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I have a serious problem. It's when copy is full of feelings like "this is the best software for" or "you'll double revenue by x". Everything is disputable. That's cotton candy copy. This is my plea to.... stop writing such copy? To describe Streamline's Flex icon sets, we've said something like this. Go ahead, try and read it!! "Flex redefines icons with smooth, flowing curves, moving beyond rigid structures for a more natural, dynamic aesthetic. Designed on a 14px grid, it brings fluidity and elegance to any design. With adjustable size, stroke, and color, these icons adapt seamlessly to any project. How enjoyable was the reading experience for you? It wasn't for me. Every set in Streamline comes with a color editor so you can change colors. It’s cotton candy copy because it tries to say too many things at once using vague adjectives. Every icon is supposedly seamless to integrate (atleast in Streamline). 14px is redundant. It exists as a separate line item on the page anyway. Flex is a wonderful set, and the description doesn't do it justice. [Please know that Streamline was ok for me to share WIP projects and share my learnings with the world. Companies may differ so check your legal contracts.] Now, read something like this, "Bobbie Organic Whole Milk Infant Formula is the first and only American-manufactured, USDA Organic whole milk infant formula and our closest to breast milk yet." This copy is probably easier to read. It does a few things: 'first and only' explains your reason to exist. 'American-manufactured' is another USP 'closest to breast milk' is a visual metaphor that people can immediately understand Let's look at another example along the lines of metaphors. "AI-first UCaaS for team collaboration lets you work together without friction using Meetings, Chat, Docs, and more, all built into Zoom Workplace." First of all, do you see the amount of text on this page? It's not meant for skim-reading (and most people skim read). Zoom also uses jargon like 'UCaaS'. Do you know what is that? See, I don't have any context on what this kind of copy is doing for Zoom. But, as someone with an opinion, I feel compelled to say, that I wouldn't want to write Streamline's copy like this. It's an anti-inspiration of where we'd want to be as a product . We don't want to overestimate what the customer knows, nor understimate their knowledge. Let's take another example. "Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We’re #2." It's visual. It's concise. It's extreme. It tells everything the customer needs to know, in the fewest words possible. Here's another one. "Romance for one. Shop the Maven Dress from Reformation, a cap sleeve maxi dress with a mock neckline, drop waist, and pleating at the skirt." It's visual. It's a metaphor. It's factual (cap sleeve maxi dress), with all details you can't immediately see. It is not subjective. There is nothing on the copy that you can dispute. Let's compare with another brand that is opinion-driven and is subjective. "Loud, comfy & so much fun! Made from the softest fabric, it's like wearing a hug that's also chic. This is all you need to make a statement without saying a word. The statement? Being chic should always be this comfortable!" There are too many adjectives. “Loud,” “comfy,” “fun,” “softest,” “chic,” “comfortable.” These are all subjective and mean nothing concrete. Who decided it's comfortable? Tries too hard to sound fun. You don’t learn anything about the product itself (style, silhouette, fabric type, structure). Redundant and wordy. Repeats “chic” twice, uses clichés (“make a statement without saying a word”). Exaggeration is ok. Subjective/opinionated isn't. The reason why I'm sticking to fashion and beauty brands is because there's not a lot of differentiation. It's an over-saturated space. And yet, they have found a way to communicate clearly. Software has so much more to offer. So, if copywriters get to know the product a bit deeper, we can write a lot more meaningful copy. Let's take an example from rhode. They have a moisturizer, named as "glazing milk". The name alone is very visual! The description is better! The essential prep step for your skincare routine. Glazing Milk is a potent, nutrient-rich complex with a milky texture that leaves skin feeling hydrated and glowy while boosting the skin barrier over time. Notice the words used: essential prep tells you when to use it skincare routine tells you to add it to your routine potent, nutrient rich, leaves skin feeling hydrated, boost skin barrier... all do things. They're active, factual and sensory. Not vague. texture 'milky' is described visually no repetition or any filler Unlike Streamline, this is not wordy. Every sentence adds some meaning. On the other hand, some brands use “perfect texture” or “incredible formula” or use adjectives that are subjective rather than objective. Metaphors go a long way. Songwriters often use them. This is one: “You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive. As if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it. Not everyone has invested in you in order to be able to have the capital for you to care about this.” Compares energy as expensive. As a physical item. I looked at the top Billboard songs and got ChatGPT to analyze it for metaphors. Here's what it found. Song Excerpt Metaphor Explained Daisies  – Justin Bieber “We grew from the dirt, and I still see your roots in me.” Concrete imagery (soil, roots) Lose Control  – Teddy Swims “I feel like a ghost without your breath.” “Ghost without your breath” conveys dependence without adjectives. Soda Pop  – Saja Boys “We fizz till we’re flat / taste the rush then fade to black.” Everyday object (soda) turned metaphor. Soda as a stand-in for youth, excitement, and burnout. Simple nouns (“fizz,” “flat”) do the emotional lifting; no subjective adjectives needed. I Got Better  – Morgan Wallen “Turned my heartbreak into horsepower.” Uses a physical measure (“horsepower”) to depict inner change. Love Me Not  – Ravyn Lenae “I’m the echo in the canyon / you forgot to call back.” Sound and distance depict rejection. Your Idol  – Saja Boys “Polished my pain till it gleamed like your chain.” Turned something abstract (pain) into something visual (chain) If you have a favorite artist, take a look at their lyrics :) Typically, I want to avoid jargon as best as possible. But sometimes you can still have jargon, if it has a novelty effect. For example, Loro Piana describes their trousers as: "Crafted for refined ease, the Coste trousers are knitted from pure vicuña – a precious fibre sourced from the Andean camelid, revered for its softness and natural warmth. The half-fisherman’s rib construction accentuates the sleek, tapered-leg silhouette, anchored by a flexible waistband. Considered details, like ribbed edges and subtle drop stitches, sign off the pair with the Maison’s characteristic savoir-faire." It's long. But it's readable. Each word is unique. You may not know what 'Andean camelid' is but it's precise. It uses a real, specific term instead of a generic word like “rare animal” or “soft wool.” “Andean” instantly paints a picture of mountains and altitude. You can almost feel the terrain. It implies exclusivity through specificity. The reader senses luxury because few people know what a vicuña or Andean camelid is. The expensive diction is still clear and literal. There is no fluff like “exquisite,” “beautiful,” or “perfect.” You can only write non-subjective copy if you know the product well enough. When you don't know the product, you gravitate towards writing subjective copy. We invent feelings when they we don't have the facts. Knowledge makes copy concrete. I've created a CustomGPT for myself with all examples. If you have a style you like, save the ideas somewhere on a Notion doc, and paste them into ChatGPT as a pdf to work on top off. You'll be surprised at the results. ChatGPT gave me this copy for Flex, "Flex is a fluid icon family inspired by nature’s curves. It replaces rigid geometry with smooth, flowing forms. It’s more organic and expressive than Core (neutral) but subtler than Plump (chunky, playful)." It needs a few more tweaks before it's customer-facing. But I'm pretty happy with the bot! If you feel like, drop a comment below or say hi !

