Cello helps Miro boost in-product referrals.

Miro is the leading online platform for collaborative workspaces, where teams can create, brainstorm, and organize ideas visually. Miro makes it easy for remote and in-person teams alike to strategize and share information in real-time, offering tools that enhance creativity and alignment across projects.

Miro has long recognized referrals as a powerful growth channel, especially given its user-friendly platform and expansive user base. However, they hadn’t yet found an effective way to harness this potential, as no existing referral solution met their high standards for quality and seamless integration.

With Cello, the referral functionality is directly embedded within Miro, reducing friction for users to share. This integration has made referrals a natural extension of Miro’s product experience, enhancing both ease of sharing and user-driven growth.

Why Miro picked Cello

In-Product Integration

The Miros collaboration suite is renowned for its exceptional user experience. Each new feature must undergo rigorous testing to meet these high UX standards. When introducing features designed as growth channels rather than core functionality, it's crucial to strike a careful balance between maximizing growth potential and minimizing disruption to the core product.

For this reason, seamlessly embedding the referral loop within the platform was essential. This ensured users could refer others without ever leaving the product experience.

A clue: Miro embedded the referral widget into their first-level menu, which leads to an 8x higher activation rate compared to more hidden integration.

Ease of sharing

As a product-driven tool, Miro streamlines virtual collaboration across teams, enabling both synchronous and asynchronous work. It allows seamless collaboration on boards, even with participants who don’t yet have an account. This focus on ease of use is further reflected in Miro's referral widget, which makes sharing Miro's solutions as simple and accessible as possible. Users can share a referral link through social media or mail, by direct copying, or by scanning a QR code (via platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and more).

2-sided rewards

Based on research, Miro implemented a two-sided reward system that boosts sign-up rates by 1.4x. By emphasizing a "give-and-get" approach, the program appeals to the psychology of the referrer, highlighting mutual benefits for both parties involved. Additionally, Miro focused on making the messaging clear and straightforward, ensuring the value proposition is easy for users to understand at a glance.

A few more arguments for why Miro as an enterprise buyer picked Cello:

• Enterprise Scalability: Cello manages the entire end-to-end referral process, including payments, and can easily scale to accommodate millions of Miro users without requiring additional maintenance.
• Enterprise Security: Cello offers automated fraud detection and, by default, uses only a minimal amount of anonymized personal data, ensuring compliance with GDPR and CCPA.
• Tax & KYC Compliance: Cello handles tax and KYC compliance by partnering with internationally recognized tax advisors. It operates only in countries where PayPal supports sending and receiving payments.
• A/B testing: Cello's platform allows simple A/B testings (e.g. copy, rewards) to figure out the best setting for a successful program adoption
• All-In-One platform: Starting with user referrals, Miro considers moving to partner referrals in the long run which can be easily added via Cello's platform

How they roll it out

Iterative approach

Being a company with several million monthly active users, deploying a new feature to your platform requires a careful testing and roll-out approach.

Cello supports Miro with an incremental rollout strategy, deploying to 50% of users at a time (3 months cadence).

This gradual release includes a three-month growth experiment phase before the full rollout to all Miro users, enabling adjustments and improvements.

GTM activities

Miro’s GTM approach focuses on embedding the referral program directly within the platform. New potential referrers see a pulsating gift icon the first time they log in, encouraging them to discover the referral program seamlessly.

In a second step, Miro will boost engagement by emailing its community about the new program, ensuring a critical mass of program participants.

Additionally, they also provide a helpdesk article that answers all questions about the referral program.

Referral Experiment for Self-Served Corporate Users

The program initially targets self-served paying corporate users. This group comprises business email users who do not work with account managers, unlike enterprise accounts, making it ideal for testing and refining the referral experience directly within Miro’s product interface.

How the funnel looks like

Miro chose a lightweight implementation approach to speed up the program's launch and quickly gather initial data. Based on this data, Miro, along with Cello's Customer Growth team, will work together to refine the process, ultimately aiming for a completely seamless experience.

This is how the flow currently looks like: After sharing the referral link through social media or mobile, referees are directed to Miro's landing page, which includes several key sections. The page clearly outlines the benefits for the referee (such as a 10% discount), provides simple instructions for redeeming the referral (e.g., entering a code in the discount field), and features trust markers like G2 ratings and logos of companies that use Miro. For additional details, the page links to a help desk article explaining the referral program in depth.