Search Results

Hi, I'm Khushi. I've been the first growth hire at multiple companies, and eventually got to be Head of Growth. I've also consulted several companies in a fractional capacity. One company grew to millions of users with majoiry of F100 companies as clients, bootstrapped! You can view my portfolio of work , testimonials , and blog if you've got time to spare. Hiring for a head of growth is fundamentally different from hiring your first growth marketer or your first growth product manager. If you've reached a level of scale where: marketing is working in its own silo product is working in its own silo, and there's a clear activation, onboarding, and retention opportunity that a growth team should be working towards That's when you need a head of growth. But what that role looks like depends heavily on your business model. Sales-Led vs. Product-Led In a sales-led company, your head of growth will have a background in outbound motions. A sales-led company's head of growth will have a background in outbound motions. How do you create sales teams? How do you build complex, clear workflows? LinkedIn ad campaigns, all of that would be part of a head of growth role in a sales-led company. A PLG company that is primarily B2C or consumer-oriented is a different story. In that case, your head of growth role is going to focus more on activation, onboarding, retention, voluntary and involuntary churn, referral programs, loyalty programs, and monetization levers like watermarks. How to Structure the Team When it comes to resource allocation, the team you're building around this head of growth typically includes developers, product managers, designers, and marketing support. Depending on your scale, you may also need customer support. For sales-led companies, you'll lean more toward marketers and salespeople, with fewer developers but definitely some data analysts and RevOps support. How to Hire Start with your investor and advisor network.  The best way to hire is through investor and advisor networks, because a lot of these amazing people are not scrolling through a job board. Go to your investors and advisors and ask for introductions. People like Gaurav Vohra, Kyle Poyar, Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky will point you to the right people. Kleiner Perkins also makes these introductions. Follow people before you approach them.   Read their blogs. Watch their work. Then reach out and tell them what you stand for, what you're building, and why you think they can help. Most people respond. And from experience, a good product excites people far more than who's making the introduction. If someone looks at your product and thinks "I can help this company be successful," that excites them more than anything else. Consider a fractional or pilot engagement.   Bring someone on board and see if you work well together. A pilot can be anywhere from a month to six months. If it works, you can go full-time. If you want to keep it fractional, you can do that too. If your local network comes up short, go broader.   If after two to three months you haven't found the right person, look across different geographies. The right person might not be local. Get creative with sourcing.   Post in the communities where these people actually are. Host a dinner with really amazing growth folks and mention you're hiring. It costs money, but it pays dividends if you hire someone good. Put up billboards. Run quirky, targeted campaigns. There are some paid communities that you may not have access to such as Reforge that costs $2000/year. In cases like this, if you want to write me a note, I can post on your behalf. Keep the Contract Simple The best contracts are short. Sometimes 3-4 pages. When contracts are longer, like 25 pages, it's harder for people to accept the terms. Non-competes are fine in moderation. Something like don't work for a competitor for a year is reasonable. But don't list seventy or a hundred companies in the non-compete, because that is going to turn people away. Don't have indemnity clauses, or ask folks to have millions dollar worth of insurance before they sign you on. ' Growth is non-linear, so it's really hard to accept with unhealthy terms. Hope this helps!

