How AllTrails Acquired 55 Million Users Organically 🤓

The inaugural Growth Loop Teardown ♻️

A quick intro

I’m Kurtis 👋 and this is the pilot edition of Growth Loop Teardowns ♻️, where I go beyond the obvious to analyze and break down how some of the coolest products & companies ✨actually✨ grow. Subscribe to see more of these!

This edition is All About AllTrails 🥾

AllTrails, one of the world’s most top subscription mobile apps 📱 and it’s phenomenally successful. It’s...(surprise!)...a place to find all trails for hiking, biking, and running, and was founded in 2010.

The stats they’ve piled up since then are truly impressive:

🤯 55 million registered users
💰 Over 1 million paying users
🚀 Nearly 100% organic growth

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Shoutout 🔥

Thanks to Sylvain Gauchet for requesting AllTrails! I highly recommend his newsletter 💎 Growth Gems.

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Let’s get to the fun stuff, shall we?

I’m going to dig into:

👉 The core growth "loop" that power AllTrails’ success
👉 How that loop work (w/ diagrams, screenshots etc.)
👉 Why it works well for AllTrails
👉 What you can imitate or steal

So let’s start by talking about how AllTrials gets its users.

Everybody knows that AllTrails grows through “SEO”…but that’s misleading

Digging into publicly available info, I can see that:

👉 68% of their 18 million monthly visitors (per SimilarWeb) come from organic search
👉 Of that search traffic, 79% is not branded (i..e they are not searches for “AllTrails”)

If you’re picture a bunch of marketers doing keyword research and writing blog articles to rank for them, you’re not quite right.

AllTrails does have SEO experts, but it’s an engineering-heavy operation:

So where’s all the SEO content coming from?

AllTrails has figured out a way to get users to create content, and turn that content into more users.

CEO Ron Schneidermann summed it up nicely on one of my favorite podcasts 🎙:

“Our business is Driven by UGC”

The loop

On closer inspection, AllTrails’ primary growth loop is what my fellow Reforge geeks would call a “User-Generated, Company-Distributed Content” loop.

That’s a bit of a mouthful so let’s break down the key points:

👉 It’s a “content” loop, which means that the “fuel” (and also the constraint) for their growth is content being created & used to reach new users.

👉 It’s “user generated” as opposed to being produced by a centralized editorial team.

👉 It’s “company distributed” meaning AllTrails works to get content indexed & ranked by search engines as opposed to, say, the New York Times, who might rely more on individual stories getting shared on social media by readers (user distributed) or authors (partner-distributed) to reach new people.

Let’s dig in!

Users sign up to find trails, but a subset of them end up contributing content

They create & curate new trails, and add ratings, reviews, and photos.

AllTrails uses that content to automagically create hyper-local landing pages

If you search “Best hiking trails Macleay Park” (a Park in Portland) on Google, the #1 organic result is a list on AllTrails of the top rated trails in the area.

That’s a big deal, because people are searching for trails near them

“Hikes near me” is AllTrails’ #1 search keyword aside from their brand name...

And luckily, no matter where you are, AllTrails has a list for you. If you search for any other place, you’d see a similar page - whether you’re looking for the best trails in Macleay City Park, Oregon 🇺🇸, or Macleay Park, Australia 🇦🇺.

These pages are created automatically, not editorially

The top-rated trails in a park? In a city? In a region? A country? AllTrails has a list.

They slice this content up a million different ways...

Any particular area can be split out futher: walking trails, biking trails pet-friendly trails... you name it.

And after people find these lists, they often sign up!

People Google for trails nearby to get inspiration, but once you’ve got it... you want a guide for that trail! So readers sign up to get access to the AllTrails mobile app and GPS tracking.

Most importantly: it’s a closed loop system! ♻️

A certain percentage of users who sign up reliably become content creators.

More users = More content.

In turn, more content = more landing pages (particularly when new trails are added in new locations, etc) and higher rankings = even more users.

Rinse and repeat.

Bonus: Users provide a distribution boost by sharing routes

Most people are not expert hikers. They’re casual novice or intermediate hikers, who tend to hike with others rather than alone. Luckily all routes & lists on AllTrails can be easily shared!

This nicely bolts onto the core content loop 🔥

Bonus: The loop also benefits from a virality booster! 🧪

People who use AllTrails straight up love it - the app has a 4.9 score on the App Store. People tell their friends about hikes they went on that they found on AllTrails. People who hike with their friends see those friends using AllTrails.

As a result, more than 2 million people search for “All Trails” specifically on Google each month.

Putting it all together:

There you have it: how AllTrails actually grows (I think 😅)

Why it works

Size of Market 🚶

Since only a small subset of users will make the leap from “consuming” to “creating” content, this loop only works when the overall user base is huge.

Luckily, damn near everyone goes for walks. In a smaller niche, it might be hard to generate enough content. 🥾

Freemium ✨

~98% of registered users are not paying. While the average free user is less likely to create content than the average Pro user, the sheer volume of free users present a huge pool of creators.

Mobile use case drives registrations 📲

The web => mobile chasm is notoriously hard to cross, but for AllTrails it’s not a hard sell. Folks who find a trail from AllTrails have a natural reason to download the app (use GPS to follow the route), and most importantly are willing to create an account to do so - driving conversion to “registered” users.

Steal (or imitate) this:

AllTrails benefits from a uniquely amazing product-channel fit (people searching for trails on Google who will then download the app to track their route), combined with a fairly large, mainstream market, and a “multiplayer” use case.

You are not AllTrails, but there are some aspects of their business that you MIGHT be able to apply to yours.

👉 Structure and slice your content library according to characteristics that your users care about (and are searching for). Think: topics, professions, tags, use cases...

👉 Play the volume game: automatically create SEO-friendly pages for a LOT of hyper-relevant search terms.

👉 Use the tools at your disposal to drive content creation: freemium, accessible pricing, etc.

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That’s all for now!

I hope you enjoyed this pilot 👨🏻‍✈️ edition of Growth Loop Teardowns! ♻️

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