So far, you’ve defined your Foundational Five and identified Growth Catalysts that could give you a strategic edge.

Now in Part 3, we begin building your Growth Engine — an interconnected system of flywheels and supporting tactics that scalably and repeatedly generate more customers.

But before you can build an engine, you need to know:

• Where you’re trying to go
• The constraints you must operate within (at least right now) to get there

Remember, the Growth Engine exists within the overall Growth System from Part 1. As we saw then, by designing our growth system, we are also defining the inputs required to produce a strong growth strategy:

While many think strategy is rooted in clever tricks and tactics, the reality is that good strategy starts with having a deep understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. Good strategy starts with shrinking the problem.

In short, we need Guardrails, the focus of this lesson.

You’ll define three sets of guardrails that shape how your growth engine can be built:

• Your goals — where you want to go, how you want to get there, and what you need to learn to make it a reality.
• Your key constraints — the practical filters of budget, time, team, market, and brand.
• Your growth economics — the guardrails that set the bounds of what’s financially viable.

Defining Your Growth Goals

“You can’t design a system if you don’t know what it’s meant to accomplish.”

Before we build your growth engine, we need to align on where we want it to take us. i.e. our goals.

Most startups, when setting goals, stop after slapping down a financial target. Revenue, profit, or user growth targets. That’s important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle.

The guardrail framework you’ll learn has three types of goals, each of which shapes how you design and run your engine:

1. Learning goals — the risky assumptions and untested hypotheses that must be validated to reduce risk and move forward confidently.
2. Financial goals — the financial performance milestones that prove you’re on track, as well as the long-term financial goal.
3. Personal goals — the goal we push all founders to define early on that informs how you want to go about reaching your long-term goal.

Together, these three goals form a complete picture. They give you direction, highlight what must be learned along the way, and define the values you’re not willing to compromise on.

Defining Your Learning Goals

Your growth engine is first and foremost a diagnostic tool. Its job is to test your riskiest assumptions and validate whether your foundation can actually generate and sustain growth.

For startups, the learning goals are generally rooted in answering two fundamental questions:

1. Have we built a product that our market actually wants?
2. How can we consistently and predictably attract more users?

Now, we’d also prefer that a third question be added to that fundamental list: Do we have a viable business model?

Nearly all startups focus on #1. Some focus on #1 and #2. But #3 is quite commonly something that’s put in the “we’ll figure that out later” bucket. If the goal is to build the next Uber, and outsized capital access is one of your Growth Catalysts, maybe you can get away with that. But for everyone else, let’s get that on the list.

But those questions are just starting points. What you need to learn now depends on the unique context your startup operates in today.

Your learning goals are stage-dependent. For example, if you’re already seeing positive signs towards PMF, other common learning objectives include:

• Scale: “We can profitably acquire X users per month. We need to validate if we can scale by 3X without breaking model-channel alignment.”
• Efficiency: “We’re acquiring the right users, but our business isn’t sustainable at the current CAC. We need to validate if we can reduce our CAC below Y.”
• Model fit: “We haven’t started monetizing users yet. Before we think about scale, we need to validate our monetization strategy and unit economics.”
• Brand fit: “Once users get into our product, they love it. But we’ve learned many people do not understand our product value based on our current messaging. We need to identify the optimal messaging so users instantly “get it” before actually using the product.”

So, when we talk about learning goals, we’re not just talking about PMF. We’re defining the core assumptions your engine must validate across your Foundational Five, but more broadly, across your Growth System as a whole.

✍️ Your Input: What Are You Trying to Validate?

In a sentence or two, describe the key assumption or hypothesis you want to validate in this stage of your growth.

Open up your Master Strategy Project. Add your input to the “Primary Learning Goal” within the Growth Guardrails section.

Defining Financial and Performance Goals

In parallel, every startup also has financial or performance milestones to hit. Both in the short and long term.

Here are a few common scenarios that would fall into the short-term goal bucket:

• Bootstrapped companies usually need to reach cash flow sustainability ASAP.
• Pre-seed and seed-stage companies often need to build a traction story that can support additional fundraising.
• VC-backed companies typically have aggressive growth targets tied to revenue or user base growth.

More broadly, short/mid-term goals can generally be categorized by:

1. Efficiency goals, such as achieving profitability.
2. Growth rate goals, such as demonstrating consistent 20% month-over-month user growth.
3. Scale goals, such as increasing revenue from $1M ARR to $5M ARR.

Your short-term goals inform our decisions today, which is hugely valuable.

That said, we also like our startups to define a long-term performance goal that ultimately informs where we’re trying to take this thing. Precision doesn’t matter here. What matters is knowing we’re trying to build a profitable, $5M ARR business, rather than the next unicorn.

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✍️ Your Input: What’s Your Primary Financial Goal?

Describe the specific short-term goal you’re trying to hit — either in terms of revenue, profit, customers, or another key metric. And also document your long-term goal.

Add your inputs to the “Primary Learning Goal” sections within the Growth Guardrails section.

Defining your Personal Goals

It’s now time to define the third component of our goals framework: Personal Goals.

Your personal goals define how we will go about achieving our performance goals.

The tradeoffs and sacrifices we are, and are NOT, willing to make in order to achieve those goals.

This is one that you may not expect to see in a growth program. Possibly because it’s simply not talked about enough in any context. However, as startup founders ourselves, we believe it’s too important to overlook.

But I’d argue that it’s a particularly relevant concept for a growth program. So many founders, and by extension, startup teams, come to us with a “growth at all costs” mindset. When we ask why, we’re generally met with blank stares.

I’ve talked to more founders than I can remember who thought raising venture capital was literally the only option for creating a startup. I’ve watched beautiful, profitable businesses implode after raising money because they thought that’s what they were “supposed to do.”

And I’ve seen founders of bootstrapped and VC-backed startups alike struggle with burnout, mental and physical health issues, etc. because their performance goals weren’t in alignment with their core values.

They didn’t define their rules of the game. They were playing by the rules of someone else’s game.

So, consider this a call-to-action to define yours. And then ensure it’s in alignment with the long-term performance goal you just set.

If you set a long-term goal, such as “I want to build a $100M ARR business,” ask yourself what you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve it. Because significant sacrifices will be required. Does the potential upside outweigh the tradeoffs of constant fundraising, managing large teams, and dealing with investor pressure?

If so, that’s the alignment we’re looking for. If not, that’s equally valuable information. It means you can reset expectations now. Before you’ve built a system that isn’t actually aligned with where you want to go.

Your Personal Goals may point you toward a slower, more deliberate path. Or they may affirm that you’re ready to pursue the high-growth, high-pressure route. What matters is that you’re intentional.

This isn’t about right or wrong answers. It’s about alignment. Alignment between your goals and the engine you’re about to construct.

✍️ Your Input: What are your Personal Goals?

Define your goals clearly. Write them down. Share them with your team. And most importantly, follow them. Let them filter which opportunities you pursue, which tactics you avoid, and which tradeoffs you’re willing to accept.

Add your inputs to the “Personal Goals” section within the Growth Guardrails section.

Up next, we’ll define the constraints that shape what’s actually viable.