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, 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. 

That said, 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 take a look at the Growth System

As you can see, there are several components to it. We're going to begin at the highest level with what we call our Foundational Five. This is the foundation the rest of the system is built on.

The Foundational Five are the prerequisites that make growth possible. Without a solid base, growth will always feel like an uphill battle.

On top of that base sit your Growth Catalysts. Catalysts answer not just why a company grows, but why some achieve breakout success.

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. 

From there, we’ll move into the executional and tactical layers. We’ll cover your channels, the engine controls you can adjust to reduce friction and accelerate growth, the fuel that powers your engine, and the enhancements that make it bigger and stronger over time.

And finally, we’ll close with the growth process. The layer that installs a simple but rigorous system for generating learnings that will enable you to continuously enhance your engine and identify additional growth levers.

The System Produces Your Growth Strategy

Many of you joined this program with one primary goal: to build a growth strategy.

And I have good news. That’s exactly what you’re doing here.

Before we dive into the first layer of the Growth System, let’s clarify what we mean by strategy and how our approach works. These days, most of my time is spent thinking about, discussing, and developing growth strategies.

And if there’s one thing I can confidently say, it’s that strategy is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the startup world. On one end, I see teams that put together goals and roadmaps and declare, “Voilà, strategy!” On the other, I see teams who treat it like some mystical exercise, trying to peer into the future and map out every move for the next decade.

In reality, strategy is far more straightforward. 

Good strategy means identifying the right problem, diagnosing its root causes, setting the boundaries you have to work within, and defining the rules of the game that inform how and what you’ll do to solve it.

So what does that look like within the Growth Program? Your strategy needs to answer six core questions:

Each question maps directly to a layer of the Growth System, which means that by building your system, you are building your strategy.

This is why we say this program helps you accomplish in months what takes most startups years.

You’re not stitching together random tactics.

You’re constructing a strategy rooted in the foundations and systems of your business.