Growth Hacker

Traction vs. Growth: A Framework for Startup Phases

Startups evolve through three distinct growth phases—Traction, Transition, and Growth—each with unique goals, metrics, channels, and team structures. Understanding where your startup fits in this progression ensures you’re focusing on the right priorities at the right time, optimizing your path to scale.

Traction Phase

Where most startups begin: validating product-market fit and building a foundation.

Goal
Find product-market fit among a specific audience segment. Assess market size to ensure you’re solving a big enough problem.

Key Metric
Retention. Without retaining users, there’s no point in driving traffic. Look for signals that users derive real value from your product.

Volume
— Generate a steady stream of users to test hypotheses.
— Avoid scaling beyond what’s necessary to analyze retention.
— Expect high Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) relative to Lifetime Value (LTV)—it’s fine as long as you maintain runway.

Channels

— Test a few potential channels but focus on one that consistently delivers users.
— Avoid spreading resources thin—manage no more than 2–3 channels initially.

Optimization

— Prioritize macro optimizations: significant changes to messaging, onboarding, or target audience.
— Skip micro tweaks like button colors—these matter later.

Team Structure

— One person, likely a founder, should lead growth, with part-time support from a developer or designer.

Transition Phase

The "awkward teenage years" of startups: building the foundation for sustainable growth.

Goal
Identify and define the growth levers—factors driving key metrics (e.g., DAUs, MRR).

Key Metric

Growth rate (weekly or monthly).
— Start tracking CPA (Customer Acquisition Cost) and LTV. Aim for a payback period under three months to avoid cash flow issues.

Volume
— Gradually increase user acquisition while monitoring retention.
— Scaling too quickly may expose cracks in your product.

Channels
— Focus on one high-performing channel with room for scalability.
— Avoid diversifying prematurely—stick with what’s working until saturation.

Optimization

— Continue macro optimizations but begin integrating micro optimizations to fine-tune your processes.
— Analyze and iterate on major growth drivers.

Team Structure
— Form a dedicated growth team, led by a PM or VP of Growth.
— Include a developer, designer, and potentially a data scientist or channel-specific expert (e.g., content marketer for a blog-driven strategy).

Growth Phase

The "firehose" stage: scaling aggressively and fine-tuning your growth machine.

Goal
Drive exponential growth—“up and to the right.”

Key Metrics
— Growth rate remains the primary focus.
— Payback period becomes critical as capital increases and channels saturate. The longer the payback period you can afford, the more channels you can explore.

Volume
— Shift from a steady stream to scaling at maximum capacity.
— Expand acquisition efforts while maintaining retention metrics.

Channels
— Maintain focus on your primary channel, which will likely drive 80% of your growth.
— Gradually diversify into new channels as you saturate the core.

Optimization
— Lean heavily on micro optimizations: small, incremental changes across a large user base can generate significant returns.
— Use insights from earlier phases to refine touchpoints.

Team Structure

— Expand to include multiple growth teams.
— Structure: A growth executive overseeing PMs, each leading their own cross-functional teams (developers, designers, data analysts, and channel specialists).

Key Takeaways

— Traction: Validate your product-market fit and focus on retention.
— Transition: Build a scalable growth process, double down on your strongest channel, and start optimizing your metrics.
— Growth: Scale aggressively, diversify channels, and refine processes with micro optimizations.

By aligning your efforts with your startup’s phase, you can navigate the complexities of growth more efficiently and maximize your chances of long-term success.

Why Most of the Content You Read About Growth Is Wrong

As growth becomes a hot topic, more content is being produced, offering advice, frameworks, and case studies. While this can be great for inspiration, much of it leads readers down incorrect paths by prescribing “proven” tactics without considering context. Here’s why you should approach such advice with caution—and how to make it work for you.

The Problem: One-Size-Fits-All Advice

Take the example of the minimal homepage. Numerous articles claim minimal homepages (e.g., Facebook, Dropbox) always convert better. However:

— Counterexamples exist:
For instance, a Crazy Egg case study showed long-form pages outperforming minimal ones.

— It’s situational.
In some cases, minimal designs fail to provide enough information for the user to take action. In others, they succeed.

The takeaway? Growth tactics aren’t universal. Prescriptive advice often ignores the unique variables that influence success, such as:
— Your audience.
—Your business model.
— Your decision-making funnel.

Key Point: Inspiration, Not Prescription

When consuming growth content, use it as inspiration rather than a rulebook. Here’s why:
— Your product, customer journey, and channels are unique.
— There’s no “right” way to grow.
— Successful growth strategies emerge from experimentation, not replication.
This doesn’t mean growth content is useless—it’s a fantastic way to generate ideas. But these ideas must be tailored to your business and validated through experimentation.

