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Snappa
SaaS B2C

Snappa is a graphic design tool that helps non-designers create online graphics quickly and easily.

snappa.com · Founded 2015 · 40 public sources · Updated 6 days ago

Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 40 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →

How Snappa Grew

Graphic design tool for non-designers.

How did Snappa grow?

Summary of the sourced claims below

Snappa grew primarily through content marketing and SEO, focusing on creating blog posts that ranked for high-volume keywords and attracted organic traffic from search engines. A viral blog post about where to find free stock photos significantly boosted their traffic and search rankings, contributing to their growth. They also used guest posting and shared content on community sites like Reddit and Designer News to gain traction.

Channels

13 channels · grouped by how Snappa grows

  • SEO

    · 5 mentions · 5 sources
    “So essentially, the way it worked, was I kind of started to really ask myself, like, what are people actually using Snap for? ... So basically what I did was I wrote detailed guides for like Twitter header size, Facebook cover size, LinkedIn banner size. And at the time, shockingly, there was a v...”
    high
    Show 4 more quotes
    “But once it was posted on StumbleUpon, it started going viral! The day after it was posted on StumbleUpon, we received over 17,000 visits to the blog post. More importantly though, we started ranking in Google for “free stock photos” just several days later. This meant that the blog post started ...”
    high
    “After promoting it to our email list and landing a few backlinks, the post started ranking on the first page of Google just a few months later.”
    high
    “The other goal of that page is purely for SEO benefit. We found that people were searching for Twitter header templates and Facebook cover templates and all the various use cases that we offer. Those template pages are intended to try to capture some of that search volume.”
    high
    “we started to actually get a bit better at content marketing, SEO, all that kind of stuff ... a blog post about where to find free stock photos that ended up going viral. And so we were actually ranking on the first page of Google for free stock photos. And we were just getting a ton of traffic t...”
    high

  • Side project marketing

    · 3 mentions · 3 sources
    “And around the same time, I got kind of lucky where I wrote a blog post about where to find free stock photos. And that was when Unsplash just came out and Pexel and some of these really nice Creative Commons free stock photos... And the blog post kind of went viral, started getting shared a lot....”
    high
    Show 2 more quotes
    “That’s because we had already built a free stock photo site that we used to promote our product. This worked extremely well in the early days of our business and accounted for the majority of our signups.”
    high
    “We also had this side project called BootstrapBay, which was a marketplace for bootstrapping templates. Now BootstrapBay had a blog, and one of the blog posts I had written was about where to get free stock photos. That post ended up going viral. Once that happened, we started ranking on the firs...”
    high

  • Email marketing

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “While Marc was building out the MVP for Snappa, we threw up a landing page and started driving traffic to it by promoting it on StockSnap via banner ads and a link in our sidebar. Several months later, we had a few thousand email addresses on the waiting list and we launched our beta on July 1, 2...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “From day one, we had a couple thousand email addresses just from people signing up from the landing page, and we had a consistent flow of new visitors from those two sources.”
    high

  • Organic social media

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “But yeah, basically, it's just like you need to have another channel, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's X or Facebook groups, something that you could be proactive about, meet people where they are, any sort of community that you can think of, and then marry that alongside your longer term cont...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “After sharing it on various community sites like Reddit and Designer News, the post started getting some traction. But once it was posted on StumbleUpon, it started going viral!”
    high

  • LinkedIn

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's X or Facebook groups, something that you could be proactive about, meet people where they are, any sort of community that you can think of, and then marry that alongside your longer term content, SEO strategies.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “After promoting it to our email list and landing a few backlinks, the post started ranking on the first page of Google ...”
    medium

  • Content marketing

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “Once that started to get a little saturated, we really focused on content marketing and SEO. Then that became the catalyst for more growth and how we ended up getting past $1M/ARR.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “we were doing a lot of content marketing for that site. That's pretty much how we grew it.”
    high

  • Word of mouth

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “And lastly, with Snappa being a freemium product, there's a kind of a word of mouth element involved. So for the first like four or five years of the business, I mean, that was just like, we're just tripling down on that. And that just became like a big flywheel for us. And that's what helped us ...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “By simply adding StockSnap to our blog post, we were generating a significant stream of traffic to the site which compounded nicely as word of mouth spread.”
    high

  • Reddit

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “So yeah, Reddit is another one, depending on your niche. Although I think Reddit is getting swarmed by bots now.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “we springboarded to the top of the Web Design subreddit”
    high

  • Product Page

    · 1 mention
    “we also saw an opportunity to further capitalize on SEO by creating targeted landing pages for the key use cases of Snappa... we created dedicated landing pages on our site targeting these types of keywords.”
    high

  • Email List Growth

    · 1 mention
    “So by the time that we launched Snappa, it's been a while now, but I think we had about 5,000 people on our email list. So, you know, from day one that we launched, you know, send it out to the list. And so we already got, you know, paying customers from that first week.”
    high

  • Earned media

    · 1 mention
    “After launching, we were lucky to be featured in some very popular blogs early on like HubSpot, Shopify, and WebDesignerDepot.”
    high

  • Product Hunt

    · 1 mention
    “The most exposure we got however came from Product Hunt. The post received over 1,000 upvotes and we were the #4 most upvoted product of the week.”
    high

  • Guest posts

    · 1 mention
    “The other thing we did was guest posting and we tried to add a lot of value to the blogs that we would guest post on.”
    high

How 3,289 businesses grow

Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each — Snappa’s highlighted.
  • Social media
    64% ◀
  • Referral/Word-of-mouth
    64% ◀
  • Search/SEO
    58% ◀
  • Email
    47% ◀
  • Community
    37% ◀
  • Content/Inbound
    35% ◀
  • Partnerships
    32%
  • Events
    24%
  • Paid ads
    23%
  • Outbound/Sales
    19%
  • Press/PR
    17% ◀
  • Marketplaces/App stores
    12%
  • Podcasting
    4%
  • Influencer partnerships
    3%
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