I was the first growth hire, multiple times. Company 1 went on to be used by millions of users, with majority of Fortune 100 companies as clients. Company 2 went on to be used by everyday SaaS tools like Notion, Calendly, Superhuman etc. ...and so on. I've hired people, and I've been hired. With this article, I hope to show you a path forward on: who to hire? when to hire? how to find unicorns? Who to hire? The general job description of someone that wears a growth hat (growth marketer, growth product manager) is that they can roll up their sleeves and execute across the full funnel. Growth marketers tend to focus more on the top of the funnel. Whereas growth product managers focus at the bottom of the funnel. But majority of them will oversee the full funnel. You want to find someone you can trust to run the business, at early stages. who has raw compute power (aka they're smart) If it's a hell yes to both answers, it's worth moving forward. Learning fast is a core requirement of the job of a growth person. There are hundreds of moving parts and dozens of tools. Figuring out different permutations and combinations is critical. Dropping things fast requires a different muscle, and is critical to the job. In pure-play research fields, you'd need people that can keep going. But in growth fields, you'd need people who can quickly pivot. When to hire? The best time to hire your first growth marketer or growth product manager is when you start seeing signs on life. One sign of life is that of product-market fit. There are people in the industry who claim that you should hire for this position prior to PMF, and I disagree. There's just not a lot of work to be done at that stage. Growth hires typically roll up their sleeves and can get work done. The downside is with this behavior is that they won't say no if you ask them to build the core product. Once you have a few customers, have the product built out, and growth is the primary bottleneck, it's time to hire your first growth hire. How to hire? My recommendation is to spread out two channels: inbound and outbound. Some growth folks are open for work. And some aren't actively looking. To reach the ones that are open to work, reach where they're consuming information. 1. Post in Reforge's job board ($2000/yr), and other community boards. There are many boards these days, such as: mindtheproduct.slack.com product-school.slack.com acquiredfm.slack.com productledgrowth.slack.com analyticsform-v0r2503.slack.com reforge-members.slack.com dev-mkt.slack.com lennysnewsletter.slack.com These links may not work as is, but if you can find their invite link and join, I can promise there's a way to post jobs in each of them. Some are paid communities and some are free. 2. Ask courses for their talent directory. Many course providers maintain a talent directory. These are some good quality courses I've taken in the past. They are good starting points to research where you can post. 3. Reach out to an influencer they might follow and include the job post in their newsletter. For example, Elena Verna has a newsletter that I love to read. If an ad is placed in her newsletter, you would get a ton of high quality applicants. These are some blogs, newsletters, and influencers  I follow. They may have advertising opportunities available for you to try out. Lennys Newsletter had a pallet community that you could post on. It's now shut down but this job board exists in another form. 4. Post via a popular ATS site. Most large/mid-size companies use ATS to track applications. Try searching in Google using this filter: 'site:boards.greenhouse.io product manager remote'. You could replace greenhouse with any major ATS board name and it should work. Many job portals constantly crawl these ATS boards, and surface posts. 5. I've also found most of my jobs using Twitter advanced search. Use the common words like 'job' or 'hiring'. Make sure it has a few likes or a few retweets so it isn't blocked by bots. Many founders have stopped using Twitter after Elon's takeover, but I'm sure that the volume is still relevant. You could spread that across to other social media channels like Threads. 6. Angelist helps but it's hard for employers. There are way too many applicants that would apply. Posting helps, but going through each profile is hard. 7. I've also found Crunchbase to generate inbound. 8. Investor job boards. Most investors have their own job boards combining all hiring asks from their portfolio companies. See if you can get added to those boards. 9. Advisors: Sometimes a lot of companies have board members, advisors etc. Ask your advisors to make introductions. Kyle Poyar (PLG/Pricing expert) referred me to a company he was consulting at, that I ended up joining. You can use a copy of his message. 10. Ask your existing customers. These make up great employees. Hiring customers is a cheat code, and I'd recommend that you start from this place. Anytime someone gives you incredible feedback for the product, ask them whether they'd be open to work with you. Thanks for reading!

Localization is more than just purchasing power parity. The question we wanted to answer was what should your product be priced... and if there was a simple plug-and-play calculator that lets companies 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 ] A note on retention psychology: There's enough research to show that the first price matters less than how people feel about price changes. If you raise prices for existing users, people feel penalized. So, you're better off not giving a deep discount on the first-purchase, and raising it later. Use good entry prices to decide how to ladder users without making them feel penalized. When in doubt, error on the high side. 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!

12 months later, here's my unbiased... Review of Reforge Growth Programs Is Reforge worth $2000/year? Could I, should I download Reforge for free? Reforge vs the alternatives An unbiased review of Reforge Growth programs An overview of what Reforge looks like on the inside 👀 What I don’t like about Reforge Some guest passes Is Reforge right for me? I have taken seven programs from Reforge 1. Growth Series 2. Growth Marketing 3. Monetization and Pricing 4. Growth Leadership 5. Advanced Growth Strategy 6. Product Led Growth 7. Retention and Engagement I’ve chain-smoked many MANY courses in the past It’s more than 60+ online courses so far and I can confidently say, I’ve seen the best and the worst of online courses. I’ve taken a little too many marketing and product courses: altMBA by Seth Godin , growth.design's psychology course, CXL , Demand Curve , Copyhackers , Common Thread Collective for FB ads, 90DaySEO , Foxwell , Chase Dimond for Email , Social Savannah Tiktok , Ahrefs and Moz courses for SEO, the super basic Hubspot and Google courses, Interface Design from Shiftnudge , Programmatic SEO from Preetam Nath, Content Marketing 201 from Amanda Natividad, Attribution and Marketing Mix Modelling from Vexpower and so many more . It’s endless, really. The point that I’m trying to drive home is that I’ve seen enough courses and had enough practical experience to have an opinion about Reforge. This article is 100% un-sponsored. No affiliate links, whatsoever either. No self-promotion either. It’s 100% unbiased and written on a whim. No ROI on this article but hopefully I’ll get to know you and make some friends. Anyway, let’s answer the questions you have before this starts to feel like a recipe blog that takes forever to get to the actual recipe. Reforge pricing and costs Membership to Reforge costs $2000 / year for unlimited access to all their programs and live cohorts. Live cohorts happen twice in a year (in April and Oct). The teams plan is their newest addition. You can request to chop off the cohorts from the individual plan to get the pricing down by 50% or so. Probably at the time of renewal. For the teams plan, Reforge reached out to me to partner. If you're actually interested to purchase, hit the chatbot button and let me know if you want an intro. It helps me and it'll help you. Is Reforge Worth it? Yes. It’s worth more than $2000. Reforge gives you access to all of their programs for an entire year. They also add new programs twice a year. So you technically have access to 22 courses for $2000. That’s $90/program or 166/month. Realistically, you won’t do 22 courses, nor would all 22 be relevant for you. You might end up doing 4–5 at best, even if you are pacing yourself. That would bring us to $500/course , which is a teeny tiny bit expensive until you look at the content. I honestly had a lot more wins ( see portfolio ) only after I joined Reforge across full-time work and consulting projects. The level up in my skillset was tremendous. We have a 'content creation' problem The problem with growth as a field is that there’s too much content. Everyone wants to produce content, and become a course creator or a ‘thought leader’. My Twitter feed is endlessly long with incredible content but as an industry, we product more content than we can consume. Compare this to the ML/AI industry where there just aren’t enough courses to complete or newsletters to subscribe to. The ML industry is nascent. Growth on the other hand is loud. There’s a lot of content and we have to be very mindful about who we learn from and how much. Reforge bypasses this problem. It curates content. I don’t have to worry about where I’m sourcing my knowledge from. I don’t have to calendar-ise my learnings or go out of my way to follow so many people and ensure that the Twitter algorithm shows the good threads to me organically (which it usually won’t). For a fee, Reforge ensures that I get the best content that exists, all wrapped in a consumable/memorizable fashion. What Reforge offers 1. One live program with an EIR each year Previously, they offered two-three live programs. Now, it's brought down to one. 2. Slack Community A vibrant and helpful Slack community. Earlier, I get to ask questions directly to people who’ve created the "hockey stick" growth for their companies. Now, it's not really possible to do. They've made a few changes. Slack is downgraded to the free tier so message history is covers only the last 30 days which was a bummer. Secondly, all the program cohort live discussions was moved online in their portal and it's not easy to access. I don't even know where to look for it. 3. Events All past events are recorded. This includes workshops and case studies with operators who grew the tools you use every day. The sort of ‘behind-the-scenes’ knowledge is hard to find. In the new UX, you can't really filter. So, it's much harder to find case studies to watch. 4. Templates and transcripts Which seems like you won’t need it, but it is pretty helpful. A lot of newer courses don't have the video recordings btw, so check with Reforge if there's a particular course you're interested in taking. 5. Discussions [obsolete] This is long gone. They don't have this available. Now you can't ask educators questions related to the course directly In the past, you could ask clarifying questions from the best operators. It is very different from asking questions to someone in a free Facebook community. I used Reforge to help me cross that inflection point in my career, and the EIRs to help me along the way. 6. The devil is in the details Reforge is by far the most organized, and detailed program I’ve ever taken. It’s the little details that blow my mind, honestly. Reforge isn’t rough around the edges. It’s painfully built and they’ve thought of so many little things. For example: Live events are shown in my time zone and auto-added to my calendar in bulk. No timezone madness. No missing out on events because of a tech issue. I never have to ‘duplicate a template’ and make a copy of it. It auto-duplicates in Google docs, directly in my Google Drive. Reforge reminds me of Zedd’s $16 million new house. Purchased because the interior designer added a little something in the kitchen. Watch for just for a minute at around the 6:12 mark. It'll auto-play when you hit the play button. Imagine how much thought someone would have put into the bigger picture if they cared about these minor details. 7. Reforge Certifications Reforge doesn't offer certifications. They give letter of completions. LoC for Live Programs (open to see) When you complete 80% of a live cohort and attend most events, they'll let you take a pretty screenshot at the end of the cohort. Or you can download a plain looking PDF like this one. LoC for Self-Paced Programs (open to see) For the self-paced programs, you can ask for a letter of completion . This will do if you need it for company reimbursement. 8. Reforge AI This is a product I helped beta test and develop. You can personalize and ask it questions. I spent 3-4 hours helping develop the product in the initial days and it's turned out well! 8. New Design I love the new design and the UI actually. And they even used Streamline icons for the entire redesign and all presentation slides! (Streamline's the company I work for btw). Your time will never be cheaper An overly simplified graph The longer you wait, the more expensive your time will be. You're either going to learn what Reforge teaches on your own, or you can shortcut and learn earlier (without the practical experience). Everything in life is a tradeoff. 1) If you feel Reforge is expensive today, it'll be financially cheaper in the future but you won't have the time! 2) If you enroll today, you won't fully understand what they teach but you'll still know how to open the emergency exit to save everyone from a flight crash. My POV. That's all! Could I, should I download Reforge for free? Members get banned if they download Reforge. If they copy something from the platform more than three times, they can get permanently banned and will lose access. So, exporting stuff isn’t allowed. Hard to Torrent I had a friend who had copies of every other course but he still couldn’t get Reforge. Of all the courses that exist out there, Reforge is the hardest to find on Torrent. Second, you won’t get a certificate which can help nor do you get to meet new people. Want free Reforge-style content? If you’ve applied and gotten rejected or are looking for a simpler entry point, I have some ideas: Reforge EIRs and Partners maintain their own blogs, newsletters, podcasts, books, Twitter threads, and so on. Whether or not you take up Reforge, you should subscribe to their newsletters mentioned on this Growth Marketing Resource page. The content is highly overlapping, and these blogs are is created by the same people who created the original Reforge content. EIRs are frequently invited as guest speakers, so keep an eye on YouTube. There will be plenty of material to look at. The disadvantage is that you must compile everything yourself. Reforge's own blog is extremely useful. Because Reforge’s in-app search isn’t very good, I occasionally use Google search, and more often than not, they have a blog post about the topic I was looking for. I believe that much of their premium content is available on their blog. It’s disorganised and difficult to consume, but it exists and should be a good starting point because there are so many blog posts to read. Search like this: site: reforge.com/blog otherwise its hard to find Request a guest pass. If you’re stuck on a topic and really want to use Reforge, ask someone who is a paid