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There are three ways to work with me. Please reach out to know more about the products, work samples, and availability. As of September, 2024: I can no longer take on more clients but I maintain a waitlist that I'm happy to add you to. Brainstorm Workshop together on specific problems. Usually ranges for a few hours together. Brainstorms are free but subject to availability. Audit Audit your existing flows, mine insights, and create a growth strategy. These are intense deep dives with starting recommendations. Testimonials sound like, "wow, we would've paid a lot more money for this". Build Hands-on execution help for individual projects. The devil is usually in the details and Build ensures higher chances of success.

Is CXL worth it? CXL is pretty darn awesome. Some content is slightly outdated, some of it is a drag. But other than that, I think the growth marketing minidegree and all-access pass is superb. Hi, I’m Khushi Lunkad. I'm a growth marketer working for SaaS and Ecommerce companies. I discovered my passion for growth marketing in 2018. Since then, I have completed over 60 online courses on Coursera, Edx, DataCamp, Hubspot, Facebook Blueprint, Google Academy, Copyhackers, Chase Dimond, Foxwell, CTC etc. If after reading this review, you realize CXL isn't right for you, I put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses tagged with budget, seniority and goals. Check that out as well! It’s been 20 months since I completed CXL’s minidegree and so far, I’ve managed to work with the best minds in the world. People know what CXL is and what is stands for. Review of ConversionXL’s growth marketing courses : CXL’s beginner’s courses were more actionable than the advanced courses from Google Academy. Their All-Access Pass is a little pricey and may be an opportunity cost for some. Most of the teachers at CXL institute are good at both — their work and teaching. Some (1–2) teachers are good at what they do but their teaching styles didn’t suit me. Know the Certificate requirements before you sign up. CXL does not take the quality of their education lightly. And I compare this with 60+ courses , some worth $4000 and some completely free that I have taken. You need to get 90% of the questions right to pass and the questions are tricky. But, it’s actually one of the best entry-level courses out there, no joke. The videos are incredibly well-edited and concise = 0% rambling. I’ve benefited greatly from the training at my job and consistently impress my colleagues by just applying the learnings. Every video has a transcript that you can search. Most lessons come with downloadable slides, lots of templates and reading material. The instructors share everything that they’ve got without any hesitations. But, this is what an instructor at CXL shared with me 😐 "CXL is very tactical. Some courses are also very beginner level. Some are good, of course. But I think overall Reforge is far more advanced." - An instructor at CXL So, what should you do? I don't really want to confuse you, but it is what the industry believes. CXL is tactical. It will get you started in the field and you won't find a better starting library elsewhere. Top experts in the industry, including the head of growth marketing at Loom and an EIR at Reforge, reviewed my resume. They noticed CXL and praised its credibility. Completing a 100-hour course shows hard work. So your efforts won't be in vain. CXL is better than free courses and some paid courses Here's what I regret: I was on Peep’s mailing list for quite a while and I wish I had decided to take this course earlier on rather than taking free courses on Google with their analytics and adwords. I didn’t store information properly in the initial days. But you can do better . CXL is even better than paid courses like Growthschool . Boy was I pissed after spending $300. Who is CXL not for? CXL is probably not for you if you have no experience with marketing. A basic foundation in marketing is necessary to make the most out of the course. If you’re a founder trying to learn marketing instead of hiring someone else, please don’t do that. CXL is too intense. Hire a marketer, a consultant, or even a mentor. This course isn’t for you if you just want a certificate, even though you get one. This course is for you if you want to get ridiculously good at data-driven marketing. If you’re not at all technologically savvy. If you're too senior in your marketing career, and already know your way around most of the stuff. If you want to specialize say in Google ads, then CXL might not be the right choice. You're better off going for a specialized course like God Tier Ads . View a list of all the courses I've taken. If you checked any 2 of those 6 statements, please reconsider before investing your time and resources. Other important details (I’m doing a brain-dump) I think they also give you access to a Facebook group. CXL shifted between a circle.so community and a FB community; not sure if any of them are still active today. The FB community helped me back in 2020 but now I have over 10+ Slack channels to get help. The growth marketing minidegree was amazing and we didn’t have a lifetime access deal like you have today. The all-access may be in terms of optionality. But you can also have a decision paralysis with so many options, so know what works best for you. Everything is pre-recorded. CXL also has personalized/live courses called Sprints if you prefer. After every lesson in a course, the instructors give you an empty templates to refill based on your data. Super practical. I found some courses to be really interesting and useful like this and this . If you can start with any one course, I'd recommend this one. It made me cry tears of joy. I honestly did not like a bunch of courses like this and this one. Some courses can be outdated even if you wouldn't expect it like this one so use your judgement! Although, I see a lot of fresh courses that weren't available when I took so that's nice. CXL Alternatives Demand Curve’s Growth Marketing Training — Demand Curve is all text, no audio/video. CXL is audio/video/text/AMAs. Julian Shapiro’s content is really good but if you don’t have a startup, then you may not be able to extract the most out of Demand Curve’s training. [Edit: I took Demand Curve in early 2022, it's better for founders, not marketers. ] Reforge — quite expensive at $2000/year but considered the best in the industry. They give you access to 22 programs but you need to apply and get accepted. [Edit: Fun fact, I got a scholarship on April 28, 2022 ] Read the full post Growth Hackers : Their courses are backed up by a popular personality in the growth marketing world — Sean Ellis. But the courses aren’t taught by him. They are taught by partners. CXL does have 1 course by Sean Ellis :) Udemy : I haven’t personally ventured into this space because I found out that Udemy has a bare minimum instructor vetting system. If I have to try tens of instructors to find the right one, then it’s a waste of time. CXL Scholarship — They have a scholarship program as well but you need to apply, get accepted and then write a 1000 word blog post each week. Edit Jan, 2023: Scholarship is no longer available but they launched another alternative which costs $100. CXL course review by other nice people Take a look at some real reviews posted. Bottom Line Look, if you’ve made it this far, it only points to one thing — that you’re serious about your future. CXL is one option to get started, and probably the easiest because of their 7-day trial . Next, take some time to understand how the industry works. I have an article here . If you want some course recommendations that aren't already on my course list, just ask me . I'm pretty resourceful as you'll see below. 😄 My recommendation is to start with CXL. They have a 7-day trial. You don't have to start the search process all over again. Maybe you’ll find the missing piece and use CXL as a stepping stone to a better future. Remember, CXL is not a magic bullet. The more you get into growth marketing, the more you'll realise what you don't know. CXL is the best way to get a step in the door. It's not the final step you'll take. Put simply, where you source your knowledge is far more important than how much you consume. Can I download CXL courses for free? 🙈 CXL is tactical, which means their courses constantly need updating. The problem with this is that you could download content that is already outdated. That'd be twice the amount of time you'd have to spend learning and re-learning. If you're lacking budget, I'd recommend CXL's New Scholarship Program. It costs a one-time fee of $100 and then they help you get hired too (which may or may not work. I've tried recruiting once from their pool but I didn't hire anyone.) If you want to take one or two courses, go for the $1 plan and skim through it. CXL also puts a LOT of content on their blog which in my opinion covers most of their content, but it's a bit too much to read through. Blog's free. You could force-download the content from their site using shady methods but it'll take longer to individually download the content than for you to consume it. Plus, you'll never watch it if it's downloaded on a hard drive that you have to keep plugging in to your laptop to watch. You won't have transcripts to read along the videos. The templates and files won't be easily accessible. You'll lose a lot of motivation along the way. It just won't be worth the effort if your time has literally any value but you could get access and download the content. I'm not sure if CXL's free courses are good or not. Better to go for the best quality of education out there if time and money constraints can be easily sorted out. About other minidegrees from CXL CXL Analytics Minidegree Content is outdated. They are still using UA instead of GA4 (as of July 4, 2023). Here's the feedback I received: My experience with GA and GTM is that the industry is shifting to Mixpanel Marketing Analytics and Segment. GTM is so unintuitive that even my developers struggle to use it, so no wonder we'll do too. CXL CRO Minidegree If learning is the goal, this minidegree is great. Content won't ever be outdated. However, it doesn't teach you how to do in-product experiments and CRO is sort of owned by Product . You need to stitch marketing site data to product metrics like activation, retention, and engagement metrics, which I don't remember CXL teaching. It's still useful and is a good alternative to the $1500 growth.design course. Edit I'm adding this note on the 31st of July in 2024. I have an affiliate link down below so I can see how many people are purchasing the course and getting a refund. The money is not super important to me but lately, I've been seeing a crazy trend of a high refund rate. One out of every two purchases are eventually refunded so it points to one thing that people aren't really satisfied with the product or they're abusing the platform. Do with this information what you will. Thanks. Liked this cxl course review? First of all, thank you for reading my experience at CXL Institute! I put in hours of effort into making the most comprehensive and honest review of CXL’s minidegrees. I’ll continue to improve it as time passes. Please leave a comment below if you feel like it. Or just say hi . It's good be friends :) And if you're feeling extra generous and thought this article helped you to make a purchase decision, please sign up using my affiliate link . 🤗 Why I wrote this article and why I want to improve it further? I wasn’t able to find any honest review of whether CXL Institute is good or not. Everything out there was unoriginal, useless or incomplete. Ever since completing the growth marketing mini-degree , I wanted to write a sincere review.

