Word-of-Mouth: The Secret Fuel Behind Tech’s Fastest-Growing Tools

My journey with Cursor began late one night when a friend pinged me: “Have you tried cursor yet?” Curious, and with very little context, I downloaded it. Within minutes, I was hooked. It wasn’t a polished ad or a slick conference talk that sold me – it was an authentic, unpolished and somewhat cryptic recommendation. That personal recommendation pulled me in, and I wasn’t alone clearly.

The Most Authentic Growth Engine

Turns out word-of-mouth is the quiet, underrated engine of startup growth. There’s a reason a friend’s excited text or a colleague’s tip feels so compelling is trust. A study found 92% of consumers trust personal recommendations more than any other source, and they are 4× more likely to buy when referred by a friend [1]. As one marketing guide bluntly put it: “Word of mouth is probably the most important thing in dev marketing… This is especially true among developers as they only trust other devs.” [2]

For early-stage startups, especially in AI, dev tools, or infrastructure, WOM is gold. It’s essentially free and self-perpetuating: build something great, and users will excitedly tell their friends, colleagues, and online communities about it. Unlike paid ads or cold sales, these recommendations come with built-in credibility and context - which money can't buy.

Cursor: From Obscurity to $100M ARR, Powered by Enthusiasm

When I first tried Cursor, I was experiencing exactly what thousands of others were: the product was so good that people couldn’t stop talking about it. In 2023, it went from 0 to $100M ARR in just 12 months, making it one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups ever [3]. How did that happen with virtually no traditional marketing?

• Let the product sell itself. Cursor’s team focused on a frictionless onboarding – a generous free tier (2,000 AI code completions) that let anyone try the “magic” without a paywall [4]. It also integrated as a plugin with VS Code, so you didn’t need to learn a new tool [4].

• Community credibility. Early on, engineers at organizations like OpenAI and Midjourney started using Cursor and raving about it, creating word-of-mouth hype in exactly the right circles [4].

• Product value = talk value. Cursor genuinely made people more productive. This kind of built-in virality – where the value of the product compels users to spread it – is far more authentic than any incentivised referral. Cursor amassed over 360,000 paying users in a year [5].

Cursor’s rapid rise underscores a key point: when your early users love your product, they become your marketing team. Its founders deliberately embraced community-driven growth, and it paid off spectacularly [6].

11x: Hype, Buzz, and Caution in AI Sales

The power of word-of-mouth also comes has two sides to it. 11x – launched in 2022 and seemingly overnight became the talk of the SaaS world. By 2024, 11x was reporting $10M in ARR, with little traditional marketing [7]. This buzz helped 11x land a $50M Series B led by a16z [7].

But 11x’s experience also proved that WOM cuts both ways. Many early customers churned after finding the product didn’t perform as promised [7]. Still, the fact that it acquired dozens of enterprise trials purely through buzz is telling.

More Startups Riding the WoM Wave

Cursor and 11x are not anomalies. In the last year or two, we’ve seen a bunch of dev tools go from unknown to indispensable largely through community chatter and peer recommendations:

• LangChain (2023): An open-source LLM framework that shot to the #1 spot on StackShare’s developer tools list [8].

• Auto-GPT (2023): Hit 100,000+ GitHub stars in under 3 months through pure Reddit/Twitter buzz [9].

• Supabase (2020–2024): Now with 900,000+ sign-ups, largely driven by community memes and dev word-of-mouth [10].

• Midjourney (2022–2023): Built a 14M+ user Discord via people sharing their generated art – no marketing required [11].

Measuring the Unmeasurable

Despite its importance, word-of-mouth has long been the “invisible elephant” in the room for startups. Some estimates suggest WOM drives 20–50% of all purchasing decisions [12]. But because it’s hard to measure, many companies ignore it in favour of what can be easily tracked and put their efforts into paid advertising and fancy marketing that drive fractional amounts of expensive but measurable growth.

Conclusion

In the end, the most efficient growth hack might simply be caring about your users enough that they can’t help spreading the word, its not all about your product either - amazing customer support drives word of mouth for so many businesses. Word of mouth isn’t just a marketing footnote; it might be tech’s most powerful (and authentic) growth engine waiting to be tapped.

Sources

[1] Nielsen, "Global Trust in Advertising," https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2012/global-trust-in-advertising/

[2] Orbit.love, "Dev Marketing Playbook," https://orbit.love/dev-marketing/dev-marketing-playbook

[3] Every.to, "How Cursor Hit $100M ARR in 12 Months," https://every.to/napkin-math/cursor-hit-100m-arr-in-12-months

[4] Lenny Rachitsky, "How Cursor Built a $100M AI Coding Tool," https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-cursor-built-a-100m-ai-coding

[5] Every.to, "Cursor: 360,000 Paying Users in 12 Months," https://every.to/napkin-math/cursor-hit-100m-arr-in-12-months

[6] Peter Levels on X, https://x.com/levelsio/status/1765800744432382371

[7] Business Insider, "11x.ai Raises $50M from a16z," https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-startup-11xai-raises-50-million-andreessen-horowitz-2024-3

[8] StackShare, "Top Tools: LangChain #1," https://stackshare.io/langchain

[9] GitHub, "Auto-GPT Repository," https://github.com/Torantulino/Auto-GPT

[10] Supabase Blog, "900K Users," https://supabase.com/blog/2024-year-in-review

[11] Midjourney Press, "Largest Discord Server," https://www.midjourney.com/press

[12] McKinsey, "A New Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing," https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-new-way-to-measure-word-of-mouth-marketing