Hello Reader,

She runs a multimillion-dollar puzzle company. And she mostly built it on word-of-mouth marketing.

This is how Kaylin Marcotte, the founder of Jiggy Puzzles, used organic marketing to sell 250,000 puzzle units in three years:

Reading time: 2 mins

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Off the beaten path

Kaylin started her company during a D2C e-commerce boom. People raised massive amounts of VC money and pumped it into social media ads to get their products out there.

But Kaylin decided to take another path. She 100% bootstrapped her company, with no money to spend on paid marketing channels whatsoever. She aimed at a much more affordable and powerful growth strategy – word-of-mouth marketing.

And it didn't slow her down. In three years, she managed to:

• Sell 250,000 puzzle units
• Grow her email list to 100,000 subscribers
• Reach a multi-million dollar company status

Here are 3 strategies she used to achieve this level of success, without burning up tons of money on ads:

The power of collaboration

Right off the bat, Jiggy reached out to contemporary female artists to feature their work on their puzzles:

The company paid artists through royalties instead of a one-time commission. And this turned out to be a brilliant idea.

Suddenly, all artists felt inclined to help Jiggy promote their puzzles. Each artist brought her own audience, building a huge network of people around the brand.

One of the most important parts of this success, however, is the exchange of value that happened:

​Source​

Co-branding > White-labelling

Jiggy treats every partnership with another business as a great marketing opportunity.

Instead of white-labelling their puzzles, they co-brand each piece created for another business:

Jiggy uses social media campaigns like giveaways to power up their organic marketing efforts, and encourage their B2B partners to spread the word on their own social media accounts.

It's a fantastic opportunity to join forces with another business and use the advantage of marketing to both audiences. Each time Jiggy collaborates with a new business, they're introduced to a whole new community of people.

Ambassadors are assets

While ambassador campaigns are a classic word-of-mouth strategy, Jiggy's approach to it makes their efforts unique (and thus, super effective).

They treat each ambassador as their team member. They get a unique code that offers an extra discount to the ambassador's followers and earns them a commission on every sale.

Jiggy's team also put together a kit for their ambassadors with things like:

• Brand language
• Jiggy FAQs
• Best practices for social posting

These make sure the brand communication stays consistent across all the channels and gives ambassadors a great point of reference for user-generated content.

As Kaylin mentions in an interview:

The missing piece of your marketing puzzle

User-generated content can be one of the best forms of word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

Think of it as a modern version of social proof – the users must be excited about your product if they decide to share it on social media.

And hey, remember how ChatGPT flooded our timelines?

It was the users who took care of a huge portion of OpenAI's growth. And while it may be hard for you to recreate THAT range of success, here are a couple of ideas to get your organic growth started:

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Have a great day!

Kuba (@contentkuba)

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