SaaS Strategists,

2026 is just around the corner, and honestly, I feel like 2025 has just started.

Where the heck did all of this time go?

Every year, it seems like our planet is accelerating faster & faster. 🌍

So I had to reflect on the best growth strategies I discovered during this year.

Here are my top 10 picks for you (that will still work strongly in 2026). 👇

Create a dedicated “mini-app” with its own domain that solves a single problem without requiring any authentication. E.g. “Free cold email generator”.

Users will love it and will naturally drift towards your main SaaS / product.

Run a campaign calling out your users to try and break your app, and send gifts if they’re able to.

Even if they completely destroy your website for a couple of hours, it will give you exposure & you’ll probably go viral since people WILL jump in to try it out.

Rows.com did this with their #BreakTheAnalyst campaign.

Michelin created “The Michelin Stars” award for restaurants in order to incentivize people to travel to these places to check them out, meaning they’ll probably drive there = spend tires = and buy new tires sooner.

Nike incentivizes you to run = wear out your sneakers faster = buy new sneakers sooner.

Your use case might be:

Solve more problems with AI = spend AI credits = buy additional credits faster.

Think of the outcome you can help your users generate, so they want to use more of your product and thus convert to a larger plan, or buy more AI credits to achieve a task, etc.

Focus on getting 💩 done.

Remove your landing page and let users jump directly into the product to solve their problems, OR create templates that are SEO-optimized and can solve problems much faster than starting from 0.

Canva nailed their JTBD with ready-made templates for ANYTHING.

Rows.com leads you directly into the product, not a landing page, meaning you immediately start solving problems, not read about them.

Timeless strategy.

Award people for bringing more people to your platform. Simple as that.

Dropbox saw 3900% more growth in signups when they introduced referrals.

Create Reddit communities where people can share their pains and problems or templates that help them get stuff done inside your platform.

This helps bond the users together, both within themselves and ultimately with your product.

Disclaimer: This won’t work well if your product is fresh out of the oven, so this one is mainly for the mature stages.

Allow people to share specific links without the need to create an account on your platform as it just creates friction.

Loom lets you watch videos without creating an account, Airtable allows you to view other public tables, etc.

People will discover your product when someone sends them a link.

Create a flywheel of interesting customer behaviors throughout the year by pulling their usage data from your DB, and presenting it on a very engaging UI.

Todoist shows you your most productive day of the week.

Spotify shows you minutes listened.

Think about what your app can showcase that will spark that “never thought about that” moment.

OpenAI sends out trophies when you pass a certain usage threshold (10 billion API tokens).

YouTube sends out play buttons when you reach high subscriber counts.

Send physical gifts when your users reach certain (big) milestones.

Create curiosity on “what’s behind the curtain” increasing the user’s motivation to sign up.

Studies have shown that ambiguous or incomplete visual information increases curiosity, motivating individuals to seek clarity.

Putting a blurred background of your product dashboard behind a sign-up screen has proven to impact sign-up conversions up to 94% in certain cases!

What strategy would you bet for 2026?

Reply to this email with your thoughts and I’ll reply back.

Ognjen Gatalo

Chief SaaS Strategist ☁

P.S. Forward this issue to a founder struggling with SaaS growth!