Zombie users are paying subscribers who pay you but don't use your product. They get counted as active subscribers, when in reality they should be considered as churned subscribers. How to measure zombie users in your product? Step 1 - Identify your engagement metrics This could be anything like pageviews, sending a newsletter (eg: Mailchimp), creating a draft (Jasper), sending a message (Slack), or creating a board (Mixpanel). Step 2 - Create a filtered view of your users I like to keep my annual and monthly subscribers separated but you can cluster them together. Here's a rough idea of how that could look like. Then sort the report by value. Customizing your subscription health 1. Using % trends You can add an event with all active subscribers. Then use a formula to find the percentage of healthy active users or zombie users (eg: zombies / total subscribers%) 2. Segmenting further You can also create three groups: healthy, at-risk, and zombie. So, you can try to win-back at-risk users. This is important to do because Zombie users might come back later and request for a refund. They might also not be happy with the brand. What should you do about zombie users? I really like what Slack does with Zombie users . As soon as they track that a user has not been active in the past 30 days, they don't bill the workspace owner. Why exactly is Slack doing and isn't doing? 1. Always charge for 1 user even if the user becomes inactive. This is probably because Slack has a cost to serve in terms of data storage costs for the workspace. 2. Don't refund the charge but instead add a credit They aren't refunding for the month. Instead, they're saving a little bit of cashflow plus ensuring that the customer's bank statements remain clean. I don't like using a lot of payment apps like Google Pay because they offer cashbacks. Cashbacks ruin my account statements. Why is this a good billing strategy for zombie users? People often hesitate to start a subscription because they're worried they will forget to cancel it. This pricing decision reduces friction to conversion. It's also good for brand and word of mouth. Clearly, I'm writing about them :) And it's also good for the customer. They aren't shocked or feel like an idiot when they see their statements and realize they forgot to cancel. But I acknowledge that this pricing decision can come from a place of privilege. Some companies can't do it if they need the cash. One of the companies I worked for signed an annual contract with Sendbird (a messaging service). Now, development time took longer but Sendbird wouldn't extend or cancel the contract. This was a tiny startup paying thousands of dollars for a service they weren't using. We wrote to them a few times but they just stopped responding. In a world of Sendbirds, be a Slack :) Thanks for reading! Khushi

The problem statement A B2C SaaS startup reached out to me to reduce their churn rate. "Churn rate is at 14.3%. By month 3, only 55% retain. And, across all our cohorts, only 32% remain over an extended period of time." Investigating high churn rate They were already using Churnkey's template which had brought down churn significantly. And after my investigation, I launched a new A/B test within Churnkey's portal. You can see that the % of people that retained were now roughly 30%. What this means is that if 100 people clicked on the cancel button, 30% of people choose not to cancel. This was much higher than what they had originally. The research that went into building this flow required some calculations. First, I wanted to see why people were cancelling and how were they responding to the offers we presented. In a Google sheet, I listed down all the reasons, and how people responded to the offers we presented (AKA the acceptance rate). I compared all time feedback with last 30 days just to remove any abnormalities. Products can change over time, so it's nice to see trends. Churnkey's dashboards also show trendlines but I prefer to do it in a spreadsheet. After, that I took some notes that looked like: "When people say "too expensive", they mean they can't see the value of the product. Some have to put in a lot of hours doing the work that the tool was supposed to do it for them." "No one's selecting this reason, maybe we should take it off?" There were certain reasons that weren't selected as much, so it made sense to group it all in one. The offers we made changed as well. Instead of offering a discount to every single person, we hooked them up with either support or education around the product pitch a different product that matches their use case better or a much larger (100% discount) Offers to reduce churn and what to do if you don't like discounting the product I'm usually not a fan of discounts. So, I like connecting people to support. Or offering them a non-subscription purchase plan (eg, billed in credits instead of monthly). Tactical friction and copy changes to reduce churn We also added some tactical friction (negative one), to increase the number of people that would abandon the flow mid-way. That copy, looked something like this: Adding that extra sentence of "This way, your data can be preserved" raised the number of people that abandoned the flow by 14.2%. How to reduce churn rate in SaaS? To reduce churn, we're also tackling it on multiple fronts. We're investing in product education and better UX. A/B testing Churnkey flows and making more segments (eg, early churners vs later churners) is also another strategy to work on. More to come soon! It's a work-in-progress and updates roll out once a few months. Best, Khushi

Imagine this... You need to grow 10X but your budget is 1/10th. How would you win? If I told you that was possible and then some more, you’d probably call me crazy. In the past three years that I’ve worked at Streamline  (an icons and illustrations library), we’ve grown to millions of users. The majority of Fortune 100 companies use/pay us, including customers like Vanguard, Twilio, Bloomberg, and Booking.com. You’d probably find it hard to browse the internet without running into Streamline. Streamline is bootstrapped, calm , and without a sales team. The company has a zero meetings culture and sometimes our founder will even promote competitors. It is wild and beautiful at the same time. So, hi. I’m Khushi. I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . In this article, I’ll go beyond the common knowledge that we’ve already seen with PLG and marketing. I’ll share counterintuitive learnings with some starting ideas to implement them in your own company. Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn: Never market alone. You’re a small team. You need outsized impact. Find a horse to ride. Your free product should probably scare you. Don’t limit PLG to only the product. Expand it to your team’s time and everything else. Be shameless when asking for help and advice. and some more! #1 Tip: Find a horse to ride Finding a horse to ride is a concept from a book called Horse Sense . It means that you need to find something bigger than yourself to climb the next mountain. Maybe it is a rich dad. Or your successful partner. SurveyMonkey’s CEO was Facebooks’ COO husband, and that’s how they got the idea of a growth team ( source ).  It is a concept similar to piggybacking in international business. Piggybacking is a market entry strategy where you partner up with someone local and ride on their back. So, how did Streamline piggyback? 1. Piggybacked with channel partnerships Streamline created a plugin for Figma . Eventually, we won Figma’s best graphic design award in 2022 and became a top 1% plugin of all times. We also partnered up with Lucid. This gave us access to 60M users that could reach Streamline in 2 clicks. Channel partnerships  bring in users that retain. Unlike a paid ads campaign, you’re embedded in their workflow. 2. Piggybacked on end users with attribution Every person that uses Streamline for free is required to attribute to us with backlinks. Not everyone will honor these license rules but those that do helped us cross a domain authority of 74 with around 100k backlinks. When you think of attribution or watermarks, you don’t need to have a singular use-case. There are more ways to incorporate them , even with paid users. 3. Piggybacked on adjacent products/competitors On your post-purchase survey field, ask users which other products they use. You’ll better understand their buyer journey and know who to partner up with. Partnering up with competitors has been done by companies like Adidas before, so it’s not a new concept. 4. Piggybacked on schools like Harvard Streamline’s taught by educators at Harvard, ShiftNudge, and some of the top design courses in the industry. Instead of simply offering an education program, we wanted to make sure it compounds. Every student that uses Streamline attributes to us from their design portfolio. Portfolios are the most shared asset by any student. We’re also a small team so we ask students to introduce us to their educators, instead of directly offering the license to a student. Educators then distribute Streamline to their current students and all future batches. It also reduces abuse of the program. Acquisition is done by a single student but the distribution is done by the educator by the hundreds. Plus, it’s taught by educators so product recall is much higher. Streamline is also embedded in the curriculum. 4. Piggybacked on trends like memes Memes are very shareable and instantly recognizable. We created a vector meme set that went viral. It hit the front page on HackerNews and got us roughly a thousand backlinks. Then, we doubled down on it. We drew people’s favorite memes if they’d share. So, how can you piggyback? Piggyback on thought leaders, like Reforge piggybacked on Andrew Chen. Piggyback on celebrities by creating a variation of what they’ve said. Music covers  is an example. Twitter did this with their “ If you can dream it, you can tweet it ” campaign. Piggyback on macro-economic trends. Piggyback on your employees similar to what Google did  when they first launched Gmail. Piggyback on your end customers. There are just so many different ways ! #2 Tip: Structure your free product such that it scares you Too often, the free version is a lead magnet in disguise. It offers the bare minimum to incentivize a sign up. Think of Notion, Figma, Canva. All of their free versions are awesome. Yes, it’s going to compete with your premium product but someone else is going to disrupt you if you leave that gap open. That’s why companies like Procter and Gamble have similar products in different price ranges or targeting different segments. How Streamline structures its free product? I remember saying, “Hey, we’re probably giving too much for free”. And our founder responded with, “That’s the threshold. If it scares you, let’s run with it. Anything less than that is not useful”. Our free library offers real vector icons. People don’t get non-editable PNGs that aren’t as useful. When Streamline was first launched as a side project, the founder created the largest ever icon set that the world had ever seen. He shared it for free and was an instant hit. Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s cheap. The free products are labor intensive to create. Pixel icon set  took a very long time to create and is ungated. Lots of our sets are open-source. Think of open source as a distribution strategy , not a business model. The product is also ungated . No need to provide your email address to download thousands of assets. All features are ungated and free to use. Trial requires only an email, no card. Although, instead of throwing people directly in the app, we realized it was better to show a welcome modal window  educating them about Streamline. Instead of clicking on a CTA, they can also close the welcome modal which is more of a Systems 1 thinking. But it should still compound. It’s a business, not a charity. #3 Tip: Compound everything. In simplest of terms = PLG means the product grows itself. It’s a compounding loop. More users bring more users. What if you applied this compounding loop to other parts of the business as well? Compounding your team’s time Let’s take an example. Say you could pick one of the GTM opportunities. A one-off newsletter sponsorship with a big influencer or run ads on a small website. Assume that the setup time for both projects is nearly the same. I’d pick option 2. The ad banner.  Newsletter is a one-and-done project. It requires time and discussions. When you set up an ad on a partner website, you don’t need to have a second conversion. Once it is set up, it can last for years if things go well. This way, you compound your time. With every new partner, I add up. This means, partners are only brought on after research because I want it to last for years. Our sales process is also PLG of sorts People fill out a form with what they need. And we send a quotation over to them. That’s it. There are no meetings. We’ve closed large contracts by just a few emails. Even governments have bought from us simply after exchanging a few emails. The product is very visual, so that definitely helps. Compound even a referral campaign  We don’t ask users to share with other users. Instead, we ask users to share with influencers. We try to max out distribution with every campaign. #4 Tip: Solving churn Churn will always be something to consider with self-serve companies. Streamline can’t lock data in. Plus, you aren’t forced to call someone to cancel a subscription. How we’re addressing churn? Better ICP targeting to freelancers, knowledge workers, and agencies. There are companies that get a subscription when they have a major redesign coming up but after that, they don’t anymore. Create a one-time purchase product for individual brands that only needed one set. This helps us get larger AOVs with more satisfied customers. Plus, it increases word of mouth. Once someone downloads an icon set, it will live forever in their design system and helps optimize for internal team shareability. How you can handle churn? Shift your ICP targeting to users that spread more word of mouth or retain longer. Learn how to calculate your word of mouth coefficient  and monitor it . If your ICP has an on-and-off use case, consider offering trial extensions, pauses, discounts before they cancel. We used Churnkey  but you can evaluate Profitwell, Baremetrics and a few others if churn’s an issue worth solving. #5 Tip: Have influence over the product Many growth teams are asked to market, activate, retain and do all sorts of things while having no real influence over the actual product. When the product tanks, this team is usually the scapegoat. You can’t expect to be given influence without putting in the hours. I’ve spent my own money to learn the subject before I tried to market it. I remember taking 6-month long courses on product design and UX that cost thousands of dollars. Eventually, I was given a proper growth pod with devs, designers, and support resources. The founder actively asks for my feedback on every new feature/product we build. And I do give (a lot!) of feedback/suggestions. The team is excited to work on growth problems. I remember asking the company for an additional 15% of engineering capacity and they gave me far more than I asked for. You can’t grow a product you don’t believe in. Growth teams deserve a skin in the game. One of my favorite matrixes is the shareability matrix. How shareable is your product? Internally within a team and externally. You can apply this to all features and products. Although, I do step out of conversations very often. Streamline is more of an art than it is a science. The design team has a very high bar. For example, Streamline’s entire library is drawn multiple times over. They spend an obsessive amount of time harmonizing and re-harmonizing a set, even years after its drawn. Look at that ampersand (&) icon from our chunky Plump icon set that was inspired by cartoons. This level of attention to detail resonates with our target audience. And I don’t think a single competitor can match that. The lesson here is to step in and give feedback, but also step out when working with creatives. #6 Tip: Be shameless when asking for help The more you know, the more you’ll realize what you don’t know. I remember cold-dming execs at billion dollar companies who were ready to extend an hour of their time to help me out. Hillary Miller  who was the Head of Whimsical and now at Calendly mentored me every month for over a full year, for nothing in exchange. People like Aazar Shad , Mike Taylor  (ran a 50+ growth agency), Foti and Jessica (founders at GrowthMentor ), Katelyn Bourgoin , bet on me in the early days. I remember reaching out to Michael Pici  (ex VP of Product, Revenue at HubSpot), Adam Fishman  (ex-Head of Growth at Lyft), and Nick Lafferty  (ex-Head of Growth Marketing at Loom). I asked them to critique and poke holes in my strategy. I asked them why I’d fail.  I even chain-smoked 60+ courses  from Reforge, CXL to learn as much as I could. There are lots of people who have helped me get here. The journey is not easy but it’s fun when you have great friends/family/advisors to help you along the way. It also helps to have a good founder like Vincent! Thank you for reading and I hope this article helped! Disclaimer: These are my insights and hypothesis. These opinions are mine alone, and not of the company’s. However, I made sure to get approval from the company to share this article.

Hi, I'm Khushi, I'll share my honest journey of becoming a growth marketer, and whether growth marketing as a field is even right for you. Some truth bombs shall follow. You can read more about me here and preview my work here . My journey of becoming a growth marketer The career of a growth marketer starts with Neil Patel and (probably) ends with Reforge. Here's my messy middle with all the courses I chain-smoked over the years. 2018 : Neil Patel — My click-baity introduction to digital marketing. I consumed an unhealthy amount of podcasts and articles. 2019 : Julian Shapiro — Read his piece about growth marketing during my student exchange at Essec and pulled all-nighters, giddy with excitement, having found my (short-term) calling. Took dozens free courses from the good people over at HubSpot , Google Digital Garage , Backlinko , edX , Coursera , Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OCW , Facebook Blueprint and more. 2020 : CXL — I took their 3-month-long growth marketing mini degree and it transformed the way I'd do marketing forever. 2021-22: Took tons of niche courses : - Copyhackers for Copywriting - Neurofied for Behavioral Psychology - Foxwell , PaidMediaPros , and CommonThreadCollective for PPC ads - Moz , Ahrefs and 90DaySEO for SEO - Social Savannah for TikTok Ads - Vexpower for Marketing Mix Modelling - Katelyn Bourgoin 's Clarity Calls for User Research and Review Mining - Sai Ganesh 's Brand Marketing course about Dunzo (for fun) - Chase Dimond's for Email Marketing - Twitter Flight School for Twitter ads and maybe a few more that I forget. 2022 GrowthMentor To have on-demand access to expert help. 2022 : Reforge - It's like the 'Harvard' of growth schools and money can't buy you a seat. I've taken Growth Series , Growth Marketing , and Monetization and Pricing 2023-24 : Even more courses and complimented with blogs. As you can tell, I clearly over-index on education. 😅 My career as a growth marketer I've been in the industry for about two and half years. And I'm not terribly bad at my job. This is what some smart people have said about me. "As a Founder/ CEO and a former Head of Growth at a Fortune 500 company, I can say without a doubt that Khushi is one of the most impressive growth marketers that I've had the opportunity to work with." "You're a rockstar, Khushi! I can't wait to watch your career journey. You're just getting started and I know you're destined for great things 🙌" - Katelyn Bourgoin (my mentor) " 5 Emerging Growth Marketers who are killing it at their job" - Aazar Shad , Growth Marketing Leader (and my mentor) "You have a tremendous successful background already and you are on a trajectory of success and growth than most people aren’t on." - Nick Lafferty | Loom, Head of Growth Marketing (my mentor) I hope the social proof above helps you trust me because what I'm about to say is a bit polarizing. What is growth marketing really though? The more experience I have, the more confused I get about what 'growth marketing' really is. This is what I understand today — it may or may not hold true as I get ahead in my career and learn more. At small startups with a 1-2 person marketing team, growth marketing pretty much means everything. You're writing copy, running paid ads, doing SEO work, talking to designers to ship landing pages, improving the funnel to activate users, optimizing prices, making product launches, looking into positioning and maybe a lil' bit into branding work, fixing retention, simplifying onboarding, setting up marketing automations / emails, working with engineering to set up analytics and event tooling, and so much more. It all sounds fun. It truly is. But you become a generalist. You are mediocre at best at everything. The antidote to that is upskilling and getting mentors. You're fighting constantly against the clock. You try gobbling up as much content as you can possibly consume via Linkedin, Twitter, Newsletters etc. It can be TMI. But you can never compete with the specialists. In many bigger companies, there's no real growth marketing field. Growth marketing has become just another fancy title for paid media specialists. Paid media specialists are those that run Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Google Search ads, Youtube ads, Display ads, Reddit ads, etc. SEO is it's own separate position. There are content strategists, technical SEO experts, SEO writers who handle all of it. Analytics? There are data analysts and even data scientists if you get lucky. Copywriting? There are product marketers, creatives, and copywriters who do all sorts of work for you. You only need to write briefs, not actual copy. Go-to-market, product launches and positioning? That's owned by product marketing teams. Forget the funnel. It's no longer a funnel you get to walk all by yourself. Everything after getting users to the site is owned by product managers and growth product teams. They take care of activation, retention, monetization, referrals and onboarding. Growth marketing is a very misunderstood title. Mid-large size companies don't hire for this position quite exactly as small companies. Getting jobs is also not easy not because there's a lot ofcompetition but because there's just a lot of bad talent, trying to pass off as good talent. Growth marketing community is also a bit misaligned on what it means. Growth is different than growth marketing. Growth product is different than growth. 😭 So, if you're still interested in growth marketing, and I haven't scared you away... Here's how to become a growth marketer Start with some foundations Then get a broad experience, trying a little bit of everything. Work at a startup or an agency. Find what you love, and become a specialist. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, which is why I enjoyed having a broad skillset and working at innovative companies where I can have a lot of impact. But if entrepreneurship isn't what you want to do, work towards becoming a specialist OR figuring out how to climb the ladders. Problem with climbing ladders is that growth marketing as a function isn't being hired for at companies large enough to have a ladder - so you'd have to specialize. It's a chicken and egg problem. Landing your first growth marketing job 1. Most large/mid-size companies use ATS to track applications. So, try searching in Google using this filter: 'site:boards.greenhouse.io marketing remote'. You could replace greenhouse with any major ATS board name and it should work. Under Tools > Time, choose past 24 hours, week or month to get the latest feed. 2. I've also found most of my jobs using Twitter advanced search. Search for the usual keywords and add 'job' or 'hiring'. Filter by minimum likes / retweets etc so you block out the bots. 3. You can also use social listening tools like Google Alerts to catch any new job postings that go out. I dislike Google Alerts because it sucks, but if you have the budget, I'd recommend paying up a little for other tools. There's also f5bot to monitor hackernews and reddit 4. Angelist helps but is mostly useful for early stage roles. Harder to get great roles on those but still works. 5. I've also found Crunchbase to be useful for job search. You can filter by team size, company industry and whether they laid off folks or not in the past year Then, export that list with the website URL. Add a jobs or careers URL parameter in google sheets and you have a list of thousand companies that you could want to work with. I think they offer a free trial which should be enough. 6. Investor job boards. Most investors have their own job boards combining all hiring asks from their portfolio companies. Look for investors you are excited by, and see if any portfolio companies make sense to you. Crunchbase can help too. 7. Advisors: Sometimes a lot of companies have board members, advisors etc. You could find a list of all celebrity product leaders you want to work with and see which companies they advise at. Reforge collective is a great list to start out with, but Linkedin Sales Navigator can get a good export too. 8. Growthmentor has an internship program that pays $2000/month. 9. CXL has a scholarship program that costs $100 in exchange for training you. They'll also help you get hired . 10. If you want to chat with me to get a second look on your resume/cover, please reach out to me. I'm more than happy to help. We can work it over on a weekend and I can show all the 99 tricks I tried to land my first job :) Apply to work with me I'm always on the lookout for good talent, so please reach out to me if you think we're a fit. All I need is a little pitch (who you are, what have you studied so far, and what's something crazy you've done to win at life). Courses to become a growth marketer CXL vs Demand Curve vs Growth Tribe There are some growth marketing courses like Demand Curve, CXL, and Growth Tribe. I've taken CXL and Demand Curve but I haven't taken Growth Tribe because it seemed a bit expensive at the time. Julian Shapiro is the person I'd give credit to for introducing me to Growth Marketing — and I'll forever be a fan. He's OP. His podcasts and his newsletter is incredible too! Demand Curve is a better choice for founders who don't want to drown in theory but want to quickly get going. If growth marketing is your full-time gig, CXL is a better choice. What was detailed out in a full-fledged course in CXL's GM minidegree was a handful of lessons in Demand Curve. Once you take CXL, you don't have to take Demand Curve or Growth Tribe. Content's quite similar. I've taken a couple of minidegrees from CXL's suite but I actually only mention one on my profile, so it doesn't look like a content dump. Caution CXL is for entry level positions. They will help you get started in the best possible way but you'll outgrow them eventually. I took their FB ads course and wasn't really able to execute as well as I should've. I had to supplement CXL with other niche courses from Common Thread Collective, Paid Media Pros, and Foxwell, and more. After CXL, you should go get some experience. You will discover what you like and don't like. Tl;dr : CXL's Growth Marketing Minidegree is the one you should get. Reforge is something you should aim to do after CXL. It's mostly for mid-senior professionals. Reforge doesn't teach you how to do SEO or design landing pages. CXL teaches you real skills, and I think that's what you want initially. It's recognized by senior industry people. I wrote a review about Reforge here . And another one about CXL . Btw, please run away from course that has uses the word 'growth hacking'. Avoid them like the plague. Mentorship helped me become a growth marketer Look, I recommend getting a mentor. Best advice I heard from Mr Beast was to "Get a mentor. Mentorship is a cheat code to success. Knowledge is so ******* OP". Courses will make it you feel like you know everything. But the minute you put into practice, you'll still make mistakes. Being able to instantly ask for feedback from mentors, is a shortcut. How to get mentors? 