How to Get the Most Out of Growth Content

Follow these four steps to make the most of the growth advice you read:

1. Understand the Context

Break down the building blocks of the tactic being discussed. Ask questions like:
— Who is the target audience?
— What’s the business model?
— What kind of decision process do customers go through?
— What channels were used?
— What existing assets or advantages did the company leverage?
— What stage of growth is the company in (traction, transition, or scaling)?

Why it matters:

The success of a tactic often depends on its context. By understanding the building blocks, you can identify what might work for you—and what might not.

2. Compare to Your Business

Ask yourself:
— How is my business different or similar?
— What assumptions am I making about why this might work for me?
— What’s the probability of success if I try this tactic?

Why it matters:
Comparing contexts helps you assess the likelihood of success and whether it’s worth prioritizing.

3. Align With Your Priorities

Avoid knee-jerk reactions. Instead:
— Add the idea to your backlog if it doesn’t align with your current focus.
— Prioritize only if it fits your goals or is a time-sensitive opportunity.

Why it matters:
Chasing every new tactic derails focus. Align experiments with your long-term strategy unless there’s an urgent, high-ROI opportunity.

4. Test Against a Control

Always test new tactics against a control group.
— Define clear metrics for success.
— Be brutally honest in evaluating results—success elsewhere doesn’t guarantee success for you.

Why it matters:
Only testing will reveal whether a tactic truly works for your audience, product, and goals.

Conclusion

Growth is not about copying what worked for others. It’s about:
— Generating ideas from diverse sources.
— Evaluating those ideas critically.
— Testing them methodically.

The next time you read about “the one hack that doubled conversions,” pause. Treat it as inspiration—then adapt, test, and iterate to find what works for your unique business.

Why Most of the Content You Read About Growth Is Wrong

As growth becomes a hot topic, more content is being produced, offering advice, frameworks, and case studies. While this can be great for inspiration, much of it leads readers down incorrect paths by prescribing “proven” tactics without considering context. Here’s why you should approach such advice with caution—and how to make it work for you.

The Problem: One-Size-Fits-All Advice

Take the example of the minimal homepage. Numerous articles claim minimal homepages (e.g., Facebook, Dropbox) always convert better. However:

— Counterexamples exist:
For instance, a Crazy Egg case study showed long-form pages outperforming minimal ones.

— It’s situational.
In some cases, minimal designs fail to provide enough information for the user to take action. In others, they succeed.

The takeaway? Growth tactics aren’t universal. Prescriptive advice often ignores the unique variables that influence success, such as:
— Your audience.
—Your business model.
— Your decision-making funnel.

Key Point: Inspiration, Not Prescription

When consuming growth content, use it as inspiration rather than a rulebook. Here’s why:
— Your product, customer journey, and channels are unique.
— There’s no “right” way to grow.
— Successful growth strategies emerge from experimentation, not replication.
This doesn’t mean growth content is useless—it’s a fantastic way to generate ideas. But these ideas must be tailored to your business and validated through experimentation.

How to Get the Most Out of Growth Content

Follow these four steps to make the most of the growth advice you read:

1. Understand the Context

Break down the building blocks of the tactic being discussed. Ask questions like:
— Who is the target audience?
— What’s the business model?
— What kind of decision process do customers go through?
— What channels were used?
— What existing assets or advantages did the company leverage?
— What stage of growth is the company in (traction, transition, or scaling)?

Why it matters:

The success of a tactic often depends on its context. By understanding the building blocks, you can identify what might work for you—and what might not.

2. Compare to Your Business

Ask yourself:
— How is my business different or similar?
— What assumptions am I making about why this might work for me?
— What’s the probability of success if I try this tactic?

Why it matters:
Comparing contexts helps you assess the likelihood of success and whether it’s worth prioritizing.

3. Align With Your Priorities

Avoid knee-jerk reactions. Instead:
— Add the idea to your backlog if it doesn’t align with your current focus.
— Prioritize only if it fits your goals or is a time-sensitive opportunity.

Why it matters:
Chasing every new tactic derails focus. Align experiments with your long-term strategy unless there’s an urgent, high-ROI opportunity.

4. Test Against a Control

Always test new tactics against a control group.
— Define clear metrics for success.
— Be brutally honest in evaluating results—success elsewhere doesn’t guarantee success for you.

Why it matters:
Only testing will reveal whether a tactic truly works for your audience, product, and goals.

Conclusion

Growth is not about copying what worked for others. It’s about:
— Generating ideas from diverse sources.
— Evaluating those ideas critically.
— Testing them methodically.

The next time you read about “the one hack that doubled conversions,” pause. Treat it as inspiration—then adapt, test, and iterate to find what works for your unique business.

Growth vs Marketing vs Product: Understanding the Roles

Over the past five years, four significant changes have reshaped how we think about growing tech companies:

1. Foundational Shifts Driving Growth

Access to Data:
— Tools like Mixpanel and Kissmetrics provide granular insights at a low cost.