This is a standalone resource where I make a laundry list of everything that inspires me. If you haven't read the rest of my blog already, I'd recommend starting there . The rest of my blog posts are related to my work. This one has a strong mix of inspiration outside work, and it's also a work-in-progress. Books Panchantantra This is an ancient collection of children stories that had a huge impact on my life. Each story is interconnected to the next one and teaches kids about moral values like friendship and trust. My father narrated one story to me and my brother every night growing up. I can't find the original texts online but when I do, I'll link to it. Horse Sense by Jack Trout If you've read my piggybacking article , you know I'm a fan of this method to grow companies. You don't need to read the entire book to get the point. Inside Intuit They actually wrote a book about the early days. There are some direct marketing ads in there, and you can see how different Intuit was to everyone else that was building then. Companies Uniqlo Uniqlo 's cost of goods sold makes up 53% of their total revenue. This is significantly higher than other fashion companies like Ralph Lauren or Zara, so they're a much better value for money. Marketing spend is only at 3%. Uniqlo made it's founder the wealthiest person in Japan. I like companies that operate like this. Reformation Their tagline is "Being naked is the #1 most sustainable option. We're #2." Masterful copywriting. Uses the fewest possible words to get the message out. ASUS They make computers. Taiwanese company. ASUS blows out all other laptops I've ever used in my life. Customer service is excellent. To give you context: Asus will send someone home to fix things if all I do is send an email. On the other hand, Apple will force me to call someone and spend 2 hours trying to screenshare. And they might not even solve the problem. There are a thousand more features than my 16" Macbook Pro and surprisingly faster too than the 48GB Apple Silicon I have. I'm impressed by their engineering power and depth of service. But they're not easy to shop from. Posthog Posthog is a software that helps other software companies build better products with tools like product analytics, surveys, feature flagging, and experimentation amongst other things. They are chronically obsessed with transparency, focus on breadth over depth, and do branding in a strangely tasteful way. Start here . Canva X GiveDirectly Very cool mission. Very cool execution. People Diana Stegall I enjoyed her podcast ' Land of Desire ' about French history, culture, and food. The storytelling and production was the best I've ever seen. She currently works as a senior editor in tech. Biswa This is an Indian comedian. I wanted to try my hand at standup comedy, improv (or atleast bringing humor in marketing) and found a youtube playlist of him teaching comedy. It's not pretty to look at, but this is the only available version today. Quotes Tur i oturen This is a Swedish quote that literary translates to "luck in bad luck". It's like the lady that had a heart attack on a flight (bad luck) but there were 15 cardiac surgeons on the same flight since they were all heading to the same conference in LA so she was okay (good luck). I heard it on a podcast lately and thought it was cool enough to bookmark. घमण्डी का कोई ईश्वर नहीं , ईर्ष्यालु का कोई पड़ोसी नहीं, क्रोधी का कोई मित्र नहीं This is a Hindi (Indian) quote roughly translated to "The arrogant has no God, the envious has no neighbor, and the angry has no friend". It comes from the faith I follow and I like to remind myself to walk this path. I think I got it from the Bhagwat Geeta but it's been years so I'm not sure. We are the ones we've been waiting for Nice. Everything Else Bananas in the US Bananas in the US are twice/thrice larger than you'd find in India. They are huge . Almost the size of your forearm. And that reflects across everything they do: giant Coke bottles, large fruits and vegetables, big homes, and so on. Having worked with Americans for the past five years, I’ve noticed a difference in the way they operate. They take risks and move fast. They always want more. You can’t become an economic superpower in such a short period without that mindset. France, on the other hand, has more delicate fruits, and it shows in how they operate. Their products are naturally more artistic, and they care about little details. India grows hardy crops that offer high nutrition at a lower cost (e.g., makhana, ragi). That’s why Indians can innovate at a surprisingly low cost. There’s even a word for it: jugaad . If you have time to spare, I’d recommend watching YouTube videos on “Supermarket tour in X country.” It’s a great way to see how people buy and sell. More so, since software is already internationalized.

A long list of little things I discovered in the activation flow (part 1). Over a 130 screenshots If you only have time to read a few, I recommend 4, 9, 14, 16, 20, 26, 30 Potential opportunities? Not sure if this is an A/B test or a bug, but I did not see this screen in the onboarding process. After the segmentation questions, it took me straight to the modal window (?pathway=share). To reproduce, you'll need to sign up via the direct google identity login system via a work email. I also see "personal" recommended when I sign up via a work email address. It only happens when I use the email/password combo to sign up. 2. Cookie banner could be a little more subtle. I saw the cookie banner and the Google identity login on the same screen. Almost ate up half of the screen. 3. Users need to scroll to see the next question. (I'm on my smaller laptop so shouldn't affect most users). It could lead to higher incomplete rates. Suggestion would be to auto-scroll and align to the next one. Progress bar also doesn't progress as I answer all four questions since they're on the same vertical flow, essentially making it feel like the progress is static. Another suggestion would be to have a tooltip over Continue . Or some action when I hit Continue . When you hit back, your progress is lost. It would be nice to partially save progress similar to how Typeform/Tally do. 4. Perhaps this entire area that says Drop files here to upload could be clickable and not just the Upload button. A good example is YouTube Studio, though not perfect. 5. I lack business context here but would it be better to let users upload both files and folders at once? Why should someone need to make an extra click and bifurcate their search? 6. Image previews only appear after a few hours. After I upload the file, it would be nice to see the preview appear. 7. The start sharing button took me to a place where I could take no action, at least at first glance. The Share file button was disabled. A suggestion would be to group the "Create and copy link" button with the "Share file" button. It seemed a bit odd, even though I could eventually figure it out. 8. 8a. You probably know this, but the purchase flow opens in a new tab and not as a modal window. Not really an issue but thought I'd share incase you see an opportunity. 8b. It also doesn't say "Start Free Trial" unlike what the pricing page states. 9. Even after connecting my Google account, it doesn't pre-fill contact data. I'm thinking that was the purpose? Typing in, doesn't bring up any contacts. 10. There are a few links that open automatically btw. The Android page is one of them. Here's a bug report [link redacted]. 11. Great visual in the desktop app but it doesn't scale correctly.  2GB is 0.1% of 2000GB. The visual makes it seems like it's a third of it? 12. Essentials is more expensive than Plus. Plus is cheaper than Essentials. Was a bit confusing from a naming POV btw. 13. Probably need a different name for the app and the folder. Harder to re-open it because it accidentally crashed. 14. Entered card. Payment fails. I see no reason or error message. I just keep clicking on the button and nothing happens. 