Growth

Free consumer products need 60% week-one retention that flattens—anything less signals weak PMF

Measure total people reaching a goal, not conversion rates—rates can be gamed by constraining earlier funnel stages

Grow by understanding and enabling users just outside your current base

Test/control methodology for validating AEO tactics before scaling

Optimize your product to show up in LLM answers, not just search results

Products with shareable artifacts drive organic community growth

The only moat in human data is access to an audience

Create content that resonates deeply with a subset rather than being mediocre for everyone

Choose a target segment that's big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and a good fit with your crown jewels

Get ICs to love your product, then enable them to spread it within their organizations

Use continuous shipping and employee/founder socials to create noise that drives growth

Get mentioned across multiple sources to become the LLM's top recommendation

Measure success by total value from a cohort over years, not retention or per-user metrics

Don't leave after the sale—stay until the customer has actually implemented your product

Guidelines for building and nurturing healthy communities

Choose the right community format based on PMF status and customer type

Focus on the customer's urgent pain, not your product's features—they need therapy, not a demo

Layer multiple growth engines that reinforce each other for exponential results

Consistency, collaboration, and curator relationships drive creator success

The gap between early adopters and mainstream customers where most technology companies die

Grow by understanding, mapping, and measuring the value journey of your best customers

Compete category-to-category by redirecting existing demand, not fighting brand-to-brand

The marketplace that aggregates demand wins—supply will always follow customers

Find product-market fit by going narrow and deep before expanding wide

Optimize for intent-driven discovery, not passive awareness

New distribution platforms follow a predictable four-step cycle from competition to closure

Build ROI equations that account for acquiring both sides of a marketplace simultaneously

Inflect retention by improving the first experience, not by re-engaging churned users

Prioritize channels you own (virality, UGC) over rented channels (SEO, paid) that competitors can buy into

A three-ingredient assessment for deciding when and how to invest in new acquisition channels

Customers return to products through only three mechanisms: synthetic notifications, organic notifications, or positioning.

Get distribution before the incumbent can copy you

Oscillate between finding winning insights and expanding them across your product

Be a big fish in a small pond—your segment must be small enough for you to achieve market leadership

Pre-PMF, identify and crack the hardest side of your marketplace while hacking the other

Traditional funnels put businesses at the center—put customers at the center instead

Growth must be founder-driven until you have PMF and sufficient data to experiment on

Different stages of market adoption require fundamentally different go-to-market strategies—using the wrong one will slow you down

Show free users a taste of premium features interspersed with free ones to demonstrate full product value

Marketing needs both fuel (content) and an engine (distribution)—diagnose which you lack

Design attribution data collection from day one to enable any measurement model later

Structure engagement through core loop, metagame, and profile—the three essential layers of habit formation

Run marketplaces with a light touch like a gardener, not like a construction worker building SaaS

As models improve, the value shifts from generalist labor to domain experts who can break the models

Provide meaningful free value before asking customers for anything in return

A framework for hiring, evaluating, and developing growth talent across four core competency areas

Small wins compound—1% improvements each week add up to massive growth

Map qualitative and quantitative growth loops to guide strategic focus and investment decisions

Build a spreadsheet model of how your business grows to understand which levers matter most

Layer new growth models every 18 months to sustain growth as existing loops spin out

Different strategies for competitive head terms versus expansive long-tail questions

Users who stake their social capital to spread your product within their organizations

Choose which customer job to focus on based on urgency, willingness to pay, go-to-market fit, and unfair advantages

Separate non-scalable hacks from scalable growth loops—kindle only exists to unlock fire

Match your marketing channel to your objective—lasers for precision, chandeliers for broad awareness

Design for users who are time-poor, habit-attached, and self-interested

Monitor experiments at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months to see true impact—30-40% of 'wins' show no long-term lift

Find the user on the cusp of converting and design for their specific barriers

The leading indicator that predicts liquidity and enables teams to act

Newer marketplaces charge higher commissions by doing more work in the value chain

Expand marketplaces based on model adjacency and network effect accentuation, not TAM

Marketplaces need fragmented supply and demand—concentrated markets don't need platforms

The measure of how efficiently your marketplace connects buyers and sellers

Three signs that a marketplace model is right for your idea

Win a lighthouse customer that puts you on the map before attempting to cross the chasm

Recommended tool combinations for B2C and B2B companies at different stages

Use standalone mini-tools to drive top-of-funnel awareness and lead generation

Measure success at each customer value moment, not just at conversions

Apply product-led growth selectively based on where conditions favor self-service

Lower financial barriers to causally change users' ability to succeed, unlocking potential winners who would otherwise give up

Make it hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right thing—without eliminating choice

40-50% of new customers should come from organic channels; if 90% come from paid, the music will stop

Understand your market, product, model, and channel constraints before optimizing

Evaluate emerging platforms using retention, user quality, value exchange, and scale

Bundling slows product-led growth land motion—land with one product, expand with bundles

Product-led growth means your product's job is to grow revenue, with humans as backstop

When users fail, show them their brilliance instead of their mistakes

When you can't get sample size in a month, ship and compare before/after instead of A/B testing

Give away your product liberally to evangelists who will do your marketing for you

Track revenue where meaningful product activity preceded any sales contact

SEO is a product problem, not a marketing problem—build for the search user's journey

Choose programmatic SEO for scale and user utility; editorial SEO for depth and thought leadership

Model builders care about three things in order: quality first, volume at scale, then speed

Great products must be better along dimensions that matter so much that people can't help but talk about them

Markets pull every software company upmarket over time—the case for staying focused on SMB

Find organic viral moments by tracking where users screenshot, then amplify those moments

Validate whether SEO makes sense for your business before investing—most SaaS shouldn't do SEO

Measure relationship depth by tracking what percentage of customer spend you capture versus alternatives

Jumpstart one side of your marketplace by tapping existing channels while building the other

The 8-10% of buyers who drive most profits and set the category's zeitgeist

Don't let user preferences fragment your marketplace—use ranking instead of filtering

Start with supply; you can't have a business without inventory on the shelves

Use your best supply to onboard, train, and recruit new supply

Forecast SEO opportunity top-down from market size, not bottom-up from keyword tools

Define activation around teams forming habits, not individual user actions

Five customer segments adopt new technologies at predictably different rates—each requires different go-to-market approaches

A comprehensive anti-pattern list of growth tactics that consistently fail despite their popularity

Sustainable growth comes from one of three engines: viral, sticky, or paid—each with its own feedback loop.

AI is eating top-of-funnel search—the SEO opportunity is now in the mid-funnel where intent exists

Find value locked in the world that your technology can unlock—the market will reward you with a portion of the gain

Most unbundling attempts fail because better UX can't overcome scale economics

Look for user demand by tracking what goes viral—if people share it, there's something valuable at the core

For AI products, optimize for wow moments that create immediate magic, not just understanding

Eliminate customer acquisition costs by leveraging existing audience trust and brand affinity