Powered By Virality: 20 Badge Templates That Added $100M Revenue

A “powered by” badge is a small branded link, such as “Powered by Typeform” or “Made in Webflow”, that a software product places on the work its customers publish: a form, an email, a website, a booking page or a chat widget. Everyone who sees that work also sees the product behind it, and some of them click, sign up and publish their own work carrying the same badge. That repeating cycle is a viral loop, so the product’s own users become its distribution channel.

Andrew Chen defines a viral loop as “the steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users.” The powered by badge is one of the simplest loops to build, because the customer does not have to invite anyone: using the product does the inviting.

Key takeaways

• Hotmail added the line “Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” to every outgoing message in 1996 and reached 1 million users within six months, according to Adam Penenberg’s book Viral Loop (excerpted on TechCrunch in 2009).
• Nathan Barry, founder of Kit (then ConvertKit), said its powered by links went from about 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a week to 14,000 to 15,000 after it launched a free plan, in a clip played in a December 2024 Founderpath webinar.
• Flodesk gets over 30% of its total inbound traffic from its viral loop and word of mouth referrals, co-founder Rebecca Shostak said in an August 2024 Founderpath interview.
• Removing the badge is a common paid upgrade: Typeform, Kit, Webflow and Calendly do not offer it on their free plans, according to their pricing pages on November 2, 2026.
• YouCanBook.me supports about 1.3 million bookings a month and counted over 150,000 self-service account creations in 2023, according to the YouCanBook.me section of a January 2024 Founderpath webinar deck.

What is a powered by badge?

A powered by badge is attribution that doubles as an ad. It usually sits in a footer or a corner, names the tool, and links to a signup page. The customer gets the product free or cheap; the product gets a permanent placement in front of the customer’s own audience. Common versions include a button at the bottom of a form, a referral badge in an email footer, a small label in the corner of a website, and a watermark on a video or chart.

Nathan Latka, Founderpath’s founder, explained the mechanic to a webinar audience using ConvertKit, the email tool now called Kit:

If you use ConvertKit for free, every email you send will say powered by ConvertKit at the bottom, people click it and then more people come in. Right? That’s what powered by means. You make people pay to remove your branding from that installation.

Nathan Latka, Founder and CEO, Founderpath. Watch at 37:10

The tactic predates SaaS. In Penenberg’s account of Hotmail’s launch, investor Tim Draper pushed the founders to put “PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” at the bottom of every message. The founders agreed to the line without the “P.S. I love you” part, and growth turned into a hockey stick: 750,000 users by Labor Day 1996 and 1 million within six months, according to the excerpt published on TechCrunch. The often repeated “PS: I love you” tagline was Draper’s pitch, not what Hotmail shipped.

A powered by badge is different from a referral program. A referral program asks a customer to invite someone, usually for a reward. A badge needs no action at all: the exposure is a side effect of normal use. Many products combine the two by turning the badge into the customer’s referral link, which we cover in the steps below and in our affiliate marketing guide.

How the powered by loop works

Every powered by loop runs the same four steps, and the loop grows only if each pass brings in at least one new publisher who keeps it going:

1. A customer publishes. They send a form, an email, a booking link or a website to their own audience.
2. A viewer sees the badge. The viewer is using the product right now, filling in the form or booking the meeting, so the badge arrives with a working demo.
3. The viewer clicks and signs up. A free plan or trial lets them start without talking to anyone.
4. The new customer publishes. Their first form or page carries the badge to a new audience, and the loop repeats.

Typeform’s co-founder David Okuniev described exactly this cycle in a 2018 interview with Nathan Latka, titled for Typeform’s $19 million in annual recurring revenue and 40,000 customers:

That’s what drives a lot of our business… They land on a form, they click powered by Typeform, then they create a Typeform, distribute it to their audience, and so forth.

David Okuniev, Co-founder and joint CEO, Typeform. Watch at 13:15

Speed matters more than reach, in Latka’s view. In the same Founderpath webinar, Latka argued that how fast a new user brings in the next one beats how many they eventually bring in: one person fast versus 10 slow. A badge on something customers publish on day one, such as a first form or a first booking page, shortens that cycle.

Does a powered by badge fit your product?

A badge only works when three things are true. Answer them before you build anything:

• Do other people see what your customers make? Forms, emails, websites, booking pages, chat widgets, reports and videos all reach someone other than the customer. An internal tool, such as accounting software or an HR system, has no outside audience, so a referral program fits it better.
• Could those viewers use your product? A form builder’s respondents often need forms of their own. A delivery tracking page’s viewers are consumers who will never buy delivery software, so that badge builds awareness rather than signups.
• Can the badge be a link? A clickable badge can carry a tracking parameter, so you can count the signups it brings. A watermark inside a video, a printed page or a screen in a lobby cannot be clicked, so its effect is brand exposure that is hard to measure.

Watermarks still earn their place when the content travels. Craig Fuller, the founder of FreightWaves, said his company puts a watermark on its market charts because it wants them shared:

We actually have a watermark and we want these charts shared on social media. We want them in the wild because, guess what, when you see those charts… I know exactly, and so does everybody else, where they came from because that watermark is there.

