Growth Levers and How to Find Them

But startups aren’t ready to optimize. They still need to figure out the basics, quickly.

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.

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 ____

Try this thought experiment: Imagine you’re right. Imagine the grand promises you made to your investors are true, and the opportunity is bigger than anyone realizes. A huge mass of people are desperate for your product, if only they knew it existed. Your business is inevitable.

Struggle: Triggers: What situations make them aware of this struggle? What triggers them to start looking? Where are they, literally? Who are they with? What are they trying to do? What’s suddenly changed or happened? Pain: What makes the situation bad? What’s wrong with the current situation before they find your product? What exactly do they hope

Here’s the high-level arc of the interview: Opening spiel:

every project, whether you get a clear winner or not, needs to bring learning. Do the upfront thinking it takes to ensure you learn from your experiments—always start with a clear hypothesis and prediction.

imagine you run a consumer finance app, and your North Star is “weekly active users” (WAUs). You hire an experienced compliance person who wants to make sure every new customer passes some required identity verification checks, so 100% compliance will be their goal. But instead, you can ask: “How do we maximize the growth of WAUs while doing our be

Problem-Aware: At some point, something happens to make people become aware of their problem or need. For example, someone might have trouble fitting into their clothes from last season and realize they’d gained weight. We call that acute moment of awareness the first thought. That’s when they start passively looking. They notice weight-loss-relate

Struggle: Every action we take, product we buy, and decision we make is fueled by some kind of struggle—either a problem to solve or a goal to achieve. Often,