Hey, I’m Tom 👋 I live and breathe marketing so you don’t have to. Every Monday, I share the best growth tactics and viral moves I spotted this week.
#1
Lovable just used Dropbox’s legendary growth hack
Remember Dropbox Space Race? 👇
In 2012, Dropbox let students vote for their schools to win free storage. It spread like wildfire because everyone texted their classmates to vote.
I remember participating as a student. It went CRAZY viral.
Sean Ellis (the guy who coined “growth hacking”) ran it - so it’s considered the world’s first growth hack.
Now Lovable is running the exact same playbook:
They built a voting leaderboard where students can nominate their university to win $100,000 worth of free Lovable access.
That’s a referral machine disguised as a “competition”.
Student A wants free Lovable → sends link to Student B → Student B has never heard of Lovable (now they have) → signs up to vote → sends to Student C.
Here’s why this is brilliant đź§
The reason it works is the “vote so WE ALL win” mechanic. When 1 person wins = only 1 shares. When a whole group wins = EVERYONE shares.
If you want to steal this for your product: find a group your users already belong to (company, city, industry, alumni network) and let them compete as a team.
#2
The easiest way to get 10x more exposure for your marketing projects
This next quick win takes 5 minutes and costs $0.
I do it with every launch: