3 Trojan Horse Growth Hacks Startups Use to Win Customers and Dominate Markets

In today's competitive market, companies that find unique acquisition funnels grow faster than their competitors.

These strategies often function as Trojan horses - they get customers in the door through one attractive offer, then convert them to other products and services over time.

Growth Trend 1: Create Offers Customers Cannot Refuse

Free Money Offers Create Irresistible Acquisition Funnels

Companies that literally give away money in economically sustainable ways see extraordinary results. The approach is simple but powerful: find a way to put money back in customers' pockets while creating a viable business model around it.

A long time ago, an app named Service exploited a little-known airline loophole. Airlines have policies that compensate travelers for delayed flights, but most people never complete the paperwork. Service automated this process, filing claims on behalf of customers. Their Facebook ads with messages like "Airlines will pay you up to $100 when you're delayed" achieved record-breaking click-through rates at minimal cost.

Yatta Bank takes a different approach to money distribution. This banking startup takes the margin typically kept by traditional banks and redistributes it as lottery winnings for customers. Users automatically receive lottery tickets just by keeping money in their Yatta account, creating a no-loss lottery system that drives rapid acquisition.

For example, Main Street can make a hypothetical ad like _"Did you know that you're not taking advantage of an extra $10,000 in tax credits every year for your business?"

For small businesses operating month-to-month, an offer like this represents significant found money, making the ads almost irresistible to act on.

These companies create business models that provide genuine financial benefits to customers while maintaining economic sustainability. This approach functions as the ultimate acquisition wedge, driving rapid growth.

While some strategies may prove unsustainable long-term (Service eventually faced resistance from airlines), they successfully capture large customer databases that can be monetized through additional services.

Clear View is one company that demonstrates the power of straightforward, no-brainer offers. Clear View approaches building owners with a simple proposition: they pay approximately $50,000 per year to place billboards on building rooftops.

This approach functions as a powerful acquisition strategy because it presents building owners with an unexpected revenue stream requiring minimal effort. The offer is framed as someone coming to a business owner saying, "I'm going to pay you $50,000 a year. All you need to do is put this billboard on your roof."

This concept falls into the category of "no-brainer" offers—deals so obviously beneficial that customers accept without much consideration.

Similarly, ClickFunnels, a SaaS platform for building sales funnels, by Russell Brunson grew through his 3 books in The Secrets Series called Dotcom Secrets, Traffic Secrets, and Expert Secrets. These low-cost books were presented as an educational resource while pitching Clickfunnels as a necessary product within the book. The books served as the acquisition channel, while ClickFunnels became the main product offering. And it worked. ClickFunnels grew from $14m to $60m ARR in 18 months.

Yet another example would be all social media platforms which provide free access to users, creating massive user bases whose data can be monetized through advertising.

Recently, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental launch employed this strategy to catch up in the AI race. They offered developers free API access for 2-3 months with certain rate limits, building adoption before implementing monetization while maintaining free access as a transition.

Drive Explosive Adoption Through Minimal Friction

Products that minimize friction create paths to rapid adoption, and Chrome extensions represent the gold standard - requiring just two clicks to become permanent fixtures in users' browsing experiences. These extensions create exceptionally low-friction adoption paths worthy of special attention.

Honey exemplifies this approach by surfacing discount codes while people shop online without requiring signup, credit card information, or data verification. Users don't need to remember to open an app - they're already using Chrome, and Honey simply tags along.

Extensions that provide "x-ray vision" into websites create sticky daily utility that keeps users engaged. SEO extensions give marketers competitive intelligence into strategies, while tools like SimilarWeb reveal website traffic sources that can't easily be found elsewhere.

Potential extension ideas include profile information when hovering over names online, Facebook ad library integration showing competitors' active campaigns, and stock/crypto alerts appearing when relevant tickers are mentioned. The ideal extension appeals to money-making desires or provides insider knowledge.

The key advantage: users don't need to develop new habits. Chrome extensions piggyback on existing behavior (web browsing) rather than asking users to adopt entirely new routines. When brainstorming extension ideas, consider what app functionalities could be transformed into browser-based tools, eliminating the need to build new user habits.

