What Is Growth?

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. ... The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. ... You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face."

–Paul Graham, investor, founder of Y Combinator

Growth is a widely used word, but it's often misunderstood.

Growth is an output.

It’s the Master Output that we measure using two important benchmarks: revenue and customers.

Therefore, everything we'll cover in this program will be directly tied to these two outputs.

Note: Profit is truly what matters in business. But, how your revenue translates into profit is dependent on a lot of things that are outside the scope of this program. It should go without saying, but the tech industry often forgets that you want to grow revenue faster than you grow costs. That being said, we'll focus on revenue and customer growth.

So, if revenue and customers are growth outputs, what are the inputs?

The inputs are the marketing tactics and strategies you will learn in this program.

Think of these tactics as levers that control a big machine. If you pull them in the wrong order, the machine isn't going to do what you need it to do. But when you get them right, you'll build a growth engine that consistently gets you more customers and increases your revenue.

Throughout this program, you will learn what each lever does and which ones you should pull.

For example, let's say you think your company should be running Facebook ads. Before committing to that channel, you'll need to understand the inputs of that activity (money, time, resources) and the desired outputs (more revenue and customers).

In future modules, we'll teach you exactly how to identify, prioritize, and execute these growth marketing activities.

Once you understand the underlying mechanics of growth, you'll realize that there are far fewer ways to grow a company than most people think. The strategies you'll learn in this program will allow you to generate results regardless of your startup's industry, country, or size.

The type of growth you will learn throughout this program is strategic, experimental, and logical.

Growth is not about:

• Jumping from one tactic to another in search of a spike in traffic or revenue
• Spreading your limited resources thin across multiple strategies and channels
• Frantically rushing to a new strategy or channel because others are getting results and you excited want to see if you can grow even faster by doing MORE.

Growth is not about being reactive.

Growth is about being proactive and putting your effort toward activities that are proven to align with your business model, market, brand, and product.

Using growth frameworks like the Five Fits, Major Growth Lanes, and Growth Loops, you'll learn how to grow your startup, regardless of your growth experience. We'll dive into each of these in this program.