Goal: create "Magic Moments"

The best feeling in the world isn’t sex—it’s when you sign up for a software and it feels like everything you already need is there for you.

In his book The Cold Start Problem, growth hacking legend Andrew Chen calls these “Magic Moments”. You’ve definitely already experienced “magic moments” without even realizing it; Notion templates, Figma components, and Slack channels are all examples of “magic moments”.

Software builders maximize magic moments for new users.

Magic moments make products more intuitive to use, more delightful, and most importantly, reduces churn and increases the stickiness of their product. And it makes sense. Think about it. When you see there’s cool templates to try, you’re more tempted to sign up and stay. You know it’ll be easy and intuitive to figure out. Meanwhile, if you log into a complex new software and there’s no templates or examples, it can be overwhelming and lead you to log off.

But here’s the thing.

It’s not enough to create magic moments; you have to make sure people see them and know about them (!!!). Magic is only cool if it’s seen by the world—otherwise you’re just a dude playing alone with rabbits.

How do you get people to see your software’s magic moments?

There’s 3 main ways I can think of.

1. You and your team can do it (this is a must)

2. You can pay influencers to do it (this can sometimes work)

3. Users do it naturally (this is the ultimate goal)

In the beginning, you need to do it yourself. No one is gonna talk about the magic moments until you do. You’ve gotta be tweeting out GIFs of the magic moments in your software. Yapping about it on podcasts. Writing blogs about all the cool features. Whatever you can do to spread the word.

On Wednesday, I actually spoke to one of my readers Rahul Bathija who works on Figma’s growth team about how they do magic moments. He confirmed my hypothesis, and said that Figma’s best growth move besides the share button was creating FigJam template and content surrounding it. Beehiiv is another great example of this this. They’re posting magic moments like this on the daily.

And sure, you can pay influencers. This often works. Some SaaS companies have entire affiliate armies. My bootstrapper friend is at $60k MRR just paying twitter/tiktok influencers to promote his SaaS. (This friend ↓)

But I believe the best case scenario that you should aim for is when users organically share the magic moments because a) they truly love the product and/or b) they’re financially incentivized without you losing any money (ex. a user selling a Notion template on Gumroad).

There are independent Notion template creators out there who make 6 figures selling templates. And if they’re making 6 figures—what do you think Notion is making from all the signups????? That’s how I found Notion and I’ve been a DAU for 3 years! I’m not sure if the Notion founders planned for this mini Notion sub-economy to sprout up, but it’s a reminder for every founder that growth shouldn’t just be part of the marketing; the ability to share magic moments should be baked into the product.

How can creators make magic moments?

After reading about this idea in software, I had a realization: creators should maximize “magic moments” for their audience the same way that software developers do it for their users.

When someone finds a creator, they should be hit with “magic moments” where they can immediately find as much as related content as possible. If my metaphor is accurate, increasing “magic moments” in your content should also reduce churn and increase delight. The idea is to lead people to a “binge bank” of your related content and help them fall in love with your work and find as much value as they can.

Let me give you some examples of how I try to curate magic moments:

• Tagging my posts by subject (adventures, social media strategies, interviews, etc.)

• Creating channels in my community for different topics (#PR-Hacks, #Social-Media-Strategies, #Memelord-Mafia, etc.)

• Subscribers to Meme Alerts get access to my database and workshop of meme templates aka my dank bank

• Linking back to articles I wrote on similar topics (ex. if I mention “cringe” in an essay, I link back to my essay Cringe is the New Cool).

• Creating a highlights section on X full of my best posts

• Creating playlists on my YouTube (podcast, funny videos, etc.)

I hope you fall down the rabbithole of Jason Levin content.

That’s it for this essay.

Go explore some of those magic moments I’ve created for you!

My adventures this week

VIDEOS ON VIDEOS.

I went on jam.dev’s podcast to chat community-led growth

I’m doing weekly SaaS reviews for Product Hunt now! Check out our first one!

And if you missed my 2 podcasts this week:

Tech Memes of the Week

Olympics + AI Friend were def main memes this week.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions