Growth

How do you decide where your growth team should focus?

Your business has a rate-limiting step somewhere. That’s the area where, if you improve it, the whole system runs faster. It may be a customer journey drop-off like conversion or retention, or it may be an employee problem like staffing levels, performance, or even mindset. Of course it might... See more

Distribution Is the Hard Part

Most founders think the hard part is building the product. It’s not.

The hard part is getting anyone to care.

You can build something great. It can solve a real problem. It can even be timed perfectly. But if no one notices, it dies.

This is where most founders get stuck. They think the job is to build. They think if they... See more

So human desire of course doesn’t change that much over years or generations or millennia depending on how much you abstract, and people want the things they’ve always wanted. They want love and money and status and a sense of belonging, and they want to influence, and they want to get answers. They want to create, and they want solutions to their... See more

“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric... No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”

For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi... See more

Granola’s insight: people like taking notes; they’re just not very good at it.

The key here is that acquisition only truly makes sense after you’ve solved activation and monetization. Otherwise, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. But once those foundations are in place, acquisition becomes a high ROI lever. You’re feeding more users into a system that you already know can activate and convert.