Access to Platforms:
— Facebook, iOS, and LinkedIn now offer pathways to billions of users for acquisition, activation, and retention.

Scale and Speed:
— Startups grow faster than ever, leading to higher expectations for rapid scaling.

Integration of Tech and Marketing:
— Tools like Optimizely and HubSpot blur the lines between technical execution and marketing strategy.
These shifts demand a more integrated and dynamic approach to growth. Here’s how Growth, Marketing, and Product differ in their roles.

2. Growth vs Marketing

Traditionally, marketing teams focus on the top of the funnel:
— Awareness and Acquisition: Generating leads, signups, and initial user interest

Marketing teams excel at:
— Content creation (blogs, ads).
— Paid acquisition.
— Brand building.

However, growth teams operate holistically:
— Goal: Optimize the entire funnel, from acquisition to retention and revenue.
— Focus Metric: Not just leads, but broader KPIs like — Daily Active Users (DAUs) or Monthly Active Subscribers (MAS).

Growth teams can influence the middle and bottom of the funnel through:
1. Product changes.
2. Platform extensions (e.g., new integrations).
3. Paid re-engagement (e.g., retargeting).

This requires tight collaboration between:
— Engineering
— Design
— Product Management
— Data Science
Unlike marketing, growth teams blend disciplines to achieve long-term, sustainable growth.

3. Growth vs Product

Product Teams focus on:
— Building Core Product Value: Creating features that deliver value and keep users coming back.
— Expanding Product Value: Enhancing the product to meet evolving user needs.

Growth Teams focus on:
— Getting Users to Experience Core Value Quickly: Removing friction in onboarding or first-use experiences.
— Maximizing Core Value Frequency: Encouraging users to return and engage more frequently.

This distinction aligns with Chamath Palihapitiya’s growth framework:
— Product builds value.
— Growth ensures users experience it as quickly and as often as possible.

Key Takeaways

— Growth Teams own the entire funnel, combining marketing, product, and engineering disciplines to drive growth systematically.
— Marketing Teams primarily focus on the top of the funnel, excelling in generating awareness and acquisition.
— Product Teams concentrate on building and expanding core product value to retain users long-term.

In today’s environment, growth isn’t just about tactics — it’s about integrating these disciplines into a cohesive, data-driven machine.

Final Thoughts

Whether you call it growth hacking, full-stack marketing, or technical marketing, the ultimate goal remains the same: scaling businesses sustainably and authentically. By aligning your teams and embracing a holistic growth strategy, you position your company for long-term success.

What Is Focus

Focus is a concept that's often thrown around but rarely understood in depth. Many see it as tunnel vision, but true focus is far more nuanced and dynamic.

What Focus Is (and Isn’t)

— It’s Not About Narrowing Vision Forever: Focus requires a broad understanding to set meaningful goals but also demands adaptability based on new insights.
— It’s Not Sticking Rigidly to a Path: While consistency is key, great achievements often come from iterating smartly and knowing when to pivot.

At its core, focus is about zooming out to define goals, zooming in to execute, and zooming out again to reassess and iterate.

Focus Means Four Key Things:

1. One Meaningful Goal
— Identify a singular long-term goal instead of chasing multiple paths.

2. Prioritize the Most Important Next Step
— Distill what must be done right now to move closer to the goal.

3. Stay the Course Long Enough to Learn
— Execute consistently to gather meaningful data and insights.

4. Refine Based on What You Learn
— Use insights to reassess and adjust your longer-term goal as needed.

The Five Advantages of Focus

1. You Move Faster
— Without Focus: Decision-making becomes convoluted, with team members debating different goals. This leads to wasted time and energy.
— With Focus: Decisions align with one clear objective. Time spent debating is minimized, and more time is spent executing.

2. You Learn More
Focusing allows you to dig deep rather than skimming the surface. True insights emerge only when you break through superficial data and explore the deeper layers of problems.

3. You Make More Progress
— Rhodes Scholars, some of the most accomplished individuals, achieve their goals by tackling one endeavor at a time, sequentially rather than in parallel.
— Similarly, startups move faster when they focus on solving one core problem at a time.

4. You Build Confidence
Progress builds confidence. With focus, teams see tangible results, reinforcing their belief in their ability to succeed, even in the face of challenges.

5. You Become More Valuable
— Companies that focus on becoming the best in a single niche outperform competitors.
— Professionals who specialize deeply in one or two areas are more valuable than generalists dabbling in many.

Why Focus Is Hard

1. Choosing a Focus
Multiple Options, Imperfect Information: There’s never one clear answer, and the fear of picking the wrong path often leads to avoiding focus altogether.
Solution: Accept imperfection. Use focus as a way to learn faster, even if your initial choice isn’t perfect.