Craig Fuller, Founder and CEO, FreightWaves ($44M revenue). Watch at 16:21

Where to put the badge: formats and examples

Put the badge where the viewer is already looking when the product has just done its job: under the submit button, in the email footer, on the confirmation screen. The table shows the common formats with an example of each and what the vendor charges to remove it.

Format	Who sees it	Example	Removing it
Form or survey footer button	Everyone who fills in the form	“Powered by Typeform” on Typeform forms	Plus plan and above (Typeform pricing)
Email footer badge	Every subscriber who opens an email	Mailchimp Referral badge; Kit branding; Flodesk footer	Required on free Mailchimp accounts (Mailchimp help, June 2026 capture); not on Kit’s free plan (Kit pricing); Flodesk Pro adds show or hide (Flodesk pricing)
Website badge	Every visitor to the published site	“Made in Webflow” in the bottom right corner	Not on the free Starter site plan (Webflow pricing)
Booking page	Everyone who books through a shared link	Calendly branding on booking pages	Not on the free plan (Calendly pricing)
Chat widget	Visitors to the customer’s website	JivoChat’s powered by label in its chat widget	Not on the free version, per its CEO in 2018 (interview)
Content footer button	Readers of content a customer publishes	Turtl’s “tiny little button” at the end of customers’ content, one of its biggest lead generators, Nick Mason said in 2018 (interview)	Not stated in the interview
Watermark	Viewers of a shared video, chart or image	Submagic’s free trial videos; FreightWaves charts	Usually on free or trial output; not clickable, so hard to track

Mailchimp shows how far a badge can go. Its help center states that the Referral badge appears at the bottom of signup forms and in the footer of emails, that it is required for free accounts, and that account holders earn bill credits when someone who clicked their badge signs up for a paid plan within 60 days (page as captured on June 9, 2026). The badge advertises Mailchimp and rewards both sides with $30 in bill credits, although the same page says credits can only be redeemed on a paid plan.

How to launch a powered by badge in four steps

The loop leaks at four points: the badge has to be seen, clicked, followed by a signup and kept on. The steps below cover the levers you control at each one.

1. Pick the asset with the biggest outside audience

Start with the thing your customers show the most people, not the screen they use most. For a scheduling tool, that is the booking page every invitee opens. The YouCanBook.me section of a January 2024 Founderpath webinar deck, credited to co-founder and CEO Bridget Harris, shows the scale this can reach: the app supports about 1.3 million bookings a month, 30,000 active free and paid accounts take bookings each week, and over 150,000 accounts were created self-service in 2023. The deck describes the loop as create an account, make a booking, experience the product (watch the YouCanBook.me section).

2. Give customers a reason to keep the badge

A badge customers resent gets removed or hidden. The strongest fix is to share the upside: make the badge the customer’s own referral or affiliate link, so every signup it brings earns them something. Flodesk did this: its viral footer sends people to the affiliate page of whoever sent the email.

We get over 30% of our total inbound traffic from the viral loop and from word-of-mouth referrals, which are sort of interlinked because… we have a really strong affiliate program.

Rebecca Shostak, Co-founder and Chief Brand Officer, Flodesk ($27M revenue). Watch at 21:01

Watch Rebecca Shostak’s full interview on Flodesk’s viral footer and affiliate program, with transcript.

3. Send badge clicks to a page made for them

Give the badge plain copy that names the product and what it does, so the viewer has a reason to click. Someone who clicks a badge has just used the product as a respondent, a subscriber or an invitee. Do not send them to the generic homepage. Add a tracking parameter to the badge link, send them to a landing page that says what they just used and how to make their own, and offer a free start with no sales call. That page is where you will learn how many signups the badge actually brings.

4. Make removal a paid upgrade, not a free toggle

If free users can switch the badge off, many will. The common answer is to keep the badge on the free plan and charge to remove it, as the vendors in the table above do. Pritesh Vora, Sprinto’s head of marketing and growth, described a stricter version from a startup he worked at before Sprinto, in his March 2023 SaaSOpen talk: the free version carried a powered by badge that both displayed trust and worked as an affiliate link, and in the early days the team purposefully made the badge difficult to remove (watch his dual fuel badge section). Watch what the friction does to support tickets and to free to paid upgrades.

Pair the badge with a free plan

A badge is only as wide as the number of people publishing with it, which is why it usually ships on the free plan: Typeform, Kit, Webflow and Calendly keep it there and charge to remove it. Flodesk goes further and keeps its footer on its entry paid plan, with show or hide from Pro.

Nathan Barry’s numbers for ConvertKit, now Kit, show the effect. In a podcast clip played in the December 2024 Founderpath webinar, he said that a year earlier the company was driving maybe 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a week through its powered by links, and that after launching a free plan and scaling it up it was driving 14,000 to 15,000 a week.

