Miro built its brand by combining a genuinely useful free product with a template library that acts as a constant search and referral engine, a community of users who share their own workflows, and a bottom-up sales motion that lets individuals and small teams adopt the tool before procurement ever gets involved. The result is a brand that spreads through use, not just advertising.
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Miro started life in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, a browser-based whiteboard built by a small team in Perm, Russia. It rebranded as Miro in 2019 and went on to become one of the most widely used visual collaboration platforms in the world, valued at billions of dollars and used by teams at companies including Cisco, Deloitte and Airbnb. For entrepreneurs, Miro is worth studying because its growth was not built on a huge advertising budget or a single viral moment. It was built through product design, content, community and timing working together, which is a far more repeatable model for smaller businesses to learn from.
Positioning the product as a workspace, not just a whiteboard
When the company rebranded from RealtimeBoard to Miro in 2019, it also shifted how it described itself. Rather than being a digital whiteboard, Miro positioned itself as an online collaborative workspace, later refining this further to an “innovation workspace” for distributed teams. This mattered because a whiteboard is a niche tool people reach for occasionally, whereas a workspace is somewhere teams live and return to daily. The positioning gave Miro room to add features like video chat, voting, timers and integrations without confusing customers about what the product was for.
How to apply this to your business: Define your product or service by the outcome it delivers, not the format it takes. A bakery is not just selling bread, it is selling reliable daily convenience or celebration moments. Write your positioning statement around the job customers hire you for, then check every piece of marketing still reflects that.
Using a freemium model to remove the first barrier to trial
Miro offers a free plan that lets individuals and small teams create boards and use core features without a credit card. This meant the first interaction a potential customer had with the brand was not a sales call or a demo request, it was simply using the product. Paid tiers were introduced for larger teams needing more boards, admin controls and security features, which meant the business model scaled naturally as usage grew inside an organisation.
How to apply this to your business: Offer a genuinely useful free trial, sample or entry-level version of what you sell, not a crippled demo designed purely to force an upgrade. Let people experience real value first, then design your paid tiers around the point where their needs naturally outgrow the free version.
Building a template library that doubles as a growth engine
Miro created an extensive library of ready-made templates for tasks such as retrospectives, customer journey maps, kanban boards and brainstorming sessions. Each template addresses a specific job a team needs to do, which meant Miro could rank in search results for hundreds of specific use cases rather than just the generic term “whiteboard tool”. A new user searching for “sprint retrospective template” would land directly on a relevant, usable Miro template rather than a generic homepage.
How to apply this to your business: Break your service down into the specific tasks or problems customers search for, then create a resource, template or guide for each one. This turns your website into dozens of entry points instead of relying on one homepage to do all the work.
Turning users into a community with Miroverse
Miro launched Miroverse, a public gallery where users and partner companies share their own board templates and workflows created inside the product. This turned customers into contributors, giving Miro a constant stream of fresh, practical content produced largely by the community rather than the marketing team alone. It also gave users social proof that real companies and coaches were using Miro for real work, which is more persuasive than a features list.
How to apply this to your business: Create a simple way for happy customers to share how they use your product, whether that is a case study page, a shared folder of examples or a customer spotlight in a newsletter. This builds trust faster than self-authored marketing copy because it comes from peers rather than the company itself.
Investing in content that answers real working problems
Miro built out a blog and resource hub covering topics like agile methodology, design thinking, remote team management and brainstorming techniques, well beyond content that simply promotes the product. This positioned Miro as a useful resource for anyone trying to run better meetings or workshops, whether or not they were already customers, which built long-term trust and steady organic search traffic.
How to apply this to your business: Write content that helps your audience solve problems related to your industry, not just content that describes your product. A accountant could write about cash flow management generally, not only about their bookkeeping software, which builds authority with people long before they are ready to buy.
Rebranding for clarity and memorability
The move from RealtimeBoard to Miro in 2019 was a deliberate simplification. The old name described a feature, real-time collaboration on a board, while the new name was short, easy to say and easy to remember across different languages and markets. A cleaner name also made word of mouth easier, since a team member recommending the tool to a colleague had a simple word to pass along rather than a clunky descriptive phrase.
How to apply this to your business: If your business name is hard to say, spell or remember, consider whether a simpler name would remove friction from referrals and recommendations. Test your name out loud with people outside your industry and see if they repeat it back correctly.
Building an integration ecosystem instead of working in isolation
Miro built integrations with tools that teams already used daily, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Jira and Asana. This meant Miro did not need to convince teams to abandon their existing workflow, it simply slotted into the tools already in use. Each integration also acted as a discovery channel, since users browsing an app marketplace or searching for a specific integration could discover Miro that way.