15. It asks for my PAN number. PAN number is a very sensitive number related to personal income taxes. I have never seen another company ask for it. My 2c is that if PayTm is asking for all those details from Bill, they are doing you dirty. When I pay via UPI, I should only be asked for my UPI ID (similar to a Paypal ID). It's one simple field. PayTm is likely creating an account in their software if they ask for my pan card details. PayTm's also not doing very well and could resort to doing such things to inflate their sign up numbers :( 14. There isn't anything like address number. It's a duplicate of zip code/pin code in the Dropbox flow. You could remove it. VAT is also deprecated, and replaced by GST. 15. Payment via UPI goes through and I see it in my bank account. But Dropbox never sees the light of it in the UI. In fact, I could see I had two subscriptions active and yet, it won't remove the banner in the dashboard. I'll update this if a charge goes through in 30 days. 16. Emails trigger far too often. Same emails are received twice. Both variants of an A/B test are sent a couple of minutes apart. Security new sign in email is received even I set a password/verify my email for the first time. 17. Kind of odd to not have a tier for 2 users. 18. Upsell (essential to business) required me to re-enter my card. Address was pre-filled though. 19. Doesn't auto-pull contacts from my work email address. 20. Desktop app for Dropbox is wonky. Kept crashing for an entire day. I couldn't reopen it. Reason was weird. Couldn't even open this message properly. 21. Still says "essentials" at the top when I have upgraded to "business" 22. Even when I see the "Billing Method Updated Successfully", it refuses to remove the banner. 23. Share works on one folder at time. Maybe have it work on multiple folders? 24. Surprised I never saw that you have this feature in the UI. So cool! 25. Replay onboarding asks users to upload a video and she waits for a few seconds for us to upload. I don't see any button in the same screen. 26. Upgrade bug in replay. I click on Learn more Takes me here. 27. Tiny, but that "Feedback" link isn't easy to see. 28. Could reduce the spacing at the top. 29. Have you considered allowing people to embed Replays in their website? It doesn't seem like it works today. 30. All CTAs in app don't mention that free trial is available btw. It would improve the CTR in the button copy if it was clearer that there's a trial available?

If you’re working on churn or retention, this resource was built for you. It distills everything I’ve learned over the past two years from pattern-matching data across companies like Notion, Calendly, Superhuman, and many others. There are three places where I’ve built my churn muscle: A churn software : it probably has the largest churn dataset on the internet, with billions of dollars worth of protected revenue. My experience : solving churn at Streamline and with several consulting clients. Our partners : unicorns and startups alike that trust us to improve their retention. Together, these experiences have given me insights on churn that you won’t find anywhere else on the internet today. 👇 Raj , who is the VP of Product at Mozilla said this: The Argument Against Churn The first thing to remember is that churn is solvable, at least to a certain extent. A lot of it depends on your product and target audience, of course. But a lot of it is still within arm’s reach. Some things work for all businesses. Some things only work for a few. But, churn is solvable . If it were not, companies would not be building retention-focused products either. A lot of times, we feel that churn is not possible to solve. I would like you to read this article with the mindset that it can be solved. The Basics The churn and retention world comes with plenty of jargon, and for good reason. Take a look at the terms and try to fill in any gaps you might have. Just like a good yoga or pilates class starts with theory, this one will too. Then, we'll move on to tactics . Tip: If you can’t finish the article in one go, bookmark it so it’s easy to find later. Voluntary churn: This is the kind of churn where people raise their hand to quit. They may click on the "cancel subscription" button, ask customer support to refund their last payment, or cancel the subscription via Google Pay or their bank without interacting with your software. Voluntary churn typically makes up around 60% of total churn. Involuntary churn: This is the second type of churn. It happens when people quit silently and unknowingly. For example, a card declines because the bank returns a "do not honor" error. Sometimes the card expires and the customer needs to update it. This makes up a large portion of your churn numbers, but you will not see a breakdown of this in most platforms. The easiest way to calculate it is to subtract voluntary churn from total churn. Revenue churn: Revenue churn measures churn by looking at the amount of money lost. For example, if you lost $1M this month and $800k last month, that is your revenue churn. Subscriber churn: This measures churn by counting customers lost. Every customer is treated equally, whether they are large or small. Measuring both is useful. It helps answer whether you are losing a few big customers or many small ones, so you can decide what to fix. If you lose one large customer, the strategy you need is different. A simple bank retry will not be enough. These four metrics help you understand who you are losing and why. Retention cohort chart This is a chart that plots subscribers by their cohorts and months. There are typically four ways to read it. Horizontal : how does a cohort perform over time compared to other cohorts? Vertical : how do cohorts perform in their starting month compared to another month? Diagonal and outliers Retention Curves The above chart is typically complex to read, so it is converted into a curve chart. The goal for most businesses is to have a smile curve. The worst is the declining chart. Layered cake chart A cake chart looks something like this. It is those smile curves stacked together. And what you want to see is this growing. You can see how each cohort contributes to total revenue over a period of time. When it does not, it looks like this. You can see how each cohort contributes to total revenue over a period of time. As Elena Verna shares, "The main point is that after 6 or 7 years in business, as much as 80% of revenue comes from existing accounts." A cake chart can demonstrate this well. You can break these charts down further (for example, by geography) to figure out if a certain market retains better than another. If so, you can prioritize retention efforts in the weaker market. Net Revenue Retention This is where things get a bit more complex. Net revenue retention takes into account expansion and contraction revenue. So if you had an MRR of $100 at the start, of which $10 churned, but you expanded existing clients by $5 and downgraded existing clients by $2, your net revenue retention would be: = (100 - 10 + 5 - 2)/100 = 93% Net basically accounts for everything. Gross Revenue Retention Gross does not account for everything. It is stricter. It ignores upsells but punishes you for any contractions. With the above example, your gross revenue retention is 88%. Typically, when people refer to Gross and Net churn, they refer to revenue churn, not subscriber churn. Net Subscriber/Logo Retention This measures customers lost, upgraded, and downgraded. Gross Subscriber/Logo Retention The same idea as above, but stricter. It accounts for customers lost and downgraded but ignores upsells. It keeps you humble, honestly. But it is typically not used for investor reporting where you want to look good. Hard vs Soft Declines Ok, do you remember we covered involuntary churn a little while ago? There are actually two sub-parts of involuntary churn. Hard decline  is when the card permanently declines. For example, the card expired, was stolen, or was blocked by the issuer. Soft decline  is when the issue is temporary. The payment failed but the bank tells you that it is temporary, so you can retry later. An example is "insufficient funds." There are lots of decline codes. Some banks do not return correct codes either and may put it under "do not honor." It involves the entire financial infrastructure, so it is no surprise that things can get complex. For now, knowing that involuntary churn happens due to hard and soft declines is helpful. You can measure this by looking at the failed payment codes returned by your payment provider. Export all failed payments with their codes, then group them by error code. You can google whether the code is a hard decline or a soft decline. Break things down by geography (Japan, India, USA), card issuer (Visa, Amex), and other details if you want to see interesting patterns in your data. Monthly vs annual churn This is where things get interesting. Did you know that a 5% monthly churn equals 46% annual