Treat the product as the marketing machine by baking acquisition, activation, and referral into core workflows, because a self-propagating loop scales faster and cheaper than external campaigns. Hotmail proved the model by appending a default footer to every user email, turning each message into distribution without buying ads; that single product tweak drove 1 million users in six months, doubled again five weeks later, and reached nearly 10 million by December 1997 before a $400 million sale to Microsoft on roughly $300,000 invested. Gmail later validated the pattern with an invite-gated rollout that converted users into distributors by steadily raising invite limits, illustrating that a superior, needed product plus embedded sharing beats awareness spend. The contrarian move is to start growth during design—not at launch—so that every use creates exposure, every exposure can be tracked, and every tracked step can be improved until the loop becomes self-sustaining.