🏔 The Challenge
Clutch had established itself as the leading B2B ratings and reviews platform, with over a million business leaders visiting each month to discover trusted agency partners. But they faced a classic two-sided marketplace problem: to be valuable to buyers, they needed a critical mass of service providers with verified reviews. To attract service providers, they needed a steady flow of buyers actively searching for partners.
The existing acquisition funnel was largely passive. Service providers would sign up, create a profile, and wait. Buyers would arrive through Google, browse reviews, and leave. There was no systematic way to activate the community of verified service providers as a growth lever.
Additionally, the onboarding experience for new service providers was creating friction. Drop-off rates between account creation and profile completion were higher than expected, and the team lacked visibility into where exactly in the funnel users were getting stuck.
🎯 The Solution
I worked with the Clutch growth team to design and implement a community-driven acquisition funnel that leveraged their greatest asset: their existing base of verified service providers. The core insight was that every service provider who received a positive verified review had a natural incentive to share that review — but there was no mechanism making it easy or rewarding to do so.
We built a structured referral and social sharing flow that triggered at key moments: after a new review was published, after a provider was featured in a Clutch list, and after milestone achievements. On the technical side, I set up the entire funnel using HubSpot for CRM and email sequencing, Zapier for workflow automation, and Webflow for landing pages that could be rapidly A/B tested.
We created segmented nurture sequences for new service provider signups based on their industry vertical, company size, and review count. We also redesigned the onboarding flow with a progress-bar approach, breaking profile completion into smaller steps with email nudges for each incomplete section, instrumented with Mixpanel event tracking.
🧑💻 Tool-stack
HubSpot
Mixpanel
🔥 Result
The community-driven acquisition engine transformed Clutch's growth trajectory within the first two quarters of implementation.
37%Increase in profile completion | 2.4xImprovement in referral signups | 22%Reduction in cost per acquisition |
