The marketing flywheel isn’t a new idea.

Jim Collins introduced the Flywheel effect in his book Good to Great, and Jeff Bezos sketched Amazon’s flywheel strategy on the back of a napkin.

But it wasn’t until 2018 that HubSpot brought the concept to the marketing folks. Since then, solopreneurs, startups, and enterprise teams have embraced the flywheel as a more holistic, customer-first growth model.

Still, like many others, I started as a funnel-first marketer. It was only a few years into my career that I finally made the switch. And it changed everything about how I approach marketing for myself and my clients.

In this guide, I’ll explain why I switched to the flywheel model and break down a real client campaign that brought the concept to life.

Why trust me?

I’ve been a content marketer for five years and have helped multiple SaaS brands grow their organic presence and audience using marketing funnels and flywheels. I believe in customer-first marketing, which has generated tremendous results for my clients.

If you told me two years ago that I’d toss the traditional marketing funnel in favor of a spinning wheel, I’d have laughed.

Funnels felt logical, linear, and predictable. After all, that’s what every marketing course, strategy deck, and SaaS playbook preached for years.

But the deeper I got into content marketing, especially for SaaS and creator-led businesses, the more broken that funnel felt.

Here’s what I learned: funnels are built for acquisition, not retention.

The funnel’s structure is designed to attract as many leads as possible at the top, nurture them in the middle, and convert a few at the bottom. But the process ends at the point of conversion. There’s little consideration for what happens afterward: how to engage customers once they’ve signed up or purchased.

Here’s how a typical funnel works: A prospect reads a blog, downloads a guide, joins an email list, gets a sales pitch, and maybe—just maybe—converts.

As a creator, a conversion might be subscribing to your newsletter or downloading your digital product.

But what happens after that? New subscribers often churn quickly or disengage altogether. There’s no follow-through, no system to keep them coming back. And in a world where retention, referrals, and community-driven growth matter more than ever, that’s a massive gap.

That’s where the flywheel marketing comes in.

The marketing flywheel model shifts the focus from simply acquiring customers to keeping them engaged and delighted. It’s based on the idea that happy customers don’t just stay—they help you grow by referring others, spreading the word, and actively contributing to your business.

Unlike the linear funnel, the flywheel works in continuous loops. It has three interconnected phases: Attract, Engage, and Delight. Each phase fuels the other.

Here’s how a flywheel plays out: someone discovers your newsletter via a social media post (attract), signs up and receives a well-designed onboarding series (engage), then shares your newsletter with others and responds to your feedback survey (delight).

After the delight stage, the same person helps you attract new readers, and the cycle continues.

Funnels end at conversion. Flywheels create momentum that builds over time.

And that’s what convinced me to make the switch. The flywheel puts energy into the customer experience, not just the acquisition process. It rewards consistency, trust-building, and long-term value over short-term wins.

But switching to a flywheel model wasn’t something I figured out overnight. It took time, experimentation, and a full rethink of how I approached content and audience engagement.

One of my most rewarding flywheel projects was with a creator-educator helping freelancers master pricing strategy. Her flagship product was a self-paced course, but sales had stalled.

She had a modest audience: over 5,000 subscribers, several educational blog posts, and a decent following on LinkedIn and YouTube—but none of it worked together.

There was no system to guide new subscribers from signup to purchase and referrals.

So, we decided to rebuild the strategy using the flywheel approach.

We focused on creating content that solves real problems.

She posted quick, practical pricing breakdowns on Twitter and YouTube: real scenarios simplified in 60-second clips. Every video and post linked to her "Pricing Audit Worksheet," a lead magnet designed to help freelancers self-diagnose their pricing gaps.

We hosted this worksheet on a dedicated landing page with an opt-in form. It lowered the barrier to entry while offering immediate value. And since the content was aligned with her course offering, the audience we attracted was already qualified.

The opt-in form triggered a 7-day "Fix Your Freelance Pricing" email challenge we set up in beehiiv. Each day, subscribers received a digestible email containing:

This sequence became the foundation of our engagement loop. It was informative, concise, and personal. It helped my client transition from being seen as a course seller to a trusted mentor.

beehiiv was pivotal in launching this entire campaign. It lends us all the required tools:

We used this data to refine messaging for new subscribers and improve open and engagement rates over time.

Once someone completed the challenge, we sent them a “Ready to Level Up?” sequence introducing my client’s full course through student success stories and transformation highlights.

We also invited subscribers to a live Q&A session to ask freelance pricing questions, share roadblocks, and connect with fellow freelancers. It added a community element and gave the brand a more human face.

We introduced a referral program using beehiiv’s built-in referral tool to close the loop.

The incentives were tailored to what our audience actually wanted. And it worked. This single referral loop increased subscribers by 15% in just a few weeks.

We didn’t just build and launch. We also listened.

We embedded short prompts like “What’s your biggest pricing challenge?” or “Where do you feel stuck?” throughout the email challenge.

Using Typeform, we collected dozens of responses. These became the raw material for YouTube topics, newsletter content, new lead magnets, and course revisions. It helped us stay responsive to what people actually needed instead of assuming what they wanted.

The magic? Each piece of the flywheel served a distinct role but was built to loop.

Our sales numbers went up, and we built a community of freelancers who contributed to the growth of my client’s business.

beehiiv was our command center for this campaign. It tied everything together and gave us full control over content creation and distribution.

Everything—from the landing page, welcome flow, and email challenge to referrals and blog repurposing—lived inside beehiiv.

Here’s what we built:

We also used beehiiv’s public posts feature to repurpose newsletter content as SEO-friendly blog posts, which we then redistributed across LinkedIn, Medium, and niche communities. It saved us time and kept the content loop moving.