How to apply this to your business: Identify the tools or platforms your customers already rely on and look for ways to connect with them, whether through a formal integration, a partnership or simply compatible processes. Being easy to combine with what customers already use lowers the switching cost of trying you.
Letting adoption start bottom-up before selling to the enterprise
Rather than beginning with large enterprise sales contracts, Miro grew by letting individual employees, designers and small teams start using the free version for their own projects. Once a product proved useful inside pockets of a large organisation, Miro’s sales team could then approach that company with evidence of existing internal usage to sell a company-wide licence. This bottom-up model meant sales conversations started from a position of proven value rather than a cold pitch.
How to apply this to your business: If you sell to organisations, consider whether individuals or small departments could adopt a lighter version of your offer first. Existing internal usage and enthusiasm makes it far easier to win a larger contract later than approaching decision makers with no prior proof.
Timing growth around a genuine shift in how people work
Miro’s usage grew sharply as remote and hybrid work became widespread, since distributed teams needed a shared visual space to replace the physical whiteboards and sticky notes they had used in offices. Miro did not create this shift, but its product was already well suited to it, and its marketing leaned into remote collaboration themes at exactly the moment demand for these tools surged. This meant existing product strengths lined up naturally with a change in customer behaviour.
How to apply this to your business: Pay attention to genuine shifts in how your customers live or work, and be ready to reposition your existing strengths around that shift rather than waiting to build something new from scratch. Being prepared to move quickly when demand changes matters more than predicting the change perfectly in advance.
Running large-scale virtual events to reach practitioners directly
Miro has hosted virtual conferences and webinars aimed at the specific professional communities that use its product, such as agile coaches, product managers and design teams. These events gave Miro direct access to engaged practitioners, positioned the company as a thought leader within those communities, and generated content that could be reused across the blog and social channels afterwards.
How to apply this to your business: Host a small webinar, workshop or online panel for the specific type of customer you want to reach, rather than a generic promotional event. A well-run session with genuine expert content builds credibility and gives you material to reuse in emails and social posts for months afterwards.
Designing onboarding and product experience for retention
Miro invested heavily in making the first experience of using the product smooth, with guided templates, simple drag and drop functionality and clear prompts for common tasks like running a retrospective or mapping a process. Because the product is visual and collaborative by nature, a good first board experience often meant colleagues were pulled in immediately, increasing the chance that a whole team adopted the tool rather than just one person.
How to apply this to your business: Look closely at the first five minutes of a new customer’s experience with your product or service and remove any unnecessary friction or confusion. A strong first impression increases the chance that one satisfied customer brings colleagues, friends or family along with them.
Turning shared boards into a natural viral loop
Because Miro boards are inherently collaborative, using the product often meant inviting other people into it, whether that was a manager reviewing a board, a client giving feedback or a colleague joining a live workshop. Each invite exposed a new person to the product with no separate marketing spend required. This kind of built-in sharing loop is one of the most efficient growth mechanisms available because it happens as a natural side effect of normal use rather than a deliberate marketing campaign.
How to apply this to your business: Look for ways your product or service naturally involves other people, such as sharing a report, a link or a result with someone else, and make that sharing step as simple and visible as possible. Even a small business can build in moments where a customer naturally introduces someone else to what you offer.
Frequently asked questions
What made Miro’s marketing different from typical software companies?
Miro relied heavily on product-led growth rather than traditional outbound sales and advertising. The free version of the product, the template library and the community features did much of the work that a marketing or sales team might otherwise have to do through cold outreach and paid campaigns.
Did Miro rely mainly on paid advertising to grow?
Paid advertising has played a role in Miro’s growth, particularly as the company scaled and competed in a crowded market, but a significant part of its early growth came from organic search, word of mouth within teams and content built around specific templates and use cases rather than advertising spend alone.
Why is the template library considered such an important part of Miro’s strategy?
Templates address specific, searchable problems that people already have, such as running a retrospective or mapping a customer journey. This means each template can attract its own stream of organic traffic and gives new users an immediate, practical reason to try the product rather than facing a blank canvas.
Can a small business realistically copy any of these tactics without a large budget?
Yes. The underlying principles, a genuinely useful free offer, content built around specific customer problems, easy sharing between customers, and a smooth first experience, do not require a large budget to implement. They require careful thinking about what customers actually need and consistent execution over time.
How important was timing to Miro’s growth?
Timing helped considerably, particularly as remote and hybrid work increased demand for visual collaboration tools. However, Miro’s product and marketing foundations were already in place before that shift, which meant the company was positioned to benefit from the change in working patterns rather than scrambling to catch up with it.
More marketing case studies
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- Marks and Spencer Marketing Strategy: How They Built a Brand That Wins
Related reading: Why I Stopped Batch-Writing A Month Of LinkedIn Posts With AI and Marketing Case Studies: How the World’s Best Brands Actually Grew.
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