Between 2024 and now, the Smarton user base went from roughly 2,000 people to more than 15,000. There was no growth hack in it. There was a distribution problem, and it took about eighteen months of unglamorous work to solve.
Here is what actually moved the number.
The obvious playbook for a consumer app is paid acquisition. For assistive technology it barely works. The people who benefit most are often not the people searching, and the people searching on their behalf — a parent, a teacher, a rehabilitation centre — respond to trust, not to a creative.
So the channel became institutions: NGOs, CSR programmes, Rotary clubs, schools, and corporate inclusion teams. A single partnership with a school for the blind reached more qualified users in an afternoon than a month of untargeted spend, and it came with something paid channels never provide — a person on the ground who could help with the first-run setup.
The measurable version of this: we tracked which partner types produced users who were still active at 30 days, and doubled down on the ones that did. Not every partnership was worth the effort, and the data said so clearly.
The second thing that moved the number was showing up in person. I delivered product demos and accessibility awareness sessions at schools, NGOs and corporate inclusion events — not as marketing, but because the product is genuinely hard to describe and immediately obvious to experience.
Watching someone point a phone at a medicine strip and hear the dosage read back does more in ten seconds than any landing page. It also produced better feedback than any survey we ran; half the roadmap items that year came out of questions asked after a demo.
At Voice of Specially Abled People, the same distribution problem existed at ecosystem scale: dozens of Indian assistive-tech startups with good products and no way to reach buyers, donors, or government.
We conceptualised and launched what became the world's first virtual assistive technology exhibition at events.voiceofsap.org. It drew participation from both government and corporate sectors, gave 30+ social enterprises a stage in front of thousands of disabled users and donors, and later evolved into an AT Acceleration Fund putting roughly $1 million a year into those startups.
The lesson there was that sometimes the growth constraint is not your funnel. It is that the venue your users would find you in does not exist yet, and building it is a legitimate product decision.
None of the above scales on goodwill. Underneath it, the boring work mattered just as much: digitising fundraising systems, introducing scalable workflows, wiring up Salesforce and marketing automation so donor management and reporting stopped consuming the team's week.
Every hour that automation gave back went into partnerships and demos — the things that actually compounded. Process automation is not a growth channel, but it is very often what funds one.
I would instrument partner cohorts from day one instead of retrofitting the analysis six months in. I would say no to more low-yield partnerships earlier. And I would have started the demo circuit before the product felt ready, because the feedback from that circuit is what made it ready.