Another anecdote (or maybe data point?!): Typeform basically had all the initial growth of the product via a "Powered by" button that was shown in the bottom of each form generated. We did no marketing/sales except having that "Powered By" button shown for forms created by all non-paying users.<p>Since the "Powered By" button of each form was affected by the number of people visiting each form and some creating their own, leading to more views of the "Powered By" button, we called it "Viral Marketing" (maybe "Marketing" is the wrong word, don't remember exactly what we used to call it) where the growth of the platform funded more growth of the platform, inherently.<p>So +1 for the "Powered By" button, leads to tons of people discovering your product based on already using it for something. Users who want to white-label the usage of your product will also be ready to pay more to get rid of it, so not only a acquisition channel, also a way of affecting how you set pricing.
+1 for the "powered by" acquisition channel.<p>1) Add "powered by"<p>2) Gain from brand awareness / leads it generates<p>3) Also gain by selling a higher tiered "white-label" plan that large co's can upgrade to if they want to remove your powered by branding.<p>Even if it fails as an acquisition channel, it can still succeed at encouraging an upsell path.
The opposite of that method is also valid, go on builtwith search on which website your competitors is installed, contact each website owners and offer them your solution
The headline is of course false. The founders got their first users first, and then got more users by putting their name on the UI of their products, which are embedded in public-facing publications, which their customers' competitors can see.<p>Savvy powerful customers like Amazon sign contracts banning disclosure of the relationship, for exactly this reason.
They charge a substantial fee for the right to be used as advertising.
Powered by has been around for 20 years, it's known trick and generally only applicable for the free tier of product.<p>One can imagine a Web page: powered by d3, hosted on github, protected by cloudflare, built by Travis CI and scanned by snyk.<p>It's somewhat tolerable, and it's cute.<p>But it doesn't apply so well for non free stuff.