Effort: How much time, effort, money, and engineering would be required? Blend those costs into one number from 1 to 5.

But discovery isn’t about getting marginally better; it’s about becoming categorically different.

Writing a hypothesis only takes a few minutes, and it’s a great way to clarify your thinking. Here’s the format: The Risky Assumption: We believe that ______. The Experiment: To test this, we will ______. The Prediction: We predict that ______ (metric) will move by ______ units in ______ direction. The Business Effect: If we are right, we will

Deliberation, execution, hiring, and delegation are all critical; no business succeeds without a healthy blend of those. However, in early-stage startups, these strategies consistently fail for one important reason: missing information.

Once you have a lot of ideas about growth—more than you could ever execute—you’ll need to prioritize the most promising ones, test them quickly, and disseminate what you learned from each experiment. I call this process a growth sprint.

Once you’ve agreed on your North Star Metric, key drivers and rate-limiting step, share the model with your leadership team. Ask each leader to use it to set their goals and prioritize their team’s work.

Map your growth model, identify your North Star Find your rate-limiting step Discover your prospects’ “locksmith moment” Explain your value more clearly to customers

Key drivers represent the results of the work people do to move the North Star, but not the work itself. For example, you could break a measure of weekly active users (WAUs) into three drivers: signups, activations, and retention. To improve activation, you might do live customer onboarding calls, simplify your product flow, and email tutorials.

Search: At some point, your customers will take action to reach their goals. They may start looking for information, or they may already have an idea that they’ll go ahead and try. You need to understand why they spring into action when they do. If they’re looking for information, you want to know where they look and make sure you’re the one