churn? And at 7%, you lose closer to 75% of all customers annually? Looking at monthly churn numbers can be relieving, but converting them to annual churn paints a realistic and honest picture of where you are. It will also be more motivating. And if you reduce monthly churn by just 1%, you could improve acquisition by around 10%. It is a good lever to work on, provided you can make it work. First term-churn This is the number of people who cancel after the first billing interval. For example, a monthly subscriber pays and cancels immediately, or cancels before their billing cycle renews. This is your first-term churn. It is not ARR until it recurs. Expansion MRR Revenue growth from existing subscribers. Contraction MRR Revenue lost from existing subscribers who downgraded to a cheaper paid plan. Customer Health Score This grades each customer as either at risk or healthy. A simple way to calculate this is to look at product engagement data. Have they used the features? Telecom companies use hundreds of datapoints, such as whether a customer is on a family plan, to decide whether someone is at risk or healthy. Knowing the health score of each customer is what helps build a great retention strategy. Churn is a lagging indicator, so having a health score brings directional data closer. This allows you to move faster and test things. There are many data science projects on Kaggle and videos on YouTube that show you how to calculate this. Time to churn The average time from signup to cancellation. This is what you need to beat. If you increase LTV by even one month, what is the impact on the bottom line? Reactivation rate What percentage of users cancel and then come back? Creating a cohort chart is more helpful than a single-point chart. You could go deeper into this and breakdown using any of the above methods (like churn reason, subscription tier, churn timing - first time vs returning customer) If you made an offer such as a discount at the point of cancellation, you would want to measure: second churn rate (how many people churn again) time to second churn reactivation discount dependency (how many stay after the discount ends, so you can create a discounting strategy) I'm assuming that you'll measure all of the obvious retention metrics like DAU, WAU, MAU, feature adoption rates, that are required for your product. Creating a churn reduction strategy The first thing to do is understand your goals. How soon do you want to move the needle? How many resources do you have? What sort of buy-in do you have from the rest of the company? What kind of retention results would be a stretch goal for you? You'd have to look at the data to be able make a goal. Being able to reduce churn by 20% is typically a good goal to have. But it depends on the business scale and existing investment. You can DM me if you'd like some directional advice. Deploying churn reduction tactics Not all tactics will help you. There have been times when I have run marketing projects that had no real impact, and other times when they completely changed the trajectory of the company. That is the nature of the job. We are not surgeons. People do not expect perfection each time. If you do hit home runs every time, the risk is that you are not taking big bets. Simple Cancel Flow You can create advanced cancel flows but it doesn't take a lot to get started. Stripe lets you redirect users to a custom link on cancellation. This is what OpenAI uses for feedback collection alongside Qualtrics. Failed Payment Retries When cards fail due to reasons like insufficient funds, you can simply retry the card without emailing the customer. Mastercard and Visa have some limits how often you can retry. Retries are usually very impactful, and require zero engineering lift to turn on. Cluster Feedback Dump the CSV in any AI tool and ask it to cluster ( example prompts ). Assume some inaccuracies. Usage Data on Cancellation Show what users will lose at point of cancellation. Canva does this well  showing how many pro features the user has used. Block Features Sometimes the buyer and user of the product are two different people. Display in-app paywalls with card-updater on the same page. Offer grace periods instead of revoking immediately. Bitly shows this, but it's actually quite buggy. You can a pause wall if the user has paused the subscription. Framer redirects to Stripe. Toggle On Auto-Renew Users turn off auto-renew. Find creative ways to encourage them again ( read Elena's article ). Some companies roll over credits if you don't let your subscription cancel. Many companies will show a banner at the top, which can be a bit intrusive. Trial Extensions If you detect low usage or a drop off after a trial, extend it automatically. If it's a paid trial, offer an extension at point of churn. If it's a free trial, consider other ways. Friction Logs Run friction logging  with new hires to capture points of friction/errors. Ben Williams shares how to effectively run it. You could hire folks to run it or ask new hires to do so. I ran one for Dropbox that their team found helpful. Refund Offers When people ask for refunds due to budget reasons, make an offer. Chess.com  does this when students churn. Multiple Senders Send dunning emails via different senders to maximize deliverability and open rates. Prevents email threading. Grandfathered Users Show grandfathered users or folks on a discounted plan the dollar values of what they would lose if they cancel. People often appreciate a disclaimer and will retain. Segmented Cancel Flows Segment cancel flows based on user's age, tenure, region, plan etc. A/B test and make different offer types to identify best for each segment. Abandoned Cancellations Monitor people that visit the cancellation page but don't cancel. They're either dissatisfied if tenure is long or want to see how easy it is to cancel if they perform this within the first few hours of signing up. Confirmation Step Add a confirmation step, "Are you sure?" instead of immediately cancelling. This goes a long way and people often change their minds. Comply with laws like FTC's click to cancel so your flows aren't annoying to cancel. Pauses Let people pause their subscription and pick a custom pause length. Test different lengths to see what maximizes revenue for you. Pauses extend LTV by ~5.5 months ( source ). Expiring Card Reminders Do you send emails to users whose cards are about to expire? If so, test without it. Card tokenization has made it a thing of the past in some regions and can hurt more than it can help. Localized Cancel Flows If you have an international audience, localize the cancel flow in their language. Your brand marketers will love it too. Sometimes, required by law. Add a Sunk Cost Give users something that prevents a cancellation. Like unused credits roll over if they stay subscribed. Having a sunk cost prevents cancellation. Map Feedback to MRR Lost Continuously map feedback to MRR lost so you can prioritize feedback by revenue whether it's feature gaps, bugs, or competitors. Churn Risk Model Run a churn risk model. Train it based on dozens of variables (tenure, LTV, features used) so that the model returns whether a user is likely to churn or stay. View tutorial , research paper . Hidden Plans If users don't use all your features, let them downgrade to a lite plan at the point of cancellation. No need to clutter up your pricing page with this. Canva, Adobe, Spotify all offer daily, weekly, monthly and yearly plans in-app but not on their pricing page. Skip Logins Dunning emails and SMS links should take people to the card updater page. Without forcing a login. You're fighting procrastination, more so with consumers, so each step is a drop off point. Charge Early Charge 30 days prior to renewal for yearly renewals (if it makes sense for your business). Website builders do this. Multi-Year Subscriptions Offer longer than 1 year subscriptions. Domain registrars offer 2-3 year contracts because they know it's an impulse purchase most of the time. Prorated Refunds if Underused Automatically reduce invoice if product is underused. Slack doesn't charge for inactive users and it proved well . Some companies that cater to seasonal businesses auto discount subscriptions for a portion of the year. Walmart was about to churn from Slack because managing access was difficult. That's what led Slack to devise a customer-friendly billing policy. “I’m a huge believer in less friction. Of all the places you can remove the friction, the