member for a guest pass, and they might be able to send you a 7-day access to three lessons from within a program. This isn’t the best method, but if all else fails, use these. Growth Programs Guest Passes Growth Series " Retention separates the top 1% " Growth Series " The Psych Framework for User Motivation " Monetization and Pricing " Use cases" Product Programs Guest Passes Product Management Foundations " Feature opportunity validation " Product Market Fit " How to measure Product Market Fit " Admitted to Reforge but aren’t sure? Consider this: Good products cost money. You want them to profit. It’s in our best interests that Reforge profits so that they can invest in developing a better product. Reforge is a learning tool. It should be exclusive because knowledge is our most precious competitive advantage. If you and your competitors are both using the same handbook, is it really a competitive advantage anymore? The high price protects you. It’s a blessing in disguise and a total silver lining. They also used to offer a paid monthly annual contract for students from India but it seems discontinued since the past 6 months. The Slack community It's well worth the money if you are able to network and make a few good friends. Reward entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship is INCREDIBLY hard. It’s tough, and if you don’t support people who truly add value to the world, they risk going out of business, and you end up with the bottom feeders. That’s a terrible incentive for the world we live in. Great products deserve to win and we should help them gain attention and then some more. 😇 Reforge Program Review Reforge is not flawless. Don’t sign up for Reforge thinking it’s all roses and sunshine. It’s not. You cannot copy from Reforge, or export the lessons. It takes two times longer than they say it will, so your weekends are booked out. If you have consulting gigs, you might have to drop them too. Not everything is easily applicable and requires you to research on your own, bring in data scientists at times, or just roll with it. Your subscription will not stop if you have a major life event like a marriage or a baby. You may not study for months and really get no value during those months. There’s no way to pause it. I took Amanda’s Content Marketing 201 last month and I plan to take altMBA in Jan, so I know I cannot continue with Reforge in those two months and will have to deal with my anxiety and FOMO issues. What I hate most about Reforge It's really hard to consume. Content is very dense so a little hard to get through. Imagine this... You're watching a Netflix series, and each episode is barely 10 minutes long. Worse yet, each episode has a 3 minutes recap without a 'skip recap' button. If you want to binge watch Reforge, it's a bit of a pain. I have to force myself to get through it. I think they could've simplified the content, used brain-friendly language, and condensed the material by half. I live in the age of Instagram Reels and Tiktok where dopamine hits are instant. So I wish they made the content a little more exciting with hooks, baits, and storytelling. I know it's not easy to make educational content entertaining but, if they fix it, I'd be encouraged to study far more often than I do today. But that’s honestly fine, IMO. Reforge is super into feedback, and they really try their best to improve. Some things are business model constraints and some things are there to improve monetization. You will hate some things about Reforge but it’s really up to you what you focus on — the value you can get out of it or the issues. Oh and one last thing, if you have no prior experience in a certain topic, it can feel too theoretical. Some of the reviews about Reforge claim that it doesn't teach real skills and feels high-level. That's somewhat true. Reforge has an Experimentation and Testing program that I'm trying to take. But it feels like there's just too much theory, making it really difficult to consume. That's probably only because I cannot tie back the learnings to my experience to make it feel exciting. So, if you don't have tactical experience in a certain topic, and you try taking Reforge, it might feel exhausting to consume it. Why Reforge over literally any other platform? Very valid question. Let’s dive in. Reforge vs CXL CXL is more tactical and useful during the early stages of your career. Reforge is more strategic, that does NOT teach you tactical skills. Reforge will not show you how to run ads, for example, there are many courses that can do that for you. Reforge vs Demand Curve Demand Curve is for founders and startups. It doesn’t have a lot of depth. It covers YouTube Ads and SEO in the same course which I think is not deep enough for seasoned growth practitioners. On a more positive note, Demand Curve won't drown you in