2. Sticking With a Focus
External Pressure: Advisors, team members, or shiny new ideas may tempt you to pivot prematurely.
Solution: Understand that new options often look deceptively easier because you haven’t yet uncovered their complexities.

3. Knowing When to Change Focus
Sunk Cost Fallacy: It’s tough to abandon a path after investing significant time and resources, even if it’s not yielding results.
Solution: Set clear milestones and forcing functions (e.g., timeframes) to objectively evaluate whether it’s time to pivot.

A Framework for Focus

Start with a Hypothesis
Use available data and insights to identify the most promising focus area.

Identify Assumptions
Clearly define the assumptions underlying your chosen focus.

Measure Progress
Set specific metrics or milestones to track against your assumptions.

Set Timeframes
Commit to a period where you’ll focus exclusively on testing your hypothesis.

Extract Learnings
Whether successful or not, analyze what worked and what didn’t.

Iterate
Use the learnings to refine your focus or shift to a new hypothesis.

Final Thought

Focus isn’t just a discipline—it’s a competitive advantage. By narrowing your efforts, you gain clarity, learn faster, and ultimately achieve more. The key is embracing focus as a dynamic, iterative process rather than a fixed, rigid path.

The First Step To Building A Growth Machine

Growth isn't about uncovering a single tactic or "hack" that changes everything overnight. Instead, it's the cumulative result of countless small wins, experiments, and refinements over time.

1. Growth Is the Sum of Small Parts

The internet loves stories of exponential growth. But what these stories often overlook are the countless experiments, learnings, and adjustments that came before the hockey-stick moment.

— No Silver Bullets: Breakthroughs often result from cumulative learnings. Each experiment informs the next, creating a compound effect.
— Avoid Surface-Level Tactics: Chasing the latest growth hacks without depth only yields shallow results. The real value lies in going deep and refining what works for your business.

Bottom Line: You need a process to systematically generate ideas, run experiments, and leverage learnings for continuous growth.

2. The Accelerating Pace of Change

Customer acquisition channels evolve rapidly:
— Facebook Ads strategies that worked last quarter may not work today.
— Entire platforms rise and fall in months, not years.
The effectiveness of these channels is cycling faster than ever.

Trends:
— New channels emerge more frequently.
— Lifecycles of effectiveness are shorter.

Bottom Line: Your growth process needs to be agile, adapting quickly to new tactics and evolving environments.

3. What Works for Others Won’t Work for You

Growth strategies aren't one-size-fits-all. The nuances of your:
— Audience
— Product
— Customer Lifecycle
— Business Model

Inspiration vs. Prescription:
Use insights from others as inspiration, not a blueprint. Your business needs its own tailored approach.

Bottom Line: Build a process to discover the tactics that work specifically for your product and audience.

4. Build a Growth Machine

The goal isn’t to stumble upon a single winning tactic—it’s to build a Growth Machine.

A true growth machine is:
— Scalable: Can handle increased volume without breaking.
— Predictable: Produces consistent results.
— Repeatable: Can replicate success across various initiatives.

Bottom Line: Tactics are merely inputs; the machine processes them. The machine runs on a robust, adaptable process.

Elements of a Strong Growth Process

Your growth process should include these key elements:
1. Set Big Goals
— Focus on the areas that will have the biggest impact on your growth metrics.
2. Generate Ideas Continuously
— Maintain a structured method for brainstorming and collecting new growth ideas.
3. Prioritize Experiments
— Rank ideas based on potential impact, effort, and feasibility.
4. Design Experiments Efficiently
— Build quick, cost-effective tests to validate ideas.
5. Analyze Every Experiment
— Whether it succeeds or fails, learn from it. What worked? What didn’t? Why?
6. Share Learnings Across the Team
— Document insights and feed them back into your experiment pipeline.

Why Process Matters

The real power of a growth process lies not in the specifics but in diligence and consistency.
— It’s Not Glamorous: Sticking to a process can feel repetitive or boring, but it’s what separates the best teams from the rest.
— Discipline Over Shiny Objects: It’s tempting to chase every new tactic or channel, but consistency in experimentation and analysis wins in the long run.

Focus: Tailor a process that fits your team’s strengths and needs while ensuring it includes the six core elements above.

Final Thought:
Growth isn’t magic—it’s the outcome of a disciplined, repeatable process. Build your growth machine, and the results will follow.

Growth Principle One: Be The Best At Getting Better

At its core, this principle emphasizes the power of continuous improvement. While flashy growth hacks might make headlines, sustained success comes from committing to getting better every single day.

The Long Game of Growth
Growth isn't about chasing the next big hack or shortcut. It's about building a system that learns and improves over time. Winning in growth means out-learning and out-executing your competitors.

