This is Lenny Rachitsky's year-end roundup of his newsletter and podcast, organized as a curated guide to his best content by the problem a reader wants solved. Rather than a single argument, it is a directory: it…
Step six of Lenny Rachitsky's consumer-business series explains how products grow through a small set of engines: virality, SEO, and paid growth, plus sales and supply-driven demand for marketplaces. It argues founders…
The post answers how to increase a product's virality, first arguing that virality should only be a primary growth engine when the product naturally suits it, versus performance marketing, content, or sales. It defines…
Lenny Rachitsky catalogs over thirty examples of 'magical growth loops,' where new users come mainly from existing users rather than paid acquisition. He groups them into four types: supply driving demand, demand…
This guest-written issue, drawn from Ali Abouelatta's First 1000 research, catalogs 60 examples of 'Turbo Boosts,' one-off events that temporarily accelerate growth. It frames them as the fuel-like components of a…
Kyle Poyar argues that product-led growth (PLG) only works economically if customer acquisition cost stays near zero, roughly under $1 per unique website visitor. Using OpenView benchmark funnel math, he shows that a…
““Supply growth was all sales - door to door, walking into restaurants during their downtime, talking to owners. It was very sales driven. What we did was take every excuse they had for not using GrubHub, and removed it as an obstacle. Fast forward to a couple of years later — you only pay when you receive orders, there are no hidden fees, you can cancel any time. We got to a place where there was zero downside to sign up and to give it…”
This post examines how fast-growing B2B startups converted their first users into paying customers, grouping them into three early sales motions: bottom-up self-service, bottom-up with inside sales, and outbound…
A guest-written post in which an SEO leader lays out a strategy for an early-stage company to compete with entrenched incumbents: build many valuable, templated pages targeting long-tail keywords, using proprietary…
A practical brainstorming list of growth tactics organized by funnel stage and team area: top-of-funnel acquisition (short and long term), monetization, conversion and activation, retention, and team velocity. The post…
Part five of a six-part series on building a consumer business, focused on retention and finding product-market fit. The post argues PMF is a spectrum of confidence, signaled by flattening retention curves, organic…
Lenny Rachitsky examines how labor marketplaces find and grow their supply side, drawing on interviews with founders and early team members of roughly a dozen fast-growing companies. Because these platforms connect…
Teresa Torres argues that once a product's success funnel converts well, the next step is growth, but only after that funnel is healthy; otherwise acquiring users just wastes time, energy and money. She introduces two…
Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Hockenmaier argue that every business can be reduced to a simple equation, and that you don't fully understand your business until you can write one. Building the equation forces teams to name…
Lenny Rachitsky surveys growth inflection stories from roughly two dozen well-known products to find what tends to precede sudden growth jumps. He sorts them into three groups: product improvements, external events that…
Lenny Rachitsky closes his eight-part marketplace growth series by asking founders and operators what they would do differently. The answers cluster around a few recurring regrets: spreading effort too thin instead of…
Duolingo's VP of Engineering Sean Colombo shares five growth lessons from scaling daily active users from 5 million to nearly 30 million. The core argument is that urgency and fast experiment rollout compound growth…
A guest post by Kyle Poyar compiling 25 low-effort, high-impact quick wins that operators at well-known tech companies used in their first months in a role. The ideas span funnel friction, pricing tweaks, workflow…
This post, step two of a six-part series on launching consumer businesses, argues that early growth depends on picking an almost comically narrow 'super-specific who' as the first target audience. It draws on examples…
A follow-up on activation metrics explaining a three-step method: brainstorm candidate moments from usage data, test them with regression against retention, then run experiments to confirm causality. It adds real reader…
Lenny Rachitsky shares a curated directory of roughly 200 favorite reads, listens, and watches on growth, startups, writing, angel investing, product management, leadership, and frameworks, cleaned up and expanded for…
Lenny Rachitsky, with OpenView and Pendo, benchmarks free-to-paid conversion from a survey of 1,000+ products, defining good and great rates for freemium, sales-assisted, and free-trial models. It argues conversion…
Hila Qu, a growth advisor and former GitLab and Acorns growth leader, walks through how B2B companies can add a product-led growth (PLG) motion alongside sales. Her core argument is that PLG and sales are complementary…
The post argues that as AI makes building and reaching customers easier for everyone, traditional B2B channels like search, outbound, events and lifecycle email are getting noisier and less effective. It makes the case…