A new market may need a push before the loop runs on its own. JivoChat’s CEO told Nathan Latka in 2018 that the live chat widget shows its brand on the websites that use it and that free users cannot remove it, which he called how the company grew. In Brazil, he said, the company first spent roughly $200,000 to $300,000 on paid channels to build an initial user base, and now has stable organic growth there because visitors see the brand on so many websites (watch the Brazil answer).

For more ways to build sharing into a product, see our viral marketing guide and our guide to launching on Product Hunt.

How to measure a powered by badge

Count signups, not impressions. Give the badge link its own tracking parameter for each format, then track four numbers each month:

• Badge clicks: visits to your landing page that carry the badge parameter.
• Signup rate: signups from those visits divided by the visits.
• Badge keep rate: the share of eligible accounts that still show the badge.
• Paid conversions: badge signups that later pay, which tells you what the loop is worth.

There is no reliable public benchmark for badge click or signup rates, so compare your own numbers month to month and between formats. When the badge cannot be clicked, accept that you are buying awareness. Asked whether the watermark on Submagic’s free videos was an effective strategy, its co-founder said:

Yes, it’s great, but it’s very difficult to quantify the impact… and to see really how much people are posting videos with a watermark online… But it’s a way for the users to try the product without paying, and I think we love that.

David Zitoun, Co-founder and CEO, Submagic ($8M revenue). Watch at 9:25

Funding growth without giving up equity

Founderpath provides non-dilutive capital for bootstrapped software founders. Connect your billing, banking and accounting data, and Founderpath shows you what you qualify for, with every figure disclosed up front. There’s no pitch deck, no equity and no board seats.

Check what you qualify for. It takes less than 5 minutes.

Frequently asked questions

What is a powered by badge?

A powered by badge is a small branded link, such as Powered by Typeform or Made in Webflow, that a software product places on the forms, emails, websites or widgets its customers publish. People who see the customer’s work see the product behind it, and some click through and sign up.

What is a viral loop?

A viral loop is the set of steps a user goes through between arriving at a product and bringing in the next set of new users, in Andrew Chen’s definition. A powered by badge creates one: a customer publishes, a viewer sees the badge, signs up and publishes their own work with the badge.

Is a powered by badge the same as a referral program?

No. A referral program asks customers to invite people, usually for a reward. A powered by badge spreads through normal use with no action from the customer. Many products combine them by making the badge the customer’s own referral or affiliate link, as Mailchimp and Flodesk do.

Should free users be able to remove the badge?

Many products that rely on the badge keep it on the free plan and charge to remove it. Typeform, Kit, Webflow and Calendly do not offer badge removal on their free plans, according to their pricing pages on November 2, 2026, and Mailchimp’s help center says its Referral badge is required for free accounts.

What is a good click rate for a powered by badge?

There is no reliable public benchmark. Rates depend on the format, the audience and whether viewers could use the product themselves. Track badge clicks, signups, the share of accounts that keep the badge and paid conversions with a tracking parameter on the badge link, and compare your own numbers over time.

Which companies grew with a powered by badge?

Hotmail added a free email line to every message in 1996 and reached 1 million users within six months, according to Adam Penenberg’s book Viral Loop. Typeform’s co-founder said in 2018 that the loop of respondents clicking powered by Typeform and building their own forms drives a lot of its business, Kit founder Nathan Barry said its powered by links reached 14,000 to 15,000 visitors a week after it launched a free plan (a clip played in December 2024), and Flodesk’s co-founder said in August 2024 that over 30% of its inbound traffic comes from its viral loop and word of mouth.

Does a watermark work like a powered by badge?

Partly. A watermark on a video, chart or image puts your brand in front of every viewer, but it usually cannot be clicked, so you cannot count the signups it brings. Treat it as brand exposure, and add a clickable badge wherever the format allows a link.

Sources and method

Reviewed November 2, 2026. Vendor terms are as Typeform, Kit, Flodesk, Webflow and Calendly stated on their pricing pages on that date, and as Mailchimp’s help center stated in the Internet Archive capture of June 9, 2026; plans change, so check the vendor’s page before you rely on them. Founder examples come from talks published on Founderpath and from Nathan Latka’s Top Founders interviews, each linked to the moment it is said; the quotes are lightly cleaned transcripts with fillers removed. The results they describe are self-reported and historical, not benchmarks.

The earlier version of this post listed 20 examples with revenue and lead figures taken from interview titles and paraphrases. Figures that the interviews did not support were removed: a 30 to 50% share of leads attributed to Turtl’s badge (the founder’s own figure is garbled in the captions, and the 30 to 50% range was the host’s general figure for other companies), an 80 to 90% badge retention rate and a further 15% gain credited to Sprinto (the talk’s deck does not contain them, and the badge was at the speaker’s previous startup), a 7 to 8% badge conversion rate and a “large share of inbound” claim from two companies whose names the captions could not confirm, a Weebly example the CEO did not support (asked to quantify badge signups, he said the very large majority of growth came from word of mouth rather than any single tactic), a Dropbox referral example that is not a badge, and unsourced badge click and signup benchmarks from the old FAQ. Examples that described something other than a badge, or that we could not check against the interview, were dropped.