Growth Marketing Cheat Sheet

Not 'hacks': a system for compounding learnings across the whole funnel.

Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue: the canonical funnel.

The one number that captures the value your product delivers.

The single best lever for most early-stage products.

Why retention is the leaky-bucket fix that beats more acquisition.

Funnels run out. Loops compound. The shift you need to make.

The math of word-of-mouth growth.

Run tests that tell you the truth, not what you want to hear.

Pick the experiments most likely to move the needle.

The one number that predicts retention better than any other early signal.

Two ways to let people try before they buy, and the math behind which to pick.

Different from growth loops: the retention compounding mechanism that keeps users coming back daily.

When the product itself does the marketing and sales.

Get new users to value as fast as possible.

What separates Dropbox-class referrals from the duds.

From ad-hoc tests to a repeatable engine.

Start users on paid, downgrade to free. The Notion, Loom, Slack monetization shift.

The compounding mechanism Metcalfe identified, and why it creates winner-take-most markets.

The chicken-and-egg problem, and how Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy solved it.

CLG flywheels, champion programs, community-qualified leads, and how to measure community-sourced pipeline.

PQL scoring, hybrid PLG+SLG motion, in-product sales triggers: how Notion, Figma, and Slack convert free users to enterprise.

Managing conversion metrics, activation benchmarks, and paywall psychology for trials vs. freemium tiers.

Why B2B growth loops compound differently from B2C, and how to design self-reinforcing loops using collaboration, integrations, champion expansion, and content.

How LLMs augment experiment design, hypothesis generation, statistical analysis, and prioritisation, and where human judgment remains essential.

Aggressive growth is not the same as deceptive growth. Learn where the FTC draws the line on dark patterns and how to grow fast without building a lawsuit.

The weekly rhythm that turns a prioritized backlog into shipped experiments, and a practical template you can run this week.

How growth teams pick which markets to enter, what actually needs localizing beyond language, and why weak localization has sunk expansions that looked unstoppable on paper.

The dollar-based retention metric investors watch closest, current 2026 benchmarks, and the specific marketing levers that move it.

How growth teams spot an at-risk account weeks before it churns, and turn that signal into a save campaign.

Sharing real MRR, mistakes, and roadmap decisions in public: what to share, what to keep private, and a cadence that avoids burnout and copycats.