theory. It's more suited to founders who want to get started quickly. Reforge vs Niche Programs I do take a few of them. Vexpower is one I really like for attribution and other cool skills. But it’s not a “this or that” decision but more of a “this AND that” decision. Every course I took added a lot of value to me. CXL helped me land my first job. Reforge will help me tip over that inflection point in my career. And frankly, you should have a learning budget set aside and force yourself to spend it. Reforge vs growth.design growth.design is more specialised, and easier to consume since it's a niche program. More alternatives I created an interactive guide for choosing growth marketing programs. If you filter for blogs and podcasts, it'll show up high quality blogs and podcasts that have similar content like Reforge, although a bit unstructured. If you have questions, drop them below in the comments. Thank you,

Growth school review Short version: Not worth it. I paid 20k INR ($300) for this course for 1-year access and I’m definitely not happy with how I spent the money. They are a WhiteHat Jr / Byju’s in the making, and have hired an agency to take down critical reviews. This review will be relevant for you regardless of which program you are interested to take. Whether it's growth school's brand marketing program, or performance marketing, or workshops, UX design, Linkedin courses, product management, etc. And if you've been scammed by GS like so many others who self reported their experiences in the comments below, I encourage you to file a complaint with the National Consumer Helpline. It takes 5-10 minutes to do so. https://consumerhelpline.gov.in/ Long version: I’ve always regretted buying a product from Instagram ads and I pretty much never learn from my mistakes. Growthschool was running a bunch of ads on Instagram. Good creative. Great copy. They retargeted me a bunch of times. The $300 price tag was a bit on the higher end for me, especially because I had no context if growthschool's course was going to be good or not. As someone working in tech, I can immediately tell when we a brand starts to use psychological tactics like these. Piggybacking off of Sai Ganesh But Growth School’s biggest lever was Sai Ganesh — the then CMO at Dunzo. And I’m a Dunzo fangirl because of how ridiculously good their marketing is. So if this was a chance for me to take a look at their behind-the-scenes operations, I was going to take it up. But, boy was I disappointed. Sai’s content is good but I don't think he taught brand marketing. Instead, the entire course was more or less about social media marketing sold under a guise of brand marketing. I absolutely don't do social media marketing so idk what I'll do with all this newfound knowledge. 🥲 Growth School’s positioning is also really odd. Is the brand marketing course by growthschool.io worth the money? Their price point is incredibly high even when you compare to CXL and Reforge — both of which are industry standards and globally recognized. Reforge — which is like the Harvard of growth schools costs $1000-$2000 for a yearly access to 22 programs + incredible guest sessions + live lectures + brilliant software + amazing Slack group + recognized brand. CXL — same like Reforge, except it’s more tactical and entry-level. I also put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses if you're looking for an alternative. Is growth school good, overall? Their marketing communication is very immature and geared towards people who would need to be motivated to join a course they paid for. Constant, noisy upsells on Whatsapp. I still don’t understand why they use Whatsapp and publicly share our numbers. Then they began hosting community led sessions. Anyone from the community could volunteer and take up a course. Great UGC and easy content for them, I’d say. Obviously not what I had in mind when I spent my money. If I wanted community-generated content, I could go on YouTube. We paid for Sai’s lectures + guest lectures. The guest lectures didn’t happen on time, we weren’t given any visibility on when they would happen and people had to proactively reach out to their team for information. The worst part? The management. Look at some other reviews by students at growthschool.io. GrowthSchool doesn't even know how to use Google Calendars. Of all the live courses, I’ve been a part of, no one scheduled courses worse than Growth School did. It's madness. The discord community that they heavily promote? It doesn’t exist. The last message is more than a month ago and no one uses it. Not to mention, Growth school constantly runs surveys for their own benefit, guising it as beneficial to our community. They’ve asked for our LinkedIn and Instagram profiles. Reviews are always incentivized instead of being organic. People were really mad, and left brutally honest reviews for growthschool publicly in the chat. Their software always crashes on me. No transcripts on videos. Slides are shared via a google drive link instead of being embedded in the course material. No templates are shared, so you’ll have to spend a lot of time recreating those. I uploaded a YouTube video because someone mentioned they didn't search on Google for reviews before being scammed by Growth School. Within 2 days, Growth School discovered the video. Downvoted, commented aggressively, and reported the hell out of the video so the algorithm got confused and stopped serving impressions. 