After months of ideating, testing, and executing the flywheel for months, I learned some key lessons. Here are some of the most important ones.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from this campaign was that flywheel marketing isn’t for quick wins. It’s built for long-term, steady growth.

I initially assured my client we might start seeing traction in a few weeks, but that wasn’t realistic. It took closer to two months before we had the data to validate what was working.

Once we tightened the alignment between the lead magnet, the onboarding challenge, and our referral system, things started to move naturally. The consistency of the loop made the momentum stick, not the content volume.

This campaign taught me that the flywheel is only as strong as its most disconnected part.

We had a great top-of-funnel and a solid engagement series, but our post-challenge flow left too much on the table. There wasn’t a strong follow-up call-to-action (CTA), no clear path forward, and nothing to deepen the relationship with our subscribers.

We band-aid this gap by adding a thoughtful follow-up series and a live Q&A. This resulted in higher conversions and referrals.

I tested paid ads as a quick way to bring in more leads. They gave us a short-term spike in traffic, but the gains were short-lived.

In contrast, owned channels like the newsletter, YouTube content, and embedded surveys drove real, compounding growth.

We collected first-party data, tracked user behavior across sessions, and built a strategy that wasn’t dependent on outside platforms or changing algorithms. It was also more sustainable from a budget standpoint, which allowed us to invest more in what was already working.

When we embedded prompts like “What’s your biggest pricing challenge?” inside emails, the responses shifted our direction.

We weren’t just getting feedback. We uncovered (and understood) our audience’s language, struggles, and motivations that shaped how we approach our marketing strategy.

Customer feedback wasn’t a one-off activity; it became a system that kept our flywheel targeted and relevant.

Looking back, there’s a lot that worked—but also a few things I’d approach differently if I were building a flywheel from scratch.

If I had to do it again, I’d begin by mapping out the retention flow first. That means mapping out the email cadence, feedback surveys, and community prompts before launching the lead magnet.

Once I knew what kept people engaged long-term, it became easier to attract the right kind of subscribers at the top.

At first, I leaned too hard on automation to move quickly. Every part of the onboarding flow was pre-planned, templated, and structured.

But the most valuable and rewarding touchpoints were the human ones: a live Q&A invite, replying to a subscriber’s question, or dropping a short, plain-text check-in. These moments didn’t scale, but they deepened trust, which is the ideal notion behind the flywheel model.

I’ve learned to balance automation without losing the human touch.

Despite having a solid email challenge, I noticed drop-offs around day three. It took me a while to investigate the reason behind them.

In hindsight, I should have used beehiiv’s 3D analytics sooner to monitor opens, click-throughs, and unsubscribes more closely. I also would’ve added a quick poll or Typeform survey at the midpoint of the sequence to catch points of confusion or disinterest.

Our best-performing content came directly from audience responses. A simple “What’s your biggest pricing struggle?” email generated replies that shaped our messaging, subject lines, and even lead magnet titles.

If I were starting again, I’d bake feedback prompts into the welcome sequence, ask questions on social media, and build the campaign alongside the audience.

Not only does this boost engagement, but it also reduces guesswork.

I am a perfectionist, which has crept into my way of implementing the campaign. I wasted time perfecting systems I hadn’t tested.

I spent hours refining email templates and page copy before we had our first 100 subscribers.

Going forward, I’d launch with a test cohort, gather real feedback, and then scale what works. The pressure to “get everything right” up front can stall progress.

Here are the tools that helped me ideate, launch, and refine the campaign efficiently and clearly.

beehiiv housed the entire flywheel system. From designing the email challenge and automating sequences to running referrals and republishing content, it handled every touchpoint.

We designed each email and landing page in beehiiv and templatized the content blocks (referral section, footer, and header) to scale email creation.

What really helped us was beehiiv’s built-in AI tool that helped us come up with interesting email openings, rewrite sentences, and proofread the entire email.

I used Notion as our central planning space. Every content idea, email draft, landing page note, and video script lived in one organized database.

I chose Notion over other tools because the paid content my client offered was hosted on Notion as well. It made sense to use it to collaborate and launch the campaign, too.

I even created a simple board to visualize the flywheel core elements and mapped every asset against it. It helped me spot content gaps and ensure no piece felt like a dead end.

I used Descript to trim, transcribe, and repurpose YouTube videos into short clips. I also repurposed webinar recordings and consultation calls to be shared in emails to engage the new subscribers early on.

Descript’s doc-like editing feature made us stick to it. It saved us time and gave us the flexibility to edit and repurpose videos and share them across multiple channels.

I embedded short, open-ended Typeform surveys inside the challenge emails.

Survey emails surfaced valuable insights that we wouldn’t have uncovered otherwise. I used this copy to write subject lines, reframe lesson intros, and craft product descriptions that resonated more deeply with the audience.

I used Zapier to tag users in beehiiv based on Typeform responses, sync email actions into our CRM, and get alerts for completed surveys. It helped reduce manual work without needing a full dev stack.

beehiiv’s 3D analytics helped us understand engagement inside the email experience—open rates, link clicks, and referral activity. For broader funnel data (landing pages, traffic sources), we used Google Analytics.

Both tools worked in tandem to give us a 360-degree view of our content’s performance, audience growth, and engagement rate.

After months of building and testing my flywheel, I’ve realized it's a better model for consistent long-term growth than a funnel. If you’re still operating on the former, consider this a sign to re-evaluate.

Start by mapping out gaps in your existing strategy, understanding the customer touchpoints, and identifying your goals. Then, jot down how you can provide value for the readers—from the first touchpoint to retention.

Social media is always a good starting point for building and attracting an audience. And, if you want a platform to host your content, build an audience, and track growth metrics, give beehiiv a spin.