1. Cold outreach Reach out to your dream mentors wherever they are. Linkedin, Twitter, Email, anything. I've even considered putting a billboard up to get attention (and I might still do it someday). One DM is all it takes. I've used cold outreach to get hour long advice sessions from top-most execs at Ferrero Rocher, BCG and more. Be shameless when asking for help. 2. Pay for it Cold outreach is tough work so I pay $60/month for a service called GrowthMentor . I've had 30 calls so far, and been an on-and-off subscriber. It's no longer super easy to book calls but it's much easier than cold outreach. These days, I usually have 1 or 2 calls in a month just to get a second opinion on whatever I'm working on. Everyone is super nice, kind, and helpful. I'll recommend. Tweets I think you should read By one of the youngest and wealthiest self-made women. 2. (Will add more worth adding) That's basically been my journey so far. I'd love to have you join for the rest of the ride. Here's my Linkedin and Twitter . Come say hi and ask me anything I missed out on! Best, Khushi Lunkad

Hi! I'm Khushi. I've paid for Growthmentor for nearly 15 months. And I've had over 30ish calls so far I got some nice feedback too. I hope the above context helps shine some light, that I've really used the growthmentor platform. Here's what I think of GrowthMentor and whether I will continue to pay for it: There are a few alternatives out there for mentorship but most feel very dry and transactional. Growthmentor doesn't feel dry and transactional. That kind of atmosphere is tough to create but they've nailed it. It's pricey! Especially if you don't use it. So, I usually have an on-and-off subscription. If I know, I'll need stuff in the future, I'll pay up. It's not super easy to book mentors but still easier than cold outreach. I usually invest 30-40 minutes to book each call. This involves research (who do I talk to?), and pitching them to talk to me. There's also a help request section. You put your help requests and mentors will apply to help you out. This worked better than my expectations Hidden benefits of Growthmentor Growthmentor introduced me to lots of people in the industry . So I'm not a small fish in a small pond. Foti (founder) introduced to me to someone who was hiring when I was early in my career looking for jobs. I was able to stay in touch with this person even after I ended my subscription, and they introduced me to lots of new opportunities. I've taken 60+ online courses but practical advice/feedback is invaluable. Today, whenever I have a problem I'm working on, I try to solicit feedback. Try to discover what it is that I don't know. And why my work might suck. It's working out really well! Growthmentor Review I think its money well spent. And I'll continue to pay for it. Although, I will pause/and reactivate my subscription and as when I can actually make use of it. My recommendation: Try for a month/or three. Give it your best shot. If it works for you, it can act as a huge catalyst in your career. If it doesn't, think of it as a bad investment and write it off. Best, Khushi So, I've had a ton of experience in and out of Growthmentor over the years.

12 months later, here's my unbiased... Review of Reforge Growth Programs Is Reforge worth $2000/year? Could I, should I download Reforge for free? Reforge vs the alternatives An unbiased review of Reforge Growth programs An overview of what Reforge looks like on the inside 👀 What I don’t like about Reforge Some guest passes Is Reforge right for me? I have taken seven programs from Reforge 1. Growth Series 2. Growth Marketing 3. Monetization and Pricing 4. Growth Leadership 5. Advanced Growth Strategy 6. Product Led Growth 7. Retention and Engagement I’ve chain-smoked many MANY courses in the past It’s more than 60+ online courses so far and I can confidently say, I’ve seen the best and the worst of online courses. I’ve taken a little too many marketing and product courses: altMBA by Seth Godin , growth.design's psychology course, CXL , Demand Curve , Copyhackers , Common Thread Collective for FB ads, 90DaySEO , Foxwell , Chase Dimond for Email , Social Savannah Tiktok , Ahrefs and Moz courses for SEO, the super basic Hubspot and Google courses, Interface Design from Shiftnudge , Programmatic SEO from Preetam Nath, Content Marketing 201 from Amanda Natividad, Attribution and Marketing Mix Modelling from Vexpower and so many more . It’s endless, really. The point that I’m trying to drive home is that I’ve seen enough courses to have an opinion about Reforge. This article is 100% un-sponsored. No affiliate links, whatsoever either. No self-promotion either. It’s 100% unbiased and written on a whim. No ROI on this article but hopefully I’ll get to know you and make some friends. Anyway, let’s answer the questions you have before this starts to feel like a recipe blog that takes forever to get to the actual recipe. Reforge pricing and costs Membership to Reforge costs $2000 / year for unlimited access to all their programs and live cohorts. Live cohorts happen twice in a year (in April and Oct). The teams plan is their newest addition. Reforge Team plans give better cost structure & flexibility for groups. If you have more than 4 people, the starter plan is a better option which gives you 10 people for a similar price with added functionality. If your team size is larger than 10, there's additional group options which makes pricing cheaper per person with more expert access. The good thing about the team plan is that your entire team levels up at the same time and it's not just one person who brings insights and moves the needle. If you're considering the team plan, I can intro you to their team for exclusive pricing and benefits should you want them. Send me a note . Is Reforge Worth it? Yes. It’s worth more than $2000. Reforge gives you access to all of their programs for an entire year. They also add new programs twice a year. So you technically have access to 22 courses for $2000. That’s $90/program or 166/month. Realistically, you won’t do 22 courses, nor would all 22 be relevant for you. You might end up doing 4–5 at best, even if you are pacing yourself. That would bring us to $500/course , which is a teeny tiny bit expensive until you look at the content. I honestly had a lot more wins ( see portfolio ) only after I joined Reforge across full-time work and consulting projects. The level up in my skillset was tremendous. We have a 'content creation' problem The problem with growth as a field is that there’s too much content. Everyone wants to produce content, and become a course creator or a ‘thought leader’. My Twitter feed is endlessly long with incredible content but as an industry, we product more content than we can consume. Compare this to the ML/AI industry where there just aren’t enough courses to complete or newsletters to subscribe to. The ML industry is nascent. Growth on the other hand is loud. There’s a lot of content and we have to be very mindful about who we learn from and how much. Reforge bypasses this problem. It curates content. I don’t have to worry about where I’m sourcing my knowledge from. I don’t have to calendar-ise my learnings or go out of my way to follow so many people and ensure that the Twitter algorithm shows the good threads to me organically (which it usually won’t). For a fee, Reforge ensures that I get the best content that exists, all wrapped in a consumable/memorizable fashion. What Reforge offers 1. One live program with an EIR each year Previously, they offered two-three live programs. Now, it's brought down to one. 2. Slack Community A vibrant and helpful Slack community. Earlier, I get to ask questions directly to people who’ve created the "hockey stick" growth for their companies. Now, it's not really possible to do. They've made a few changes. Slack is downgraded to the free tier so message history is covers only the last 30 days which was a bummer. Secondly, all the program cohort live discussions was moved online in their portal and it's not easy to access. I don't even know where to look for it. 3. Events All past events are recorded. This includes workshops and case studies with operators who grew the tools you use every day. The sort of ‘behind-the-scenes’ knowledge is hard to find. In the new UX, you can't really filter. So, it's much harder to find case studies to watch. 4. Templates and transcripts Which seems like you won’t need it, but it is pretty helpful. A lot of newer courses don't have the video recordings btw, so check with Reforge if there's a particular course you're interested in taking. 5. Discussions [obsolete] This is long gone. They don't have this available. Now you can't ask educators questions related to the course directly In the past, you could ask clarifying questions from the best operators. It is very different from asking questions to someone in a free Facebook community. I used Reforge to help me cross that inflection point in my career, and the EIRs to help me along the way. 6. The devil is in the details Reforge is by far the most organized, and detailed program I’ve ever taken. It’s the little details that blow my mind, honestly. Reforge isn’t rough around the edges. It’s painfully built and they’ve thought of so many little things. For example: Live events are shown in my time zone and auto-added to my calendar in bulk. No timezone madness. No missing out on events because of a tech issue. I never have to ‘duplicate a template’ and make a copy of it. It auto-duplicates in Google docs, directly in my Google Drive. Reforge reminds me of Zedd’s $16 million new house. Purchased because the interior designer added a little something in the kitchen. Watch for just for a minute at around the 6:12 mark. It'll auto-play when you hit the play button. Imagine how much thought someone would have put into the bigger picture if they cared about these minor details. 