🤷‍♀️ After 3 months, their legal team issued a takedown and took down the video. It ranked well and persuaded people to save their hard earned money. Share this article or your own review in as many places as you can. They've hired a legal agency to take down honest and critical reviews. Growth school fees At 20k for an 8 week course, they seem to be using the price skimming pricing tactic. So, what should you do? It depends. I’d value this course at 5k, at most if it goes through Growth School. If Sai just took this up on his own, I’d pay 20k because I know he has a full time job and needs to be compensated. At the same time, I would expect smaller cohort sizes and better engagement. Sai is a great teacher and I absolutely 100% recommend him. You also have a lot more options, like CXL , Reforge , and so many more growth marketing courses ! Fun fact: When I first joined, we had an icebreaker session that was fun and well-led. Then, Growth School got a lot more interest by using the community to market for them. We had more members join. Then, they set up a second ice breaker session, without telling the first group that we didn’t have to join. Everyone took time off on the weekends and joined the session. 15 minutes into the call we realized this was a repeat call. 🤣 They weren’t even apologetic about wasting our time. I think they have the most aggressive marketing tactics of all times. Learning from a company like this is so embarrassing that I'll never put on my resume. So, that’s a wrap. I took 30 minutes to badly write this article in the hope that someone manages to read through this non-proof read version of a brain dump and finds value. I’m also going to get a lot of hate from Growth School’s team for this article but I hope it helps you! If you're hoping to find a good growth marketing course , take a look at this interactive guide of all growth marketing courses I chain-smoked over the years! And if you have any questions, I’m available to chat via Linkedin but please don’t ask for access to the course. I don’t infringe on copyrights. Thanks for reading and all the best. - Khushi

Earlier, I thought calculating bounce rate in Mixpanel wasn't possible. Even their blog states that it's not possible to calculate bounce rates. But then, I think there's a way to calculate bounce rates in Mixpanel. Look at this template report they prepared for me. As you can see, I'm able to search for landing pages, exit rate, and bounce rate. All of which I previously thought wasn't possible to calculate in Mixpanel. How to calculate bounce rate in Mixpanel There are two ways. Simplest way is to modify a Mixpanel template. Another way is to just create it from scratch, which is more scalable. In this example, I'll show how to use a template. Then, towards the end, I'll show how you can create it on your own too. 🚨 I do want to give a big disclaimer before you start executing the steps. Lately (as of Jan, 2026), I've noticed that abuse of fake users on Mixpanel is quite abnormally high. This is because Mixpanel isn't good at filtering for AI bots as I'd like them to be. You should exclude these bots. A simple way is to filter out users whose session duration is less than 1 seconds. For one company, nearly 90% of users turned out to be bots. 1. Create a board Go to the boards and create a new one. It's under Discover. Choose "Use a Template" 2. Pick a template Choose this Web Analytics Template. It has the bounce rate metric pre-calculated for you. 3. Answer two questions To correctly answer them, think about whether you're a large site or a smaller one. Smaller sites: I use Pageviews for the first one and then Page Title for the second dropdown for my small personal site. Larger sites: If you have a separate web app and a marketing site, you might need to create a custom pageview event which is a sum of both of those. So I'd either use a combined metric for both of those pageviews or only isolate the marketing site. For Page Name, I'll probably use URL path / Current URL instead of Page Title because you can keep changing the Page Titles without losing historical data. 3. Click open this report Navigate to "How are each of the website pages performing?" report. Then click on the