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Overview

To come up with a growth strategy — to know what to work on first — you need to answer four questions. We literally ask these questions when we first meet a company:

  1. Who uses you?
  2. Why do they use you? ****(And what were their bad alternatives?)
  3. How did they hear about you? (And products like you?)
  4. What are your possible growth loops?

Then, based on the answers, we brainstorm ideas for how to get more users.

We’ll explain what these mean in more detail, but we want to give some examples so you have an intuitive sense of what we’re talking about.

Example strategies

These are based on real companies we’ve worked with.

Again, we may use some words you don’t know, but that’s OK. We just want to build your growth instincts.

Security camera company

This product was similar to Ring Doorbell. They captured video of your front porch to catch package thieves and other goings-on.

When they talked with their users (homeowners), they learned a bunch of people had seen crime footage from their cameras on the local news. After some false starts, they stumbled onto a growth loop: they made a system to filter their footage for eye-popping crimes, then emailed the crime video to journalists in cities close to where the crime happened, saying “Here’s a crime that happened near you. Just give us credit if you use the video.”

Then, the video would show up on local news stations. Residents would see the footage, hear about the company, and buy a security camera for themselves. They’d have their own crime footage, which would get on neighboring local stations…rinse, wash, repeat.

Strategy summary

  1. Who uses us?
  2. Why do they use us? ****What were their bad alternatives?