7. Reforge Certifications Reforge doesn't offer certifications. They give letter of completions. LoC for Live Programs (open to see) When you complete 80% of a live cohort and attend most events, they'll let you take a pretty screenshot at the end of the cohort. Or you can download a plain looking PDF like this one. LoC for Self-Paced Programs (open to see) For the self-paced programs, you can ask for a letter of completion . This will do if you need it for company reimbursement. 8. Reforge AI This is a product I helped beta test and develop. You can personalize and ask it questions. I spent 3-4 hours helping develop the product in the initial days and it's turned out well! 8. New Design I love the new design and the UI actually. And they even used Streamline icons for the entire redesign and all presentation slides! (Streamline's the company I work for btw). Your time will never be cheaper The longer you wait, the more expensive your time will be. You're either going to learn what Reforge teaches on your own, or you can shortcut and learn earlier (without the practical experience). Everything in life is a tradeoff. 1) If you feel Reforge is expensive today, it'll be financially cheaper in the future but you won't have the time! 2) If you enroll today, you won't fully understand what they teach but you'll still know how to open the emergency exit to save everyone from a flight crash. My POV. That's all! Could I, should I download Reforge for free? Members get banned if they download Reforge. If they copy something from the platform more than three times, they can get permanently banned and will lose access. So, exporting stuff isn’t allowed. Hard to Torrent I had a friend who had copies of every other course but he still couldn’t get Reforge. Of all the courses that exist out there, Reforge is the hardest to find on Torrent. Second, you won’t get a certificate which can help nor do you get to meet new people. Want free Reforge-style content? If you’ve applied and gotten rejected or are looking for a simpler entry point, I have some ideas: Reforge EIRs and Partners maintain their own blogs, newsletters, podcasts, books, Twitter threads, and so on. Whether or not you take up Reforge, you should subscribe to their newsletters mentioned on this Growth Marketing Resource page. The content is highly overlapping, and these blogs are is created by the same people who created the original Reforge content. EIRs are frequently invited as guest speakers, so keep an eye on YouTube. There will be plenty of material to look at. The disadvantage is that you must compile everything yourself. Reforge's own blog is extremely useful. Because Reforge’s in-app search isn’t very good, I occasionally use Google search, and more often than not, they have a blog post about the topic I was looking for. I believe that much of their premium content is available on their blog. It’s disorganised and difficult to consume, but it exists and should be a good starting point because there are so many blog posts to read. Search like this: site: reforge.com/blog otherwise its hard to find Request a guest pass. If you’re stuck on a topic and really want to use Reforge, ask someone who is a paid member for a guest pass, and they might be able to send you a 7-day access to three lessons from within a program. This isn’t the best method, but if all else fails, use these. Growth Programs Guest Passes Growth Series " Retention separates the top 1% " Growth Series " The Psych Framework for User Motivation " Monetization and Pricing " Use cases" Product Programs Guest Passes Product Management Foundations " Feature opportunity validation " Product Market Fit " How to measure Product Market Fit " Admitted to Reforge but aren’t sure? Consider this: Good products cost money. You want them to profit. It’s in our best interests that Reforge profits so that they can invest in developing a better product. Reforge is a learning tool. It should be exclusive because knowledge is our most precious competitive advantage. If you and your competitors are both using the same handbook, is it really a competitive advantage anymore? The high price protects you. It’s a blessing in disguise and a total silver lining. They also used to offer a paid monthly annual contract for students from India but it seems discontinued since the past 6 months. The Slack community It's well worth the money if you are able to network and make a few good friends. Reward entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship is INCREDIBLY hard. It’s tough, and if you don’t support people who truly add value to the world, they risk going out of business, and you end up with the bottom feeders. That’s a terrible incentive for the world we live in. Great products deserve to win and we should help them gain attention and then some more. 😇 Reforge Program Review Reforge is not flawless. Don’t sign up for Reforge thinking it’s all roses and sunshine. It’s not. You cannot copy from Reforge, or export the lessons. It takes two times longer than they say it will, so your weekends are booked out. If you have consulting gigs, you might have to drop them too. Not everything is easily applicable and requires you to research on your own, bring in data scientists at times, or just roll with it. Your subscription will not stop if you have a major life event like a marriage or a baby. You may not study for months and really get no value during those months. There’s no way to pause it. I took Amanda’s Content Marketing 201 last month and I plan to take altMBA in Jan, so I know I cannot continue with Reforge in those two months and will have to deal with my anxiety and FOMO issues. What I hate most about Reforge It's really hard to consume. Content is very dense so a little hard to get through. Imagine this... You're watching a Netflix series, and each episode is barely 10 minutes long. Worse yet, each episode has a 3 minutes recap without a 'skip recap' button. If you want to binge watch Reforge, it's a bit of a pain. I have to force myself to get through it. I think they could've simplified the content, used brain-friendly language, and condensed the material by half. I live in the age of Instagram Reels and Tiktok where dopamine hits are instant. So I wish they made the content a little more exciting with hooks, baits, and storytelling. I know it's not easy to make educational content entertaining but, if they fix it, I'd be encouraged to study far more often than I do today. But that’s honestly fine, IMO. Reforge is super into feedback, and they really try their best to improve. Some things are business model constraints and some things are there to improve monetization. You will hate some things about Reforge but it’s really up to you what you focus on — the value you can get out of it or the issues. Oh and one last thing, if you have no prior experience in a certain topic, it can feel too theoretical. Some of the reviews about Reforge claim that it doesn't teach real skills and feels high-level. That's somewhat true. Reforge has an Experimentation and Testing program that I'm trying to take. But it feels like there's just too much theory, making it really difficult to consume. That's probably only because I cannot tie back the learnings to my experience to make it feel exciting. So, if you don't have tactical experience in a certain topic, and you try taking Reforge, it might feel exhausting to consume it. Why Reforge over literally any other platform? Very valid question. Let’s dive in. Reforge vs CXL CXL is more tactical and useful during the early stages of your career. Reforge is more strategic, that does NOT teach you tactical skills. Reforge will not show you how to run ads, for example, there are many courses that can do that for you. Reforge vs Demand Curve Demand Curve is for founders and startups. It doesn’t have a lot of depth. It covers YouTube Ads and SEO in the same course which I think is not deep enough for seasoned growth practitioners. On a more positive note, Demand Curve won't drown you in theory. It's more suited to founders who want to get started quickly. Reforge vs Niche Programs I do take a few of them. Vexpower is one I really like for attribution and other cool skills. But it’s not a “this or that” decision but more of a “this AND that” decision. Every course I took added a lot of value to me. CXL helped me land my first job. Reforge will help me tip over that inflection point in my career. And frankly, you should have a learning budget set aside and force yourself to spend it. Reforge vs growth.design growth.design is more specialised, and easier to consume since it's a niche program. More alternatives I created an interactive guide for choosing growth marketing programs. If you filter for blogs and podcasts, it'll show up high quality blogs and podcasts that have similar content like Reforge, although a bit unstructured. If you have questions, drop them below in the comments. Thank you, I appreciate the read! And if you'd like help with your growth, product or marketing setup, please reach out . — Khushi Lunkad