Focus on What You Can Control
Bill Walsh, legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers, famously said:
“Focus on executing the process, and the outcomes will take care of themselves.”

In growth, you can't control external factors like:
— Market changes
— Competitor moves
— Evolving customer needs

But you can control:
— Your team’s effectiveness
— Your learning speed
— Your ability to adapt and improve
By mastering what’s in your control, you build a growth engine that thrives in any environment.

Reframing Failure
Growth is experimental by nature, which means failure is common. However, failure is only damaging if no lessons are learned. Every experiment should be a learning opportunity.

Instead of labeling experiments as “success” or “failure,” ask:
— What did we learn?
— How can we apply these learnings to future experiments?

How We Implement “Getting Better”

1. Process-Driven Learning

Every step in our growth process is designed to drive improvement.
Experiment Analysis:
— What Happened? Review the numbers and outcomes.
— Why Did It Happen? Dig into the root cause, whether the results were good or bad.

Sharing Learnings:
— All experiment results are documented and accessible to the entire company.
— New team members gain instant access to a wealth of insights.

Applying Learnings:
— Update the experiment backlog with new ideas based on learnings.
— Prioritize experiments based on past results to improve the impact of future efforts.

2. Continuous Team Improvement

Stepping Back: Every four months, we review our processes and discuss how to improve as a team.
— What’s working?
— What’s not?
— How can we communicate and collaborate better?

Hiring for Growth:
— We look for self-learners who thrive in an experimental environment.
— Hiring isn’t about finding perfect candidates but those with raw potential to excel in growth.

3. Individual Development

Personal OKRs:
— Team members set quarterly goals focused on skill development.

HubSpot’s $5K Learning Budget:
— Every employee gets $5,000 annually to invest in personal and professional growth.

Self-Learning Culture:
— We prioritize individuals who are naturally curious and proactive about their development.

Growth Team Classes:
— Regular sessions cover growth strategies, leadership, and technical skills.

Final Thought: Commit to Improvement

The best growth teams are those that commit to constant evolution. They improve their processes, team dynamics, and individual skills daily.

In growth, your greatest competitive advantage isn’t a single tactic—it’s being the best at getting better.

How to Drive Insights for Growth

Is growth an art or science? It’s a debate often centered on creativity versus analytics. On one side, we have creative storytelling, innovative ad strategies, and groundbreaking tactics. On the other, we see data-driven optimization and user behavior insights at scale.

But the real question isn’t which one is better—it’s how to master both. The most effective growth teams blend art and science to unlock sustainable growth.

Balancing the Three Sources of Insight

1. Quantitative Data
Numbers tell a story: they reveal friction points, validate opportunities, and offer a bird’s-eye view of user behavior. But raw data alone isn’t enough—it must guide decisions, not dictate them.

Key Uses of Quantitative Data:

— Baseline: Understand your starting point.
— Ceiling: Identify the potential improvement range.
— Sensitivity: Measure how changes impact key metrics over time.

2. Qualitative Data
Sometimes, metrics need context. Qualitative insights help answer why metrics look the way they do. User feedback, surveys, and direct interactions fill in the gaps that numbers leave behind.

3. Intuition and Experience
Data helps define problems, but it won’t always hand you the solution. Intuition—shaped by experience—turns hypotheses into actionable experiments.

Avoid Common Data Mistakes

1. Underinvesting in Instrumentation
Tracking and analytics are non-negotiable. Early teams should spend up to 50% of their time on instrumentation. Without it, decisions are based on gut feelings, not facts.

2. Ignoring Qualitative Data
Metrics tell you what happened; qualitative data tells you why. Tools like Intercom or Typeform can help you gather user feedback at scale.

3. Data Without Action
Collecting data isn’t the goal—extracting insights is. Growth teams must analyze, interpret, and act on their findings to drive real impact.

4. Lack of Accessibility
If data is hard to access, it won’t get used. Early-stage teams can rely on tools like Mixpanel, while larger organizations may need custom dashboards.

How We Apply This Principle

— Growth Models: Quantitative models help forecast the impact of changes over time, guiding strategic focus.
— OKRs: A blend of qualitative objectives (“Increase user retention”) and quantitative key results (“Boost Week 4 retention by 15%”).
— Experimentation: Every experiment starts with a hypothesis, complete with impact predictions and underlying assumptions.
— Post-Experiment Analysis: Success or failure, every test offers learning opportunities. We dig into both quantitative results and behavioral insights to refine our next steps.

The Takeaway

Growth isn’t about choosing between creativity and data—it’s about harmonizing them. Successful teams commit to a rigorous process of analysis, feedback, and iterative improvement. In doing so, they turn insights into action and action into results.

