Meet your growth system

Alright, welcome to the first part of your company path. In case you missed the intro, I'm Justin Setzer, CEO and co-founder of Demand Curve. I’ll be guiding you through the first core parts of the Growth Program to help you build your growth engine. I'll be guiding you through the key strategic concepts to help you level up as a growth thinker and operator. And that all begins with our growth system:

This is a system that we have honed after a decade-plus of working with thousands of startups... everything from pre-launch bootstrapped products, to some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. One of the things that we credit our success, and the success of the companies we work with, is the fact that we take a very systematic approach to growth. That’s the system that you're about to learn.

With our growth system, you will be able to go from feeling like growth is this nebulous, uncontrollable, anxiety-inducing component of your startup... to understanding every knob and dial that you can push and turn to engineer your growth on command. Let's get into it.

So, why a system?

At the highest level, this system will help you not just make decisions, but also build what typically takes startups years to do, in a matter of months. You will also produce the kind of growth that many operators and founders chase after for years, and sometimes never achieve. You'll be able to put yourself in the best possible position to produce those levels of results... in a matter of months.

It's going to take you away from pursuing random acts of marketing and sales, and feeling like you have no understanding of how your business is actually growing (or how it's meant to grow). You'll be able to install a system that shows precisely where growth comes from, what's preventing it, and how to move the right levers and remove key constraints to unlock growth rapidly. Most importantly, you're going to walk away with an understanding of a quantitative and qualitative model and map for exactly how your business grows.

So let's get into the system.

As you can see, there are several components to the DC system. We're going to begin at the highest level with what we call our Foundational Five. This is the foundation for growth. From there, we will talk about growth catalysts.

We can think of the Foundational Five as being the prerequisites for growth to be possible. If we can nail our Foundational Five, we now have the foundation for growth to be feasible. Without them, growth will feel like an uphill battle. Our growth catalysts provide the answer to the question of not just why some companies grow... but why some companies have breakout successes.

The next layer of our system is our Growth Engine.

And this is ultimately what you're in the Growth Program to build. With a growth engine, we achieve predictable, scalable, and controllable growth. In other words, we have growth that isn't driven by hustle and time. Growth that will continue to compound without your involvement. And within the growth engine, we're going to be examining the components that make up our engine. We'll be exploring the concept of growth motions, as well as flywheels, which are the driving force of our engine. And then, we will move into the more executional and tactical layers. We will explore channels. We will explore our engine controls... the levers that we can pull to reduce friction, to increase the acceleration at which our engine runs, the fuel that powers your engine, and ways to enhance and essentially build a bigger and more powerful engine. And finally, we'll talk about systems to have a simple but quantitative understanding of how your engine works, and ultimately, how your company grows.