Growth school review Short version: Not worth it. I paid 20k INR ($300) for this course for 1-year access and I’m definitely not happy with how I spent the money. This review will be relevant for you regardless of which program you are interested to take. Whether it's growth school's brand marketing program, or performance marketing, or workshops, UX design, Linkedin courses, product management, etc. And if you've been scammed by GS like so many others who self reported their experiences in the comments below, I encourage you to file a complaint with the National Consumer Helpline. It takes 5-10 minutes to do so. https://consumerhelpline.gov.in/ Long version: I’ve always regretted buying a product from Instagram ads and I pretty much never learn from my mistakes. Growthschool was running a bunch of ads on Instagram. Good creative. Great copy. They retargeted me a bunch of times. The $300 price tag was a bit on the higher end for me, especially because I had no context if growthschool's course was going to be good or not. As a marketer, I can immediately tell when we a brand starts to use psychological tactics like these. Piggybacking off of Sai Ganesh But Growth School’s biggest lever was Sai Ganesh — the then CMO at Dunzo. And I’m a Dunzo fangirl because of how ridiculously good their marketing is. So if this was a chance for me to take a look at their behind-the-scenes operations, I was going to take it up. But, boy was I disappointed. Sai’s content is good but I don't think he taught brand marketing. Instead, the entire course was more or less about social media marketing sold under a guise of brand marketing. I absolutely don't do social media marketing so idk what I'll do with all this newfound knowledge. 🥲 Growth School’s positioning is also really odd. Is the brand marketing course by growthschool.io worth the money? Their price point is incredibly high even when you compare to CXL and Reforge — both of which are industry standards and globally recognized. Reforge — which is like the Harvard of growth schools costs $1000-$2000 for a yearly access to 22 programs + incredible guest sessions + live lectures + brilliant software + amazing Slack group + recognized brand. CXL — same like Reforge, except it’s more tactical and entry-level. I also put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses if you're looking for an alternative. Is growth school good, overall? Their marketing communication is very immature and geared towards people who would need to be motivated to join a course they paid for. Constant, noisy upsells on Whatsapp. I still don’t understand why they use Whatsapp and publicly share our numbers. Then they began hosting community led sessions. Anyone from the community could volunteer and take up a course. Great UGC and easy content for them, I’d say. Obviously not what I had in mind when I spent my money. If I wanted community-generated content, I could go on YouTube. We paid for Sai’s lectures + guest lectures. The guest lectures didn’t happen on time, we weren’t given any visibility on when they would happen and people had to proactively reach out to their team for information. The worst part? The management. Look at some other reviews by students at growthschool.io. GrowthSchool doesn't even know how to use Google Calendars. Of all the live courses, I’ve been a part of, no one scheduled courses worse than Growth School did. It's madness. The discord community that they heavily promote? It doesn’t exist. The last message is more than a month ago and no one uses it. Not to mention, Growth school constantly runs surveys for their own benefit, guising it as beneficial to our community. They’ve asked for our LinkedIn and Instagram profiles. Reviews are always incentivized instead of being organic. People were really mad, and left brutally honest reviews for growthschool publicly in the chat. Their software always crashes on me. No transcripts on videos. Slides are shared via a google drive link instead of being embedded in the course material. No templates are shared, so you’ll have to spend a lot of time recreating those. Growth school fees At 20k for an 8 week course, they seem to be using the price skimming pricing tactic. So, what should you do? It depends. I’d value this course at 5k, at most if it goes through Growth School. If Sai just took this up on his own, I’d pay 20k because I know he has a full time job and needs to be compensated. At the same time, I would expect smaller cohort sizes and better engagement. Sai is a great teacher and I absolutely 100% recommend him. You also have a lot more options, like CXL , Reforge , and so many more growth marketing courses ! Fun fact: When I first joined, we had an icebreaker session that was fun and well-led. Then, Growth School got a lot more interest by using the community to market for them. We had more members join. Then, they set up a second ice breaker session, without telling the first group that we didn’t have to join. Everyone took time off on the weekends and joined the session. 15 minutes into the call we realized this was a repeat call. 🤣 They weren’t even apologetic about wasting our time. I think they have the most aggressive marketing tactics of all times. Learning from a company like this is so embarrassing that I'll never put on my resume. So, that’s a wrap. I took 30 minutes to badly write this article in the hope that someone manages to read through this non-proof read version of a brain dump and finds value. I’m also going to get a lot of hate from Growth School’s team for this article but I hope it helps you! If you're hoping to find a good growth marketing course , take a look at this interactive guide of all growth marketing courses I chain-smoked over the years! And if you have any questions, I’m available to chat via Linkedin but please don’t ask for access to the course. I don’t infringe on copyrights. Thanks for reading and all the best. As always, if you have more questions, I'm available via LinkedIn and Twitter ! - Khushi

The cheapest way to learn in SaaS is probably to buy the product and see what they're doing. Dropbox Revenue From a numbers standpoint, Dropbox has 700M users, of which are 18.16M are paying  customers (around 2.5% of all users). 2.5% is a high enough number for a PLG company. They grew revenue by 7% (~180M) in 2023. The first quarter of 2024 saw slower growth in terms of revenue though. To learn from Dropbox, all I needed to do was pay $30 and see everything I could as without having to join the team. What a steal. I gathered 130+ screenshots across their entire app, and labelled a lot of stuff 🥵 The company I work for has a paid plan with Dropbox so I know that creatives are their most important target audience. Creatives have a few challenges. They work with very heavy files and must keep them organized. They also work with clients and have an approval process. Every product that Dropbox built was about virality. Choosing creatives as an ICP also has virality baked in if you think about it. More on that to come in a different blog post. Homepage The homepage is focused on conversions. You see ‘Find your Plan” at the top. The secondary CTA is sign up for free. The fifth fold prioritizes work use case over personal in the visual hierarchy. Forces people in the Systems 1 thinking by giving two options instead of just one. The footer also focuses on the "Get your plan" CTA Idea💡 Direct people to the pricing page from the homepage where they can get a free trial Activation The first modal window I see in the onboarding asks me to upload a file and share it. When I try to share it, I see a paywall. This is brilliant! First, the feature is optimized for shareability. Dropbox stands to gain from this. Second, they show me a nice feature (password to a file). The share button is disabled. The feature is highlighted in blue to draw attention. If I didn't want to pay I could click on the "Create and copy link" text, and it would still work. Idea💡 The first feature you introduce to can lead them to a shareable feature. When you introduce a paywall, you might want to let people opt-in for a trial. Buying a plan When I click on "Buy essentials", I'm not taken to the pricing page but rather led to their plan directly. Yearly is selected by default for obvious reasons. The one odd thing is that I can't start a trial. It was available on the public facing pricing page. I signed up with multiple accounts. So, here's another thing that Dropbox is testing. Dropbox will also ask you in the onboarding itself which plan would you like to choose. You can see that the free plan is almost hidden below the fold. They also offer to remind me when I have a few days left before my trial (but I didn't really read that copy). Different layouts for the same plan I installed the desktop app and haven't upgraded yet. On the final screen of the onboarding, it tries to sell me into the "Plus" plan. Again, it doesn't mention I could start a free trial on the CTA. Anyway, the imagery is great! It compares the free vs the paid plan. Although, 2 GB on the free plan is 0.1% the size of the paid plan limit. Not 33% that this visual demonstrates. Tip 💡 Compare the free plan vs paid plan visually. Might need an art director. Now, this is interesting. You saw earlier with the Essentials plan, I never saw Dropbox Plus. But now I do. Plus comes with no free trial, since it's a cheaper plan. I also got a little confused with their naming. How was Essentials more expensive than Plus? All prices uses 1 and 9 so it got even more confusing. There are a host of clever things Dropbox does Showing how close am I to the plan limit (Using 39KB of 2TB) with a progress bar No free trial vs free trial Show both monthly and yearly plans at once, and calculated in both frequencies Look at the differences, even in the features shown on the side. Dropbox lets you bypass their free trial. It's a good anchor to the free trial. You can request an invoice too. Manages expectation that it needs to be a larger order (team of 15+) They offer multiple payment providers (although some may not work well). Dropbox doesn't let me abandon the purchase flow. Once I clicked on the upgrade option via the onboarding flow in the desktop app, it doesn't let me simply abandon it. Lifecycle Emails Dropbox emails are very inspiring. They have the perfect email previews, use lots of liquid and HTML, is super on-brand, ties every email to their core action metric, and use proper sub-domains for sending so it never hurts deliverability. There's a lot to like! Email 1 Email 2 Upsells Dropbox does a great job at upselling me into a plan. In the UI, you'll see "Invite Team Members" plastered at nearly three different places. If you were to click on it, you'd see this modal that asks you to upgrade into Dropbox Business. So, essentially I was upsold while I was in the middle of a trial. And I can't purchase just one more seat, so I need to purchase a minimum of three seats. Once you upgrade to business use cases, the invite flow is also incredible. Your team members are assigned tasks by you. Two are selected by default. One of the tasks is to upload their personal folder. The more team members upload their personal folder, the more likely will you hit those storage limits if any. Another cool thing Dropbox does, it it will ask all your team members to invite more team members in