Your growth loop is just a drawing until you measure it

Last week a colleague and I were prepping a growth loop workshop for a new client. Halfway through I worked out why these sessions land for some teams and slide off others. The shift comes when we stop drawing the customer journey and start specifying how to measure it.

A growth loop does nothing until you attach measurement points to it. Until then you have a nice drawing, and a drawing has never acquired a single user.

Teams present loop diagrams to leadership and feel productive. They still can’t answer the question: is this loop spinning, and is it slowing down? Optimize blind and you spend real engineering weeks feeding a loop that may already be dead.

The diagram is the easy part

Every loop looks reasonable on a whiteboard. A user comes into the product and uses the core functionality. That usage triggers an output that pulls the next user in.

Take WhatsApp, a personal viral loop: the product gets better when more of the people you know are on it. I install it after an SMS invite. I connect my contacts and feel I can reach everyone I know. I message my mum, she doesn’t have the app, so she gets an SMS invite.

Clean. Plausible. A loop that looks right on a slide tells you nothing about whether it works.

Measurement turns the story into a system

Put a number on every arrow. Invite sent, invite opened, signup, contacts connected, first message sent, new invite generated. Now you have a funnel you can read step by step.

Only a measured loop can be compared and managed

When does the loop start losing its spin? When do you need to bolt on a second loop for extra fuel? Which loop deserves most of the optimization budget? Every one of those is a question about numbers.

We mapped loops with Plick, the second-hand fashion marketplace. They had a strong viral loop, but it was hard to measure and we didn’t know what drove it.

Was it a personal viral loop, where the product gets better because your friends are on it? Or a social one, where sharing raises the user’s status (the “I was first on Clubhouse” effect, also plain word of mouth)?

Reforge counts around 19 types of micro growth loop, all behaving differently. You can’t pick the right metric until you know which one you’re holding.

The Plick team did the right thing and went out and asked. They gathered qualitative data on user motivation, and only then built features that fed the loop and put tracking on it.

The diagram is still worth doing. It aligns the team, and it’s the necessary first step. No, you won’t have clean tracking the morning after the workshop.

If all you can manage at the start is one proxy metric per loop, that still counts.

You can do the first move this afternoon. Take your loop diagram and write, for every arrow, the number that tells you whether that step converts. Where you can’t name the number, you’ve found the step that’s secretly broken. Once you have those rates and want to know whether they’re any good, that’s what a benchmark is for: https://benchmark.scilla.studio.