Software Growth

User-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content is anything your users create inside or around your product, like templates or public pages, that other people discover and use.

User-generated content, or UGC, is material your customers produce: templates, designs, public pages, reviews, forum answers. For a software company it becomes a growth channel when that material can be found by people who are not yet customers, usually through search. Users do the content work, and each new piece attracts new users who create more.

The mechanism

A newsletter on UGC-driven SEO lays out the loop plainly: users sign up, create assets such as templates or designs, those assets rank for long-tail keywords, new users find them, and the cycle repeats (The Growth Mind). It is a growth loop in which the content is the output that restarts the cycle.

Examples with numbers

The same piece reports two cases, based on its own traffic estimates:

  • Notion's templates subfolder drew over 470,000 visits in November 2024.
  • The Figma Community subfolder drew about 1 million visits in January 2025.

It credits their success to varied use cases, time saved for the visitor, reduced "blank page" friction at signup, and a marketplace that lets creators earn money. Pinterest is the older example in Reforge's account of growth loops, where saved items are distributed through search to attract new users.

What makes it work

  • A reason to create. Creators need recognition, money, or a personal benefit like saving time.
  • A reason to publish publicly. Private by default means nothing to index.
  • Quality control. Search engines reward pages with real value. Thin or copied pages can hurt the whole domain, a risk shared with programmatic SEO.
  • A clear way to try the product. The visitor lands on a template and needs a one-click path to use it.

UGC versus billboarding

Both expose the product to outsiders. In billboarding a mark is attached to what users send or share. In UGC the content itself is the attraction and ranks on its own. UGC takes longer to start, since you need enough content to matter, but it compounds over a longer period.

For a small SaaS

You do not need 30,000 templates. Start by building 20 to 50 good examples yourself, so the page is useful on day one, then open submissions to your best users with a clear benefit such as a profile link or revenue share. Test one content type before expanding. If your product has no output that people would want to share or search for, such as payroll or internal reporting, UGC is probably the wrong channel, and you should look at integrations or community content instead.

Related terms

Sources

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