the onboarding itself. They customize the reasons for inviting differently for team members vs admin. Admin might care about security but team members might care about other things. I'll talk more about their invite flow in another blog post. It's extensive! If I were to get a trial on the business tier, it wouldn't give the bare minimum of 3 licenses but rather give me five. Feature Discoverability A big reason why people pay is how deeply you are integrated with their workflow. Many users might churn stating that they left because a feature wasn't available. When, you probably had that feature and they couldn't discover it. The beautiful thing about software is that people pay when they receive value and stop paying when they don't. Feature discoverability plays a strong role in making the first part of it happen. The coolest thing that Dropbox does is that each product has their own tutorial/onboarding. Dropbox's Replay had the best onboarding of all times. My mind was blown. You can watch it here . Can't embed it unfortunately, no idea why not. They also added a PDF file because one of the features was to "Send and Track" files. This PDF would come in handy as I discovered another feature of theirs, hidden under their most used button. My first thought when I saw this was, "Huh!? You can edit PDFs these days? Wow". This is probably so useful. The thing about feature discoverability is that people might not even know what they need until you show it to them. And Dropbox introduced me to 10s of features in a matter of a few minutes without being intrusive. Such as this one: "you can convert file formats with Dropbox!?" Sometimes, it would trigger the good old modal window when I opened up a new product. Other times, it would highlight the button enticing you to click on it. When I uploaded a file, it automatically opens up in the sidebar and the first thing I saw was this share button. And it doesn't stop there. Dropdown gives you reasons why you might want to share. In-product onboarding is more natural. They open up a feature I haven't yet explored. If they detect that I have explored a feature, it won't open up. This button on the main dashboard keeps changing based on which feature I might have not explored yet. When to monetize They monetize the number of templates, and it is not just 1-2 but a healthy limit of 15. Perhaps, it triggers a sales conversation. A niche little feature that lets you compare versions, is an add-on. Btw, the upsell you see in a feature disappears after the first click. So, they don't continuously spam the user. And also open up room for few features. Contact sales is not visible on the cheapest tier. I saw a popup only when I hit the business tier. Failed Payments When you login, this is the modal window it’ll show to you. You see this banner with a countdown at all times. Plus a "Add billing details" as a CTA that replaces the upgrade button. Thanks for reading, I'm going to improve this article in the next couple of months. There's a lot to learn!

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso The status quo for SaaS products is onboarding. But most onboarding funnels add more friction than they seek to remove. And if activation is your goal, there's only so many steps or friction that you can remove. At Streamline, we provide icons and illustrations. People can browse, customize, and export as many assets as they want. And it's not just the web app that is ungated. Our Figma and Lucid plugins as well as our desktop app is ungated or has open funnels. There's literally no barrier to using the product. Humble beginnings.. A indie-maker created a zip file with some icons. It went viral. People asked for more. And the indie maker turned into a full-blown company. After I joined, Streamline moved from a transactional based business model to a subscription based model. People had to sign up to use the free product back then. Streamline's current onboarding.. Check out our onboarding: 1. You land on the icons homepage with all free sets at the top 2. You click into a set 3. You customize colors and size before exporting in the format you want. 4. And that's it. No watermarks. No low-resolution images. No signup needed. No account. No credit card. No questionnaire. Note: We do ask users to attribute to us if they use for free. The free tier is generous enough for most users and acts us our growth loop to generate high quality backlinks. The good stuff of open funnels.. People experience the product without friction and are delighted because it delivers on what they were hoping to get. One big benefit for us is via programmatic SEO. The more time people spend on the page, Google rewards us and ranks us higher. Activation explodes because there are no onboarding steps that lead to drop offs. Everyone skipped the line. More product data, perhaps 10x more than what'd you'd see with a traditional gated experience. This helps us understand which searches have no relevant results and if some icon sets convert better than the others. More users to run experiments. Instead of relying simply on homepage A/B testing, we now have more users in the product. The not-so-good stuff of frictionless onboarding.. Tracking is extremely hard. You have to stitch pre-login and post-login data together. If your audience is tech-savvy, you have to invest in server-side tracking to bypass adblockers that block client-side. Around 40-60% of devs, designers and tech-savvy people have ad blockers turned on. Users once lost are lost forever. If you fail to activate a user, you can't hope to win them back via onboarding emails. Lifecycle campaigns won't cover up for an average product experience. You're setting up users to fail. Some users require more hand-holding or your product has complex features that you can't just let people explore on their own. No sunk costs to keep users invested. It's easy to quit and make another search on google. Conversion rates will be lower because more people explore the product. In a traditional setup, these people would've dropped off already in an onboarding. No segmentation data. Onboarding usually helps to get information around industry, company size, role, traffic source, etc. And without one, your cohort analysis capabilities are limited. No user data means harder to qualify users or pipe them into sales funnels. You can't even customize the emails based on what their role / jbtd is about. You can customize only based on what you've seen them use. To get people to sign up, you'd have give away even more value. We layered on a free trial to get people to sign up. At the end of the day, you have good friction and bad friction. You have to choose whether to keep both or remove both. Thanks for reading :) Khushi Lunkad

A while back, I had to run A/B tests to improve the activation rate. If you've never run in-product A/B tests before, it can be a little overwhelming so here's a simple guide on how to get started. The first test The first test we conducted showed a significant lift, increasing our core action from 14% to 21%. It was a tiny change, but it made a huge impact. And got buy-in to run more experiments. The second test After we working on activation, we went a bit deeper making sure each part of the funnel was tested. We found a user insight that we wanted to actively solve for. The result? If you look at the data below, you can see that the percentage of people that successfully went and selected a plan increased by 28%. And all other health metrics improved. The test concluded that if site traffic remained constant, we had improved trial starts by 6%. I also want to acknowledge that it was a relatively big change (involved positioning and messaging) that required a week of design and dev support. When we first launched the test variant, the test failed. So, we watched some Hotjar recordings. Discovered a few bugs and some design flaws. Everyone jumped in to help and we quickly fixed it. Had we lost faith in the test early on, we wouldn't have done anything to improve it. You can start via these 3 ways. I've over-simplified them so you know where to look and what to look for. Option 1 Step 1) Use a feature flagging tool like Flagr to conduct A/B tests. Developers will create two different environments (control and test). Step 2) Then send that data to Mixpanel, linked with the users' device IDs. Step 3) Next, analyze the data in Mixpanel. Mixpanel will directly calculate statistical significance for you, which is helpful. Option 2 Step 1) Send data from Segment directly to a tool like Statsig . Or via code. I chose Statsig because it was used by companies like Notion, Microsoft, Flipkart. It was self-serve (no need to speak to a sales rep to get started). They also offer a nice startup program if you wanted that? Statsig really speeds up the process of running experiments. You get to see all your metrics easily and can filter users with the user profile data that works best for you. I haven't completely explored the product myself, so it's a good idea to do some research on your own. In my own journey, I've evaluated Eppo, Optimizely, Taplytics, Split.io, and Launchdarkly. I finally chose Statsig. Step 2: Conduct experiments in Statsig. The process is similar: developers set up an experience, and you run a test, sending data to Statsig. Step 3: Then make a decision Option 3 Step 1) Utilize the experimentation tool in your analytics platform, like Mixpanel Experiments . Step 2) Ask developers to code the experience and run the test. What to test? To collect qualitative data for this test, I sent an email to users who signed up but did not activate in the product, asking for clear reasons why they didn't. It worked well but only after a bit of tweaking (adjust copy, timing etc). Here's the final template that worked well (h/t to Hillary for sharing): Subject : Brutal feedback for {company name} Body : Hi {first name}, I noticed that you signed up for {company name} but never did {core action}. Any chances you'd share why?—even a single sentence would go a long way in helping us improve the platform. Thanks! {founder's name} Founder at {company name} Start here with the user research if you want. Then validate with data. And finally, move on to building your test using the three options I shared above! Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi