Word-of-mouth creates trust but not guaranteed reach. Recommendations work only among people who already know you exist, or are one relationship away; if your product is invisible in the first place, there is no conversation to spread. Relying solely on referrals tends to produce uneven, hard-to-scale growth: bursts of interest from local clusters, followed by long plateaus where no new networks are touched. Because informal advocacy is difficult to target, control, or measure, teams can mistake anecdotal enthusiasm for broad market traction.

Treat visibility as an infrastructure problem, not a vanity metric. Some combination of search, partnerships, direct outreach, and lightweight campaigns is usually required to seed enough initial users for recommendations to compound. Marketing in this sense is not a substitute for value but a scaffold that lets genuine advocacy take off: it ensures the right people discover you, understand what you offer, and have a low-friction path to trying it. The art is to invest just enough in visibility to unlock the word-of-mouth engine, without letting paid exposure hide weak product–market fit.

Links: Recommendations matter more than marketing spend, Timing and luck can override product excellence