purchase decision would be a big one.” — Stewart Butterfield Reactivation Campaigns For products with an on-and-off use case or a low switching cost, reactivation campaigns help. Make a great offer and reduce friction best you can (eg, no logins required). Typically hard to pull off. Assemble Trigger Moments Remind people that they need to use you, outside of your product. Oreo used Got Milk  and the entire desserts range. Force Network Effects If your product has some sort of a network effect, don't gate it. If it doesn't, try to add one creatively. Eg, sharing your daily workout wasn't done before Strava  decided to make it cool. Gifts Swag retains. Hard to scale. Tools: loopandtie  or ongoody.com  but you can also make it artsy like Figma. Transform A Drop Off Point If your free tier has a limit that causes people to drop off (eg, Dropbox' 2GB storage), let them raise this limit by helping you. Like a referral program. Secondary Products If your core product has natural churn, layer on a secondary product. People use Zillow to buy homes. You don't purchase homes often. To offset that, Zillow launched Zillow Zestimate  to increase retention. New Products If your core product has natural churn and a definite day when they don't need you anymore, get users to switch. Bumble launched Bumble for Work and Friends. Consider using a different brand though. Login Method Reminder Show last used login method so people can quickly remember which method they used to sign up. Example can be found here . [more tactics coming soon] Also, a huge thank you to everyone who said nice things about this article. I am beyond grateful. Sapph Yip who was kind enough to tell me that Mind the Product featured in their newsletter that goes out to 150k people. Mind the Product is a communuity for PMs that picked it up organically, and I only found out after they published it. I'm super impressed with their curation muscle. Aman Kumar (Growth at Rippling ) went all in. Taylor O'Brien is a product leader in the monetization space and led Involuntary Churn @ HBO Max. He focused on prevention + recovery of subscription payment failures. He's got a rich portfolio of work on his personal site. Marc Sirkin who runs a boutique consulting shop and has done leadership roles at SEMRush, PwC, Microsoft amongst others. Adam Sanghera (Software Engineer). He's got a neat personal site too :) Natalie A. Thomas , who is a Research and Strategy Director. Having a designer say good things about a churn article is a high honor! Also, my incredible marketing professor ( Sourjo Mukherjee ) from 6 years ago at Essec Business School. Steven Macdonald is the founder at OKRs Tool , and thinks this is best article he's ever read on churn. Wild. We've got Pedro , Ruhi , Jolene , and Fyodor too! Chris Todd  (Marketing Ops, Strategy) and Kerry Campion  (PMM), who are in Slack, ready to upskill themselves. Susan does Growth Product Marketing at Google and holds a host of different titles. She shared it with her audience and I can't thank her enough for the vote of confidence. And so did Devprakash , who is a UX designer out of Germany. P.S - If you found this article via word of mouth, please tell me who shared it so I can properly thank them :)

Collecting Cancellation Data Stripe has this functionality in their billing settings that you can use to capture cancellation reasons. Once you have this set up, you get two types of data: MCQ options that people choose from Freeform text input field when people choose 'Other' option. Exporting Cancellation Data from Stripe Stripe will let you hover over each cancellation to see what they said. But you won't be able to export this data as a CSV. You'll have to use Stripe Sigma which comes with a 30 day free trial. I don't know SQL nor did I have the time to learn how to use it. So, I used ChatGPT. Fed ChatGPT some example codes from the template section of Sigma, and asked it to create one for this use case. Took me 20 minutes of trial and error but the outcome was pretty nice! You can paste both of these in the editor as is and then hit RUN. SQL Snippet #1 - Freeform field SELECT cancellation_reason_text, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason_text SQL Snippet #2 - MCQ field data SELECT cancellation_reason, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason Analyzing Churn Data Download the MCQ version and create a lovely bar graph to see the primary reasons why people cancel. For the freeform field, it'll require a bit more work before it's usable. You'll have to Import that data in Ch atGPT and ask it to run cluster analysis and 'group by themes'. Then, you can ask it to convert it to a table format, add numbers based on how many times the theme recurs, and expand on each! Making Decisions with Churn Data You'll know why people are cancelling before paying hundreds of dollars for a churn prevention tool. But once you know why people are cancelling, you can take better steps to across the product, starting with segmenting them at the onboarding. ⭐

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 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. #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.

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 a software which had brought down churn significantly. And after my investigation, I launched a new A/B test. 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. Metrics of a cancel flow A/B test 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). Why do people churn? And how well they respond to offers? 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. I prefer to do it in spreadsheets. Acceptance rate trend over time 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. Long vs short churn flow 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) What people really mean when they complain that the price is too high 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). Different offers to make 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: Pause wall 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 cancel flows and making more segments (eg, early churners vs later churners) is also another strategy to work on. If you're diving deep into churn, read my deeper churn guide . Best, Khushi

Localization is more than just purchasing power parity. The question I wanted to answer was what should my product be priced at... and if there was a simple plug-and-play calculator that lets me adopt smarter localization pricing plays. With that, I've covered: What does localization include? Three localization calculators for base price, laddering, and lite plans [ jump to section ] Price maps from Netflix, Canva, and Big Mac [ jump to section ] What does localization include? 1. Some countries get a discounted rate Canva in Uruguay costs 0.88 USD. You know this.. but the extent of this can be higher than 50%. 2. Some countries get a 'lite' plan Vietnam gets a mobile-only plan at 480p, costing $2.80/month. This is not available in many other countries. ChatGPT Go was first-launched in India at $4.5/month which is a stripped down version of the Pro plan. They expanded to Indonesia shortly after. India was supported via UPI payments. 3. They show local currency You don't directly convert to a funny looking number. But instead, round it off. And cleverly with a 90, or a 9, or a .99. If rounding off isn't possible, you can get it closer to 5 or 1. 4. Some countries get a higher rate Switzerland has a higher Big Mac Index at $8.07. Spotify in the US is $11.99. In Switzerland, Spotify is priced at $17.5. That's far higher than just currency conversion rate. As of now, 1 Swiss Franc is 1.26 USD. 5. Price laddering can be different The first tier vs the second tier don't scale proportionately in every country. In the US, the base price of Neflix (with ads) jumps by 125% to the next tier. But in Japan, it jumps by only 78%. United States Japan Tier 1: 720p or 1080p with ads $7.99 $6.03 Tier 2: 1080p with no ads $17.99 $10.77 Jump 1.25 0.79 6. Copy is translated and localized Audible localizes languages based on the user's region. Pricing is not the only thing that is localized. 7. Local payment methods are added This could be Klarna, WeChat Pay, Kakao Pay. Some people pay via an email-like ID, some people via a phone number. A credit/debit card isn't the only way. Surfshark also offers crypto payments because that's where the audience is at. They offer a free trial only on PayPal or Credit/Debit card. Paying via crypto forgoes the trial. Finding Patterns I've looked at 50 countries across the world comparing prices for Canva and Netflix. To make economists happy, I've also added the Big Mac Index data. Which is McDonald's way of deciding what each country should pay. With this, I've created some calculators that you can plug and play your numbers in. And get a rough idea what the pricing should be. What Each Calculator Does? The calculators localize pricing in a few ways: What your monthly price should be in each country, for the base tier? What your next pricing tier should be? Eg, if Netflix charges $7.99 in the US, what have they laddered up to in the next tier ($17.99)? Laddering is never consistent across regions. What lite plans should you offer and in which reions? Work backwards from the costs and strip down features that aren't a necessity. Keep your base price handy, which would be the base tier you offer in the US. For example, Loom's base tier is $15/month. Their pro tier is $20/month. Calculator 1: The One to Localize Base Price Big Mac is $5.69 in the US, Canva is $15/month, and Netflix is $7.99/month. Find your base tier. And enter in the box below. Then round off the numbers to the closest 9 ending. Calculator 2: The One With Laddering Laddering is never linear for many of the companies. In the US, the base price of Neflix (with ads) jumps by 125% to the next tier. But in Japan, it jumps by only 78%. Egypt gets a 720p plan that jumps by 65%. Norway's jumps by only 35%. That's because the base prices are localized ie the entry price. What costs $10 in Norway costs $2.5 in Egypt. If you plan to make your base tier competitive, you can use this laddering calculator. Calculator 3: The One For Lite Plans Lite plans are no-frills options available to certain regions. Where your base price isn't competitive enough and the market demands a cheaper price. Input your base price and see what price you could ladder down to. Example: Canva's Localized Pricing Hover on the map to see what Canva charges in each region. Uruguay gets Canva for 0.88 USD. Costa Rica gets Canva for 45.56 USD. That seemed like a bug to me. Canva typically localizes prices down to 25-50% of the original. They show localized currency pricing (eg, in Pounds for UK) for 22 regions. They offer the same plan across regions, unlike Netflix and Big Mac. There are no lite plans. Example: Big Mac's Localized Pricing Hover on the map to see what Big Mac charges in each region. The most common localization framework is the Big Mac framework, that economists often refer to. A Big Mac costs twice $8.07 in Switzerland In the US, it costs $5.69 And in Taiwan, it costs $2.28 Example: Netflix' Localized Pricing Hover on the map to see what Netflix charges in each region for their 1080p premium tier (which is often the second most expensive tier). Netflix has pricing tiers. Cheap, mobile-only plan at 480p 720p Base Plan 1080p with Ads Base Plan 1080p without ads 4k + HDR premium plan For most regions, they don't offer the mobile-only plan. They offer either the 720p or the ads plan. But never both. That way, their tiers never go beyond four on a page. Thanks for reading!

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. [Also read: What is a Growth PM, anyway? by Thomas Christensen ] 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 of competition 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, especially with their Black Friday deal . 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

No one dreams that they will become a marketer when they grow up. You could be a scientist pushing humanity forward. A surgeon saving lives. Or even a founder solving problems. Marketers? We're most commonly know to spam. Growth practitioners? We're most commonly know to suck the life out of a good product. Clearly, everyone hates marketers. It's not a secret. So, why on earth would I knowingly choose this profession? Re: "I love you" I once sent a newsletter. The response I got was "I love you" from one of our users. In a world where marketers spam, this is my KPI. Where people actually want to hear from you. Look, I know. Marketers don't build a product. All we do is amplify. We help good products reach more people. Like journalists, we amplify stories. Too often, good products die out because no one thought how to bring it to market. And build a real business around it. It's not this black and white with "good" and "bad". Amongst all of this, my aim is simple. Great products deserve to win, and then some more. And I do that in four ways: acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention. I almost never touch the core product but strongly influence the product depending on what the market wants and what we can win against. If your goal is entrepreneurship... Then solving marketing & growth is a great skillset to have. Consumer behavior is notoriously hard. People don't act the way they think. They don't think the way they act. It's as much of an art as its a science. Your company depends on you... Who do you think gets fired if the company fails to make money? Company doesn't perform well? They say "oh, our marketing isn't great". CMOs have the shortest tenure. Driving income is a huge responsibility that marketing and growth team shoulder together. The life of the company depends on how many people resonate with you and draw money out of their pockets. Marketing teams can no longer be siloed into these awareness-only buckets as they have been historically. You have to influence the product. You have to be on top of bugs, monetization model iterations, algorithm changes etc. You can't be accountable for revenue or poor performance if you don't have influence over every part of the company. * By influence, I don't mean ownership. Much to my mother's disapproval, I have rejected bonuses too. This is how I justify it: I will still want us to reinvest it back into the business. This is definitely not financially smart. Sometimes, companies know I'll reject it so they'll just send it and tell me later. More importantly, I also get to work with awesome people, who put me first. I understand not every company can and will do this. Unfortunately, I live for validation. The fact that people like what I do makes me happy. Almost every company that I have ever joined as a consultant offered me a full-time role :) Failure and feedback loops Marketing and growth teams are close to the customers in two ways. Failure is real. It cannot be sugarcoated by user count or qualitative feedback. Instead, if you're not making money, you're responsible. We have the shortest feedback loops. Product takes months to build. Design iterations take longer. Engineering has to get through several sprints to ship. We can ship an experiment and train our intuition almost immediately. It's as real as it gets. Customer support is close to customers but doesn't have revenue accountability (except for mature companies). We talk to customers to map out their buyer journey and trigger points. We know how we compare to our competition and what changes are they making in their product in real-time. Having short feedback loops and being close to customers gives us so much more insight into what works and doesn't. Given all that context, here are some founding principles of how I think about marketing and growth. My growth and marketing manifesto 1. No traffic for the sake of traffic Target people that will get value out of your product. It's easy to believe every channel can work for you. If you're a B2B brand selling solar home installations that cost tens of thousands of dollars, posting generic drowsy content on IG is never going to work. Be honest to yourself and look for early signals to lean into it or pivot away. Essentially, there are two types of users we want: 1) People who can get real value out of our product 2) People who offer us feedback to improve 2. Ship with intensity and urgency Focus on things that matter. And then execute best you can. I've made mistakes of hiring people that simply cannot get things done. Or they need a hundred feedback rounds to ship even the little things. It's hard to find people who love what they do so much so that intensity and urgency is a by-product. They don't count the hours they spend. And they *want* to spend their weekends advancing in their field. If you don't love what you do, you'll just get burnt out. To win, you need four things. Mediocrity is competitive. But there's always room at the top. And that's where you should want to go to. Here's a tweet by the founder of Runaway to better explain what I mean: 3. Never market alone Find a horse to ride and piggyback on anything . You're a small boat in an ocean. You cannot make big waves by doing it yourself. Let the wave carry you. 5. Find out what is working So you can double down on what is working and what isn't. Very hard to execute in real life though because buyer journeys aren't simple. I used a lot of stuff at Streamline to get clarity (qualitative interviews, post-purchase surveys, product marketing analytics data, marketing mix models). Start with the easy stuff. Then layer on. 6. Chase insights, not revenue Revenue is an outcome and focusing too much over it just leads to stress. I hardly check Stripe to see how much money we make every week. Instead, I mine insights. And use those to form winning strategies. And eventually, you'll see you've come pretty far. See how one insight helped us reach 60 million users . Figma's first ever marketer shares a similar sentiment, "Metrics don’t help because what good is +x% [growth] when you need to 10x, 100x, 100000x? All you have is intuition." 7. No fluff If something's not working, we have to be honest about it. Cut down fluff from everywhere. I don't like to spend time working on stuff that truly doesn't matter. And hate it when copy is unnecessarily wordy or stuffed with adjectives. 8. Play with sportsmanship No belittling competitors. At Streamline, our competitors often promote us. Vincent promotes our competitor launches. It's kind of weirdly healthy. It won't apply to every industry but we don't throw shade. 9. Be honest with your audience, no clickbait-y content or dark patterns I don't like to receive click-baity zero value content. And I don't want users to receive content like this either. It's simple. Treat your users like they're already customers. 10. Be curious and invite feedback Feedback is a gift. I often publish my work in Slack inviting feedback from whoever is willing to give it. Earlier in my career, I would feel bad when I received harsh feedback. But now, I actively seek out feedback. And it really helped me improve. 11. Optimize for happiness I took a class at Essec called the Science of Happiness and it taught me more about psychology than anything ever could. Many people aren't truly happy. We are in a loneliness pandemic. 😶‍🌫️ It honestly doesn't cost much to put a smile on people's faces. It's free to do. At least, most of the times. An example of this is when I had to send a discount code to a guy named Marq. The coupon code I sent to him was called "MarqMyWords," and he was surprised I took that time out to be unnecessarily creative. When I provide harsh feedback to someone on my team, I now try to do it in a way that brings them joy. It's challenging, and I admit that I fail at times. 12. Aim for inbounds, over outbounds Over the years, I've tried outbound multiple times and realized that the ROI never works out. Maybe they churn faster or the conversion rate is lower or you're terribly impacting your brand equity. Inbounds are the way to go. Here's an example. I received an inbound message from Shaan Puri back in 2021 that said something along the lines of if I was consulting for growth marketing or had an agency. Shaan Puri is pretty well known! There was no way I could reach him via outbounds. Or, from Kyle, who is pretty much defined the PLG space as we know it today. And another inbound from the person behind one of the most viral UNO campaigns ever. She created the “You can’t draw 2 on draw 2” post. She also worked with government intelligence agencies to fight terrorists, using data and marketing! Absolute badass. You might argue, "Hey Khushi, it's probably because you're bad at outbound". Well, maybe I am. But I do know that I don't like to be on the receiving end of outbound sales messages. Asking for feedback via outbounds is great though but direct sales wasn't something I could ever see work. And the only time outbound sales sort of worked for me was when Stefan Bader from cello.so reached out. It was mostly because I was already interested in his work and I sent him a connection request first. 13. A no is better than a maybe or a yes If I come to you for feedback or suggestions, I prefer you say no to a certain project idea vs a maybe or a half-yes. Aggressive prioritization is the name of the game. Thank you for reading my rather long manifesto. I'll make it shorter in the future. It is essentially a guideline about how I think about marketing and growth. And why I am still excited by a field that nearly everyone hates. I'm always looking for good talent, so if you'd like to work with me, send me a message. Best, Khushi

I have both Windows and Apple devices. Asus Zenbook, the one with touchscreen Macbook Pro, the one with 48GB RAM I want to test our product on both Apple and Windows. And more importantly, each operating system has it's own marketing channels to piggyback on. So, I can't feel confident working in tech, without having access to both ecosystems. For example, Apple has a menu bar at the top where apps can live. This doesn't exist on Windows. So, if I only had a Windows machine, I would never know! Apple has some limitations too. For example, Windows has a very powerful clipboard and emoji system. I can copy images, links, text. And it gets stored. I can pin copied items like my email address, calendly link, and GST number. On Apple, life isn't always easy. Pasting emojis requires so many clicks that people buy a streamdeck device. On Apple, you can't open two full screen apps on the same desktop. CMD+Tab is terribly inefficient, especially if you have more than 1 chrome window. So if your app is an overlay, things get harder. The natural user behavior and what people are accustomed to on both devices is incredibly different. Trying to change consumer behavior is hard. It would make sense to lean into whatever it is that they're trying to do. For example, if your product isn't successful with Windows users, it might be good to question why? Arc, the browser company, was Apple-first. I didn't understand the hype when I was Windows-only. And it made sense why. Many of Arc's features were on Windows already. Some even better. Pinning chrome profiles to the dock is possible in Windows, but not on a Mac So, it didn't make sense for Arc to offer it to Windows users. Instead, they kept it invite-only for Mac users. For Loom, I can almost bet that majority of their customers are Apple users. That's because Slack's video product on Apple laptops is unstable. And Loom on Windows is unstable. Windows also has their own screen recorder software that is a mix of Veed and Loom. Apple only has Quicktime. It's primitive and can't even mirror a recording. The audience expectations will be different because the context is different. One will expect more settings and shortcut keys than the other. If your product is used by knowledge workers that work on multiple screens, then there are more caveats. Apple often doesn't allow certain apps to be moved to a second screen. For example, I can't move Todoist to my second monitor. Logitech MX Keyboard/Mouse has an app that can't work well on Apple because Apple doesn't have all shortcut keys that Windows has. Apple has something Windows doesn't too. They have more indie-developed products like ScreenStudio, Bettertouchtool etc. This is stuff I haven't often seen on Windows. I honestly bought a Mac for ScreenStudio :) You also get realistic colors on a Mac than you'd get on Windows. The camera quality and speaker volume is better. Mac doesn't heat up or has fans. So there's a certain aesthetic people are used to, that your product has to fit into. I could go on and on.... but the bottom line is that if you're working in tech, maybe get both devices. Why Apple Wins, Even Though... For me, a Windows machine is more powerful. It helps me be more productive. Everything takes an extra click on Apple to achieve the same thing. And many times, it's just not possible to do things on a Mac. So objectively, Windows is better across all things I care about. But Apple still wins on one thing. Their marketing. And how simple it is to buy their product. Apple doesn't confuse you. See Apple's webpage. Naming is easy - it's Air or Pro. Very few options - at most, there are a couple of options to choose from. Now, let's look at Asus: Instead of letting me filter, they categorize laptops into home vs work. Why is this necessary? Can't a laptop be used for work and home, both? They have complex naming, like Zenbook vs Vivobook. How can a consumer understand what the difference is between those two at first glance? Even if I filter to a specific type like Zenbook, I'm flooded with so many options to choose from. What exactly is the difference between Zenbook 14 vs S14, if pricing is the same? What exactly is NPUs used for?... Is Dell any better? I see many popups. Some that I can't close easily. My first decision is to choose between Dell Pro vs Dell Plus vs Dell Pro Plus vs Dell Pro Premium vs Pro Max.. I'm serious. That's the 1st choice 🥲 There's something like "Alienware", which I don't immediately understand. Even when I filter for 'Professional Grade Productivity', I get flooded with 13 options to choose from in a UI that is confusing. Thought it couldn't get any worse. But it does. This is HP. It never loaded. Reloading never fixed it. The first choice to make was "Laptops on Sale" vs "Laptops". That's an odd choice to make, because everyone would want a cheaper price. But with a cheaper price, what am I losing? I see banners plastered all over the screen. Discounts thrown too early devalue the product. Lenovo personalizes, but at what cost? Yes, I live in Pune. But I'm not ready to buy the second I land. They say to order before 5pm. I don't understand why customers need to be told that on the first session. Especially for something that's a thoughtfully purchased item and not an impulse purchase. If Apple wins, maybe they deserve it. Asus has a much better product and a far superior service. They send people home to fix things for free, if all I do is write an email. I don't see Apple shipping features as fast as Windows does, or even to the level of quality that Windows does. I've had Macbook Air while I was in college, and I don't see many new features in the past 5 years. But the buying process with Windows is complex. You'd need an engineering degree to understand what product you need to buy. The other thing that Apple does is that they have a robust student program. It's the only ad they're running in India (or the only one I see). Switching costs are so high after a certain age, that it makes sense to bring people early in their journey. Two lessons for me to take forward: Make buying simple (Apple wins) Make people productive and be innovative (Microsoft/Asus wins) Thanks for reading!

I recently wrapped up a complex technical SEO and programmatic SEO project. The site has hundreds of thousands of pages. After about 9 months of iteration, we've started to see incredible wins. Every time you hit a new traffic milestone, Google sends an email. These emails are like a drug. You can see the quick succession in which we hit them. Sometimes, they aren’t even a full week apart. What works and doesn't work with programmatic SEO? Technical SEO is different from programmatic SEO It's more task-based and requires deep, specialized skills. Programmatic SEO can be handled internally, but a technical SEO review will require external help if you're creating hundreds of thousands of pages. A spiky point of view For PSEO to work, you need a point of view, a specialized competitive advantage. If you don't have a competitive advantage, there's no defensibility. I like building things that companies can get benefit from even if I'm no longer working there. Their growth shouldn't stop if I'm not around. So, be extremely defensive on the projects you work on with programmatic SEO. A no is typically better than a maybe . That means, no to — Content that ChatGPT can generate (now or in the future) Content that is generic enough for competitors to generate too Content that relies on piggybacking  off a partner. If the partner already dominates the search query, you'd end up competing with them. The only time this works is if you use a multi-pronged approach that targets LLMs, forums, and layers on paid ads. Content that is costly to serve for free. Anything more than a couple cents per user is costly for most products. It should also never generate customer support tickets unless that fits into your growth loops. Content that brings traffic but is unlikely to bring customers. The cost to serve should be low so that you're not forced to monetize free users just to cover expenses. Serving these pages is expensive. We've had our AWS or Vercel bill explode because it's not just Google crawling them. A bunch of LLM crawlers do too (even TikTok has one), and they all weigh your site down. You can block some of them but you'll still want to allow the majority of them since LLMs search is the future. If you're looking for an SEO consultant, send me a message  and I'd love to make an intro :) Lessons from programmatic SEO and when to bring in an experts Technical SEO is better left to experts You can drown in tasks and you need someone to filter out the good-to-have vs the must-have tasks. Reading Google's wordy documentation and having the expertise to skip through the irrelevant stuff isn't easy. SEO is iterative When I brought on the consultant, I shared with him and the team that I see SEO as an iterative process. It’s okay to try something, see how it performs, and even recall it if we learn something new later. I’ve said the same to developers and designers. In many cases, B+ work is actually better than aiming for A+. It gets us moving faster, and avoids spending too much time perfecting something that might need to change anyway. Setting that expectation early helps. At the same time, if quick wins are the priority, this might not be the right kind of project. That usually signals a modest expected return, and to make the ROI look reasonable, you’ll probably try to keep the investment low. But big wins usually require big swings. If the upside isn’t meaningful to begin with, it might be better not to invest at all. You should own the strategy and insights For the strategy bit, which involves a business and competitor understanding, it's best to bring those insights from the internal team. You typically don't want to delegate this to external technical SEO partners. The intuition muscle isn't there yet and it's not a good use of their specialized skillset. I only gave access to Google Search Console and that was sufficient to drive the wins. No customer research calls, no Mixpanel, nothing. Own the project management I understood technical SEO deeply enough to steer the ship if we ever started working on the wrong things. I am not an expert but curiosity helps. We set up a Slack channel. Typically, I had one meeting a month with the consultant and zero meetings with developers/designers. I would first share the context of the project I wanted to pick up, on the call. The SEO expert would then estimate and come up with a list of things we need to do to achieve the goal. I would then be asked to double check if the list made sense and if there's anything we could remove or add. Once it was approved, I'd then hand off to our devs and designers to build. I'd take up any questions my team had. If it got too technical, I'd move it back to the expert. I'd get some sort of rough estimates from devs on how long each task would take. Eg, this task will take 3 hours with high confidence or, this task will take 2 days with low confidence This helped the team move way faster. We want the expert to share his expertise, not drown in project management or QA work. I wanted to ensure there was no scope creep and minimize surprises in the business. In fact, developers/designers were not recommended to directly communicate with the consultant even though they were all in the channel. We had a private internal channel and a shared channel. After devs shipped all the tasks in the sprint, they'd mark it in review. I'd typically review first and then hand off to the expert to review. I did not review each task individually otherwise it would distract me from all the other projects I was deployed at. Our developers were senior enough that they typically did not require a lot of feedback rounds or QA once tasks were shipped. We usually got them right on the first try. P.S Bugs do creep up. They deindexed the entire site and I only caught it a week later! But the quality of work was always high. So, having a small senior team helps. Thanks for reading! Always happy to hear questions, stories, or ideas. You can subscribe to my newsletter if you'd like. Emails are sent out once a quarter, or semi-annually.