How We Apply Focus to Drive Growth Faster

Warren Buffet famously advises, "If it isn’t the most important thing, avoid it at all costs." Similarly, Peter Thiel once refused to engage in conversations unless they were about an individual’s top priority. The lesson? Focus is a superpower, especially in growth.

Growth thrives on the principle that Focus Wins. Let’s explore why and how this philosophy powers growth teams to excel.

The Equation Behind Focus

Cal Newport sums it up simply:
Focus on the highest-priority goal that yields the most value per unit of time.
Time and attention are finite resources.
Spending time on lower-priority goals reduces the total net value you can achieve.

The Five Reasons Focus Wins
1. Speed: Focusing on a single priority reduces complexity and accelerates decision-making. The less you juggle, the faster you execute.
2. Learning: Speed leads to quicker learnings. Fast iterations mean more insights and better experiments.
3. Progress: Focused learning drives successful experiments, leading to measurable growth.
4. Confidence: Achievements in a singular area boost team confidence and morale.
5. Competitive Advantage: Deep focus allows you to master a few areas rather than being average across many, creating a lasting edge.

How We Apply Focus to Growth

1. Targeting High-Impact Areas
Growth offers infinite possibilities, but time is limited. That’s why identifying and prioritizing the most impactful areas is critical.

Our method:
— Build a growth model: Analyze data to determine the baseline, ceiling for improvement, and sensitivity (how changes impact key metrics).
— Use these insights to decide whether to focus on acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, or referral—and within those, which specific aspect to prioritize.

2. Setting Guardrails with OKRs
Once the focus area is chosen, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) keep the team on track:
— Objective: A qualitative focus (e.g., improve retention).
— Key Results: Quantifiable goals tied to the objective.
— Time Frame: A set period for focus, providing a clear window to reassess and stay disciplined.
The time frame is essential. It allows the team to block out distractions and commit fully to the task at hand.

3. Concentrating on Core Acquisition Channels
It’s tempting to chase every new channel or tactic that promises quick wins. But focus means doubling down on the few channels with true scaling potential.
— One-off experiments are deprioritized unless they offer significant, scalable gains.

4. Doubling Down on What Works
When an experiment succeeds, we don’t immediately move on. Instead, we ask, "How can we do more of this?"
Maximizing returns from proven tactics before exploring new ones ensures we extract every bit of value from what’s working.

Final Thought

Focus isn’t just about saying “yes” to the right things—it’s about saying “no” to everything else. By concentrating on the areas with the highest potential impact, teams move faster, learn more, and ultimately drive sustainable growth.

7 Principles to Mastering Growth

The growth industry has an addiction: hacktics. Every day, forums and communities flood with threads seeking tips, tricks, and quick fixes to growth challenges. While tempting, these “solutions” rarely offer lasting value. True mastery of growth lies not in chasing the latest hack but in building the frameworks and skills that enable consistent problem-solving.

Here’s how to go beyond the noise and become a growth master:

1. Generalist or Specialist?: Both, But With Purpose
Many wonder whether to be a jack-of-all-trades or focus deeply on one area. The answer lies in mastering the fundamentals first:
— Data Analysis: Understand and interpret metrics to unlock growth opportunities.
— Quantitative Modeling: Project future growth by simulating different scenarios.
— User Psychology: Grasp what motivates users and leverage that to influence behavior.
— Storytelling: Present data and insights in compelling ways to drive action.
Once grounded, go deep in one area. Mastery of one discipline makes it easier to apply that depth to others.

2. Prioritize High-Impact, Unpopular Projects: The best learning opportunities often come from tackling messy, high-visibility projects no one else wants. These challenges:
— Accelerate learning through problem-solving.
— Position you as an expert in critical areas.
— Highlight you as a leader willing to take on tough tasks, gaining recognition and trust.

3. Balance the Known and the Unknown: Maximize growth by working on projects that challenge you while leveraging your existing skills.
For example:
— Use familiar data analysis techniques to explore a new acquisition channel.
— Experiment with tactics in areas where you already understand user behavior.
This balance prevents stagnation while fostering continuous growth.

4. Focus on Accomplishments Over Credentials: Degrees and certifications may open doors, but accomplishments keep them open. Employers care about demonstrated results:
— Instead of listing courses or certificates, showcase work—campaigns, projects, or experiments—that produced measurable outcomes.
— Use platforms like GitHub, Dribbble, or Medium to make your impact visible.

5. Build Your Personal Platform: Creating a personal platform amplifies your achievements and attracts opportunities:
— Blogging, speaking, or podcasting showcases your expertise.
— Share success stories and lessons learned to build a reputation within the growth community.
— Platforms position you as a thought leader, making it easier for opportunities to come to you.

6. Find a Coach: A coach helps you navigate challenges with:
— Unbiased perspectives: They’re not tied to the outcome, providing clarity.
— Provocative questions: They push you to think deeper and consider new angles.
The right coach accelerates your growth trajectory, helping you refine strategies and avoid pitfalls.

