3 things going ‘viral’ this week:

1. My first viral Twitter thread (2.1k saves and counting!)

2. The flu I caught over the weekend (hitting send then I’m back to bed… @ 2pm 🤒)

3. The ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button (keep reading to understand)

— Tom

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How a button goes viral

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

In 2016, one-year-old cloud infrastructure startup Netlify turned the world’s biggest developer community, GitHub, into a viral distribution engine.

They released a feature called ‘Deploy to Netlify’ - a button that allowed users to deploy a website directly from a GitHub repo to Netlify in just one click.

For those of you not so technical, imagine it like this:

1. You’ve made a cool lego creation (i.e. piece of software) and you want to share how you made it with the world

2. You put your list of Lego pieces and instruction manual (i.e. code) on the public Lego forums (i.e. GitHub)

3. When someone clicks ‘Deploy to Netlify’ it takes your instructions and instantly builds your Lego creation in their living room (i.e. replicates your code to their Netlify account)

So rather than having to create their own Deathstar with a solid design foundation and build quality, they can instantly copy yours, fully assembled and functional, then tweak it for their use case.

A massive time-saver for users.

A frictionless onboarding machine for Netlify.

This simple workflow turned Netlify into the de facto standard tool for letting other developers instantly copy and deploy your code.

Meanwhile, every time someone added a Deploy button to their public repository, they distribute another Netlify funnel into GitHub's 100M+ userbase.

The result? Within 4 years, Netlify surpassed 1+ million developers, and millions of projects shipped via the ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button.

Today, they have 5+ million devs, 35+ million live sites, and are generating 10,000 sites a day (mostly from AI codegen platforms, but that’s a breakdown for another day depending on how viral today’s article goes!)

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  Remove friction, become the default

Deploying a website is a complicated and lengthy process.

You have to:

• Set up and pay for servers that can handle your traffic

• Configure multiple environments (staging, production, etc.)

• Create systems to test your code before it goes live

• Manage domain settings and security certificates

Plus an array (😏) of technical and time-consuming steps in between.

Netlify abstracts away this complexity with one click-deployment.

For developers this means:

• Instantly deploy code without managing servers

• Automatic updates whenever you push changes to GitHub

• Built-in security and performance optimisations

• Preview features before they go live

By completely removing the friction, Netlify makes deployment easy for devs as well as less technical users.

The ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button compresses all of this simplification into single funnel, where users viewing a repo are only ever a few clicks away from cloning it and spinning up a live website.

2. Create a viral, self-serve adoption loop

Every time a developer adds a 'Deploy to Netlify' button to their project README, it acts as free marketing for Netlify.

Not just any marketing - an direct entry point for prospective users to sign up in a few clicks.

To use a practical example:

1. A developer includes a 'Deploy to Netlify' button in their open-source GitHub project

2. Other developers click it → Sign up to Netlify → deploy their own sites → experience Netlify’s product firsthand

3. Some of those developers convert into customers and use Netlify themselves

4. Some add 'Deploy to Netlify' buttons to their own projects

5. The cycle repeats

This PLG motion turns Netlify users' projects into a built-in distribution channel that leverages the largest developer community in the world, GitHub.

To put this into perspective: it contributes ~25% (almost 6M visits) of Netlify’s total traffic.

~10 years after the feature was released.

Entirely for free.

🎁 P.S. I recorded a free tutorial showing exactly how you can find traffic data like the examples above for any website. Check it out by clicking "Get free tutorial" here

Each deployment also adds to Netlify’s powerful proprietary datasets, allowing them to monitor popular frameworks, workflows, trends, and guide product decisions (integrations, framework templates) accordingly.

3. A self-replicating PLG motion

Marketing is one thing.

Social proof is another.

Each ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button is a statement from a proud Netlify user (as opposed to Netlify themselves) that proves the product is valuable.

But the ‘Deploy to Netlify’ button doesn’t just create free marketing, it also creates a compounding flywheel.

How?

Every time someone clicks the 'Deploy to Netlify' button, they copy the button into their new repository.

If they make it public, anyone who views it will see another 'Deploy to Netlify' button in the new project README.

Other users can then click the button and deploy their own version of the copied project (and button), without ever seeing the original.

The cycle continues with each button clicked.

Every PLG disciple's dream: a signup funnel that multiplies organically.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Netlify Milestones on the road to 1 Million Devs ↗

[11 minute read]

A behind-the-scenes journal from the Netlify founders on their road to 1 million users, and the milestones they achieved along the way.

Spoiler: ‘Deploy to Netlify’ was an important moment.

Lessons from Building Netlify ↗

[33 minute watch]

From bootstrapping Netlify as a two-person startup to creating the industry standard deployment ecosystem serving over 5 million developers.

Here’s Biilmann going deep on their core product strategy: eliminating friction to help teams focus on building, rather than managing infrastructure.

Netlify investment thesis ↗

[13 minute read]

Our friends over at Contrary Research write some of the internet’s cleanest memos on private hypergrowth companies.

Here’s their thesis (market sizing, competitive analysis, risk assessment, etc) on Netlify.

Enjoy.

If you enjoyed, please forward it to a pal. It’s free, and only takes 10 seconds.

Who knows, maybe this article will go viral too.

— Written by Sheldon Bishop and Tom Alder

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