in March 2025.
There is a template loop as well. The S-1 says the community has created over 250,000 Community resources, more than 10,000 of them plugins and widgets. According to Figma’s Help Center, duplicating a Community file needs a Figma account, so every template someone wants doubles as a sign-up prompt.
For B2B tools, the invite that spreads is “share this with the person who needs to see it”. “Invite your friends” does far less. Make the shared link open in a browser with nothing to install, and give the invited person something useful to do when they land. Our team invite prompts tactic covers where to place those prompts.
Canva and Notion: templates as a public front door
Both companies made templates do two jobs at once, acquisition and activation.
Canva
A new Canva user starts from something finished instead of a blank canvas, which shortens time to value. The library is also a supply-side programme. According to Canva’s Help Center, Canva Creators can publish templates and elements to its marketplace and are paid every time someone uses their work in a Canva project, from a royalty pool that grows with Canva’s subscription revenue. Outside designers have a reason to keep the library fresh.
And it is big. TechCrunch reported in February 2026 that, according to the company, Canva had more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paid users in 2025, and ended the year at $4 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Notion
Notion’s version leans on creators. In its post on passing 100 million users in September 2024, the company wrote that “a community of non-programmers can sell ‘software’ built on Notion”, noted that some creators made $1M in 2023, and said creators are building businesses on top of Notion. A creator marketing a template is marketing Notion too, because the buyer has to open Notion to use it.
A template gallery becomes a loop only when the templates are public and indexable, duplicate into the product in one click, and get refreshed by people outside your team. Thirty in-house templates make an onboarding aid.
Five conditions the loops share
Across all five companies the same conditions keep turning up.
The non-user gets real value without signing up. A Calendly booker books, a Loom viewer watches, a Figma viewer comments. Put a sign-up wall in front of the recipient and most of them leave, and the loop breaks there.
Sharing is part of normal use. None of these loops depends on a “share for a reward” prompt. You send a booking link because you need to book a meeting; you send a Loom because you need to explain something. That is why the loops keep running with no incentives attached.
The brand shows without getting in the way: a small badge, a browser page with a logo, a “(Community)” suffix on a duplicated Figma file. Enough to answer “what is this?” and no more, so the paying user’s experience stays intact.
The free plan carries the loop and the paid plan removes friction. Calendly drops the branding on paid plans; Canva and Figma gate advanced features and team administration. The free tier is the distribution channel, which only works if it is good enough that people use it constantly.
Finally, the recipient has a reason to become a creator: replying to a Loom, sending their own booking link, building a page from a template. The loop closes only when new users start producing outputs that reach yet more people. A simple viral coefficient estimates this: invitations per user multiplied by the share of recipients who sign up. The viral loops and K-factor lesson shows the maths. K stays below 1 for most products, and that’s fine. A loop that adds 0.3 new users per user still makes every paid acquisition go further.
Which loop fits your product?
Not every product can copy every loop.
| If your product’s output… | The loop to build | Example from above |
|---|---|---|
| Is seen or used by someone outside the account | “Powered by” exposure | Calendly booking pages |
| Is a message or asset sent to one person | Recipient-to-creator | Loom videos |
| Needs input or approval from colleagues | Collaboration invites | Figma files and comments |
| Can be reused by strangers as a starting point | Public template gallery | Canva and Notion templates, Figma Community |
| Is private and never shared | No product loop; rely on content, paid or sales | n/a |
Take the last row seriously. Plenty of good products (accounting tools, internal analytics, password managers) produce nothing that leaves the account, and a sharing feature forced into them rarely works.
To find your row, list every output that leaves the account: links, files, emails, PDFs, embeds, notifications. Then look at each from the recipient’s side. Can they get value without signing up? Can they tell which product made it? Is there an obvious next step? Pick one loop and build the smallest version of it, whether that is a badge on a shared page, a share button that opens in the browser or five public templates. Tag the shared links with UTM parameters so you can count the sign-ups they bring and work out a rough K. If branding removal or extra collaborators are going on a paid plan, write down why before you touch pricing.
What a small loop is worth
Take an invoicing tool whose customers each send 40 invoices a month. The recipient is often a small business too. The numbers below are hypothetical; measure your own click and sign-up rates before planning around them.
| Step | Figure |
|---|---|
| Invoices sent per customer per month | 40 |
| Recipients who click a “Sent with…” footer | 0.5% |
| Clickers who sign up | 10% |
| New sign-ups per customer per month | 40 × 0.005 × 0.10 = 0.02 |
| Across 5,000 customers | 100 free sign-ups a month |
Each customer brings in 0.02 sign-ups a month, which looks like nothing. Across 5,000 customers it is 100 free sign-ups a month, from invoices those customers were sending anyway.
Questions people ask
What is a product-led growth loop?
A cycle where using the product creates something that brings in new users, who then use the product and create more of it. A shared Loom video, a Calendly booking link or a duplicated Notion template all put the product in front of someone who has not signed up yet.
How did Calendly grow so fast?
Every booking link a user sends shows the product to someone else, and free scheduling pages carry a "Powered by Calendly" badge by default. The person booking gets a quick demo of the product just by using it, which makes the step to their own free account short.
Do templates actually drive growth?
They can, when they are public, searchable and lead into the product. Canva, Notion and Figma all run template or community libraries where creators publish work that others start from. Templates also shorten time to value because new users begin from something finished rather than a blank page.
Can B2B products use viral loops?
Yes, but the loop usually runs through collaboration rather than social sharing. Figma's S-1 says non-designers made up two-thirds of its monthly active users, which shows how far a tool spreads when colleagues are invited into the work.
Sources
- SEC: Figma, Inc. Form S-1 (2025)
- TechCrunch: Canva's 2025 users and revenue (February 2026)
- Canva Help Center: Canva Creators program
- Notion: 100 million of you
- Calendly: About
- Calendly Help Center: Turn off Calendly branding on your scheduling page
- a16z: Investing in Loom
- Atlassian: Atlassian acquires Loom
- Figma Help Center: Duplicate Community files