7. Be Proactive, Not Reactive: Opportunities will flow as you grow. To avoid being swayed by every shiny object:
— Establish clear goals and criteria for evaluating opportunities.
— Treat career decisions as experiments:
1. Hypothesize what aligns with your goals.
2. Test by taking on relevant projects.
3. Reflect on outcomes to refine your focus.

Final Thought

Mastering growth isn’t about shortcuts—it’s about embracing long-term principles. Invest in the skills, frameworks, and habits that enable you to solve problems repeatedly, and you’ll find yourself ahead of the curve.

5 Recommendations for Setting Yearly Growth Goals

As the year wraps up, many teams are setting their sights on next year’s growth goals. But in fast-changing environments, planning can feel like guessing with a blindfold on.

Here are five essential recommendations to sharpen the process and set goals that drive results:

1. Let Your Growth Model Drive Goals: Growth goals must be rooted in data, not gut instincts. A forward-projecting growth model is your compass. Use it for:
— Top-Down Analysis: Start with your main metric, say Weekly Active Users (WAUs). If your current WAU is 100K, ask: What would meaningful progress look like? Maybe it’s 1M WAUs. Use the model to identify what needs to improve—3x virality? 20% better retention? Then assess if those improvements are feasible.
— Bottom-Up Analysis: Flip the script: evaluate each input (e.g., acquisition, retention) independently. Ask, How much could we realistically improve this input? Then see what your model predicts for the main metric.

Comparing both approaches ensures your goals are ambitious but achievable.

2. Prioritize Inputs by Timing: Not all inputs impact growth equally over time. Some, like virality or retention, compound, delivering bigger gains the earlier you tackle them. For example, improving virality in Q1 maximizes its year-long impact. Map out your input improvements on a timeline, prioritizing early wins that snowball.

3. Focus on Strategies, Not Tactics: Annual planning isn’t about detailing every tactic. Tactics will evolve as the year unfolds. Instead, focus on high-level strategies:
— If you aim to 4x new users via paid acquisition, outline strategies like:
— Expanding Facebook Ads to new audiences.
Exploring two new paid channels.
— Increasing conversion rates.
This approach gives your team flexibility to adapt while keeping the overarching goal clear.

4. Assess Your Acquisition Portfolio: Channels decay over time—what works today might falter tomorrow. Use this planning period to audit your acquisition channels:
— Identify which channels may start decaying.
Allocate resources to test new channels early.
New channels take time to unlock, so don’t wait for decay to hit before diversifying.

5. Gut-Check Goals with Your Team: Your goals won’t succeed in isolation. Secure buy-in “Above, Below, and Across”:
— Below: Engage your team. They’re closest to the action and can validate if goals are realistic.
Above: Align leadership by explaining your goals and how they support company objectives.
— Across: Collaborate with other teams. Highlight mutual benefits and outline where you’ll need their support.
Growth is a team sport. Ensuring alignment across the organization boosts your chances of success.

Final Thought

Growth planning isn’t about setting targets in stone. It’s about creating a roadmap flexible enough to adapt while anchored in clear strategies and solid data. Use these recommendations to turn your yearly goals into actionable, sustainable growth.

How to Embrace Constant Change in Growth

Growth is never “done.” This simple truth is one of the most important principles for any growth team. Yet, many organizations resist it, striving for stability and finality. But in growth, change is constant—and not adapting is fatal.

High-performance growth teams thrive by embracing this reality, building processes and culture that evolve alongside product, audience, channels, and tactics. Let’s explore why constant change is critical and how to bake it into your growth strategy.

Why Change Is the Only Constant

1 Product Evolution: Products are always evolving to deliver more value. As features change, so do user behaviors. Consider Facebook: its early focus was on profiles and walls. Today, it’s all about the News Feed, reactions, and live videos. Each product shift changes how users engage, forcing growth strategies to pivot accordingly.

2 Audience Shifts: Your audience isn’t static. It evolves from early adopters to the mainstream, each segment with unique behaviors.
— Example: Twitter initially focused on getting users to post their first tweet. As its audience grew, onboarding shifted toward following others and consuming content.
Demographics, geographies, and industries also influence audience dynamics, requiring tailored growth tactics at every stage.

3 Channel Changes: Acquisition channels constantly shift, with platforms like Google and Facebook rewriting the rules. New channels rise, old ones close, and micro-changes in algorithms force continuous adaptation.
— Case in point: Zynga’s growth tanked overnight when Facebook altered its platform rules. Staying ahead means anticipating and experimenting with these shifts.

4 Tactic Fatigue: Even the best growth tactics lose effectiveness over time as users grow desensitized.
— Email capture tactics: From lightbox popovers to exit-intent full-page takeovers, each tactic has a lifecycle. What works today will need replacing tomorrow.

How to Build a Culture of Constant Change

To thrive in this dynamic environment, follow these five steps:

1 Foster a Culture of Experimentation
Embrace change by making experimentation a core value. Encourage teams to view every shift as an opportunity to learn and grow.

2 Validate and Retire Playbooks
Every growth playbook has a shelf life. Regularly review effectiveness and don’t hesitate to discard outdated strategies, no matter how well they worked in the past.

3 Balance Your Portfolio
Treat growth tactics like a financial portfolio:

— Low-risk, low-reward optimizations on proven channels.
— High-risk, high-reward bets on emerging channels.

4 Hire for Grit and Resilience
Growth requires persistence. Look for team members who thrive on solving tough problems, adapt to failure, and constantly push for improvement—even after a win.

5 Always Adapt
Build systems to continuously reassess your product, audience, and channels. Every major shift should trigger a strategic review to keep growth aligned with reality.

If You’re Scaling Growth Today...

Use this checklist to assess how well your team embraces constant change:

— Product: How have your growth strategies evolved alongside product updates?
— Audience: Are you adapting tactics as your user base shifts?
— Channels: Are you experimenting with new channels and adjusting to rule changes in existing ones?
— Tactic Fatigue: How often do you refresh your tactics to avoid diminishing returns?

Growth isn’t a straight line—it’s a constant loop of learning, iterating, and evolving. The sooner your team embraces that, the sooner you’ll unlock sustainable, compounding growth.

How to Launch a Product or Feature That Fuels Growth

When Superhuman launched as "The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made," they did something unusual: they didn’t open sign-ups to everyone. Instead, they crafted a limited launch, cultivating exclusivity and maximizing interest. It was a risky but brilliant move that drove substantial growth, press, and word-of-mouth, showing just how powerful a targeted launch can be. Here’s how this strategy works and why launching differently can create a lasting growth loop.

Why Traditional Launches Can Hold You Back

Most teams approach a launch with a checklist: release to all users, send out mass emails, line up media, and aim to get on platforms like Product Hunt. But this broad approach can create noise, obscure real feedback, and even harm long-term growth by overwhelming audiences who aren’t yet ready or interested in the product. Here’s why:

1. Dilutes Word of Mouth: Broad launches expose your product to users outside your ideal audience. If the experience doesn’t exceed their expectations, it can lead to neutral or negative feedback, weakening valuable word-of-mouth.

2. Slows Validation: By launching to a general audience, it becomes challenging to interpret metrics accurately since feedback is likely to be inconsistent. A filtered, targeted launch gives clearer validation and quicker insights.

3. Drains Audience Attention: A mass release can exhaust your audience’s interest. Trying to “wake up” all users risks making it harder to recapture their attention later, especially when the product is better suited for a specific subset.

4. Misses the Opportunity for Sustainable Growth: The goal of a launch is not just a spike in activity; it’s building a lasting growth loop. Instead of focusing only on the initial excitement, the right launch strategy should build a sustainable engine that keeps users coming back.

Building a Growth-Oriented Launch Strategy

To create a launch that drives long-term growth, let’s break down the strategy used by Superhuman and others into five essential steps:

1. Scope Your Initial Audience

Define a narrow target audience based on a specific hypothesis about who will benefit most from the product or feature. Instead of thinking about how to reach the most people, focus on those whose needs align closely with what you’ve built. This initial “core” group will set the foundation for future growth.

2. Create Access Points

Once you have an audience in mind, plan access points. Options like waitlists, email outreach, social media, or closed communities can all work. The key is to start small and build from there, ensuring you reach your target audience first.

3. Apply Filters

Introduce filters to qualify users who align with your ideal target profile. This could be surveys, questionnaires, or insights from user behavior. Filtering helps gather users who’ll find value in the product, increasing the chances of a positive experience that leads to valuable feedback.

4. Seek Success Signals

Early on, look for success indicators that validate your hypothesis. These can include:

— Qualitative feedback: NPS scores, user surveys, and feature requests.
— Retention metrics: Consistent usage patterns show product fit.
— Engagement markers: User activity levels indicate depth of engagement.

A step-by-step approach allows you to find what resonates with users, enabling you to optimize further before expanding the reach.

5. Leverage and Expand

Once initial success signals are evident, gradually open the product to the next audience layer. Think of it as concentric circles radiating out from your core users. With each new layer, continue testing and filtering to ensure your product scales without sacrificing quality.

Real-Life Example: Superhuman’s Exclusive Launch

Superhuman’s sign-up process was rigorous—starting with a waitlist, followed by a multi-step survey, an email conversation, and even manual onboarding. It wasn’t about maximizing initial sign-ups but about identifying high-potential users who’d be delighted by the product. This careful select