A referral system and a 1M RUB acquisition budget helped Kotbot grow company turnover 250 percent.

Starting point

Kotbot is a SaaS platform built for marketers. The product had no dedicated brand identity and no referral mechanism to turn existing users into an acquisition channel, so growth depended almost entirely on whatever direct marketing spend the team could run. Average order value had room to move, and nobody had tested whether a referral loop could add meaningfully to what direct spend alone was producing.

A product built for marketers carries a particular risk here: the audience buying the tool can spot a generic SaaS funnel immediately, and a brand that looks interchangeable with every other marketing tool in the category makes every acquisition channel work harder than it should.

What we did

We built Kotbot’s brand identity for the service, then designed and implemented a referral system that gave existing users a reason to bring in new ones, turning part of the growth loop into a channel with no direct media cost. Paid acquisition ran alongside it on a fixed budget of 1M RUB, reviewed in the same weekly cycle we run under Growth Lab on every engagement: audience and creative combinations checked against cost per user, kept or cut on that number rather than on total spend.

We also worked on the pricing and packaging signals that move average order value, testing changes against actual purchase behavior rather than assumptions about what a marketer using the product would pay for. The brand identity and referral system sit under our Marketing-Operational System practice, the same one that keeps the acquisition numbers and the product-side changes reported on one shared view instead of two separate ones.

The referral system mattered here for a reason beyond cost: a user who refers a colleague has already made the case for the product better than any ad could, and the leads it produced needed the same weekly cost review as paid traffic so the team could see which channel was actually carrying growth once both were running at the same time.

Over the course of the engagement the combination of referral growth, paid acquisition and the pricing work reached about 7,400 users acquired against the 1M RUB budget, with average order value up 11 percent and the company’s overall turnover up 250 percent.

What the team kept

Kotbot kept the brand identity, the referral system and the weekly review process that ties acquisition spend to cost per user. The pricing and packaging changes that tested well stayed in the product after the engagement.

Figures reported by the client and by our own campaign dashboards for the period stated.