Credits-for-Sharing Loop
Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 86%
Maor noticed users organically posting about what they built on Base44, so he formalized it into a program: share your build (or even just your process) on social, get extra credits to build more. Because the reward is product currency, not cash, it costs almost nothing and deepens engagement. Combined with build-in-public, it became a core growth loop.
Origin
Maor Shlomo's account of Base44 growth; a friend assumed he was paying people to post — he wasn't, so he turned the organic behavior into an incentivized program.
Core principles
- 01Reward users in product credits, not cash — near-zero marginal cost and it drives more usage
- 02Incentivize sharing the process or the build itself, lowering the bar to participate
- 03Formalize behavior users already do organically rather than inventing a new one
- 04Automate the reward loop once manual fulfillment stops scaling
How to run it
- 1
Spot the organic sharing already happening
Watch for users voluntarily posting about what they built with your product — that's the behavior to amplify.
Pro tip A friend asking 'how much are you paying these people to post?' is a signal you have a loop worth formalizing.
- 2
Offer product credits for a public share
Tell users: post about the app or the building process on social and get extra credits to build. Make it not even have to be about your brand specifically.
Pro tip Rewarding the process, not just brand praise, widens who's willing to participate.
Watch out Social APIs make verification hard — early on you may need users to email you the post link.
- 3
Fulfill manually, then automate
At first, have users paste the link and email it; grant credits by hand. Once volume outgrows that, build an automated flow to tag and credit them.
Pro tip Maor ran it manually until he 'couldn't really manage the whole thing,' then automated it.
In the wild
Users emailed Maor links to their posts; he granted build credits, first by hand then via an automated LLM-tagged flow. Paired with his own building-in-public, the credits-for-sharing loop drove a large share of Base44's growth.
→ A self-reinforcing distribution engine that helped scale to hundreds of thousands of users with near-zero ad spend.
Common mistakes
Paying cash instead of credits
Cash rewards cost real money and don't deepen product usage; credits are cheap and pull users back to build more.
Over-restricting what counts as a share
Requiring posts to be about the brand narrows participation — allowing 'the app itself or the process' broadens the funnel.
Is it for you?
Best for
Usage-based or credit-metered products (AI tools, SaaS) whose users create shareable artifacts
Not ideal for
Products with no natural shareable output or no credit/usage currency to reward with
From the transcript
“I did this program inside B 44, saying, hey, if you share just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it…”
“how much are you paying those people to to like write posts about space 45? I was like, I'm not paying anyone”
“at some point I automated that because I couldn't really manage like the the whole thing”
From the episode
Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story
Maor Shlomo