Growth Trend 2: Harness Network Effects and Visible Usage

Product-Led Growth Creates Self-Propagating Customer Acquisition

The most efficient growth happens when using a product naturally encourages others to join. Products like Slack, Dropbox, PayPal and Calendly have designed growth directly into their user experience.

Slack became indispensable for internal team communication, then expanded with Slack Connect, enabling cross-company collaboration. This brilliantly forced adoption across organizational boundaries - if you want to communicate with a team using Slack, you need to join Slack.

PayPal created mandatory adoption through financial incentives. If someone wants to receive money sent via PayPal, they must create an account. This requirement drove exponential growth as users pulled in new participants.

Calendly simplifies scheduling, but the recipient gains additional benefits by also becoming a Calendly user, including seeing overlapping availability times.

For product-led growth to succeed, both parties must benefit: the sender gets enhanced functionality, while the recipient receives clear value from joining. This approach doesn't rely on fluctuating channels like SEO or paid acquisition, creating more sustainable growth.

Nikita Bier, one of the best in the world at social apps, employs this strategy on every social app he makes or advices on. It is one of the easiest ways to reduce (Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Billboarding Transforms Users Into Walking Advertisements

Products that attach their branding to user interactions create free, perpetual marketing. This "billboarding" effect turns every user interaction into a promotional opportunity.

Microacquire, now Acquire, sent me a good T-shirt and I wore it every week for 2-3 years. The trick is to send good T-shirt. I got a free beanie from Bolt.new that I posted about on X but never wore once. Alex Hormozi drops the secret hack to make merches work.

Early email platforms pioneered this approach. Hotmail included "Get your free email at Hotmail" in every message sent, exposing millions to their branding daily. Similarly, "Sent from iPhone" text signals status while promoting Apple's products.

Mercury banking embeds subtle signals in its wire transfer details. Their beautifully formatted payment information signals to venture capitalists that "everyone uses Mercury," creating an impression of ubiquity among startups.

This creates an "oversampling" effect where influential people believe adoption is higher than reality. In Silicon Valley, Apple's Macbooks seem universal despite Windows maintaining 90% market share globally. By targeting high-signal individuals, products can create perceptions that eventually become self-fulfilling.

Nikita Bier, founder of TBH & Gas, did this when he launched both of his apps. Instead of launching globally, he launched hyper-locally in multiple schools. This made the app seem even more bigger than it was because everyone was using TBH in a geographical location.

Growth Trend 3: Utilize Self-Liquidating Funnels for Lead Generation

Offset Ad Costs with a Low-Ticket Offer

Marketing channels often struggle with profitability, but self-liquidating funnels offer a solution. These funnels offer secondary, low-cost products ($5-30) with fast purchase cycles, making ad economics viable even when the primary product has longer sales cycles.

The strategy works by breaking even on customer acquisition while building a massive email database. A company might offer a $5 e-book or mini-tool related to its main product, using paid advertising to drive traffic. Even if the ads only break even financially, they effectively print email addresses at zero cost.

Companies can scale this approach to capture 100,000+ leads that can be nurtured toward main products over time. The key insight: think of product roadmap and growth roadmap together, creating features specifically designed to facilitate customer acquisition.

The approach mirrors the "free plus shipping" offer common in e-commerce, where products are given away "free" with customers paying only shipping costs (which often cover both shipping and product costs). This creates the perception of receiving something valuable while still making the economics work.

Julian Shapiro offers detailed, free "handbooks" on his website, Julian.com. These attract readers interested in topics like writing or growth, who provide their email addresses in exchange for valuable content, building a qualified audience. These highly qualified audience is then sold a $5k per month Growth Agency and another overseas hiring agency.

Alen Sultanic's Automatic Clients book teaches this principle directly. The strategy is to offer a $5 book through Facebook ads (creating a self-liquidating funnel) while building a customer base for higher-priced $5,000 services on the backend. And it works for any product in any niche (mobile, SaaS, masterclass, e-commerce, etc.) that can be sold at a lower price point. It doesn't even have to be a book.

Yet another example is Laurel Portié who offers FB Ads Community for just $7/month. Everybody has $7/month to spend so it becomes a no-brainer offer for those who need to make FB Ads work.

Hat Tip to Julian Shapiro for his insights.

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