title so that it opens it up in a new page. 4. Customize metrics On the left sidebar, customize the metrics. Let's take a look at each of the individually Mixpanel bounce rate template B) Landing Page: Notice that the way they're calculating is by using "First Touch". That's a smart hack! C) Exit Page This is last touch, pretty clever! It'd be good not to forget this. D) Bounces This calculates total bounced sessions and they've set up a formula which gives you more granular controls over GA4 on how to define a bounce. I changed this from 2 to 1 because for some of our pages, just spending more than 10 seconds is fine. But you could customize this however you want.. Their default recommendation is 2. They've also hidden this metric and used a custom metric to show bounce rate. 5. Lastly, calculate the bounce rate Mixpanel calculates bounce rate like this: Total Bounced Sessions / Exits * 100 ⚠️ Mixpanel's default bounce rate formula may be wrong I'm not sure it's accurate though. I would calculate it something like this: Bounce rate in Mixpanel = Total Bounced Sessions / Total Sessions * 100 And ChatGPT agrees! Mixpanel's calculation of bounce rate will lead to an inflated rate because they're essentially taking a smaller denominator than what I am. It might make sense for some use cases so I'll leave it up to you to decide. First check with their pre-built formula. Then use mine by replacing the C with the A. This is the web standard and should always be right. ✅ Use this formula instead Bounce Rate = D/A*100 You should see an improvement of 10-15% on each page. Last touches / thoughts I'm happy that I tried out Mixpanel's templates. I was just playing around with their tool on the weekend trying stuff on my personal site and accidently found this. Their templates are a really good starting point and showed me how to calculate the metrics. However, it's might not always be right, so just double check each part of the equation. In the future, you don't have to go to the templates to create formula. Your formula remains the same and is reusable across other reports. Mixpanel Bounce rate = Sessions, where total pageviews is 1 AND time spent is less than 10 seconds / Total Sessions * 100 Remember, that to be able to set 'first touch' or 'last touch' at the top in the events, you will have to first break down. Select "Attributed by" and then "Page Title" Best, Khushi

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 is a like a messy personal diary where I jot down things as they come to me. People I Want to Hire or Work With I maintain a dream list of people I'd like to work with. They are them. Video Editors Jim Friend - funny b2b videos. See ad for Clickup.  Jack Vaughan Gaurav Bhatt The video editors and animators in the screenshot Teh Aik : animated text videos Hayley Carloni : made Lily Ray's SEO presentation video with aligators . Excellent storytelling and concept idea. If you want bold design, she might be a great fit. Jesse : catchy videos on a budget Designer Lu Yu : Independent designer, based in Berlin Julián Leiss : Wrote a great article on auth0’s website redesign . Great for dev-first dev projedcts if he's open! Radhika Sen : headed design at The Whole Truth in India. I do like their creative direction in partnership with Thought Over Design. She's departing from Mumbai and may go independent. Primary Studio: Brand design studio Website Design Unseen : created the superlist site. They've been winning some serious awards. Brucira : design agency from India that designed apps like Zepto, Disney+ etc. They made Ruttl as a product. No Boring Design : interesting pitch Product Analyst  Balaji Kasiraju : This guy is impressive. Saw a reply on LinkedIn that made me add him on the list. Social Media Stonks Studio (India) Ad Agency BBH : see this ' Bassi vs Garnier ad ' posted by Cannes Mother : for their Claude Thinking campaign. The Harmon Brothers : They created Squatty Potty's viral ad campaign. Dapper : Netherlands based content marketing and performance marketing agency. B2B ads have long been boring and mundane. They're bringing D2C type content to the world of B2B, which seemed unique to me. Check out this ad . Audio Band 9Teen : For custom ad songs. They may create. Production Houses Early Man Film : if friends ask for a referral. This creative was good! Retail Marketing BrandVak : did retail for Cornitos ( case ) 3D Designer Arek Kajda : worked with MDS and did work for Pitch ( twitter ) Lifecycle Marketing Agency Scalero : I saw Notion use them. I hired them as well and really liked the experience. SEO Agency Marketing OG : mentioned in Nick Lafferty's newsletter. Worked with Hotjar, Ramp and some good clients. Market Researchers Beehive Research : Marketers researchers used by Harvard Performance Marketing Keene Do : ppc ads Paintgun : performance marketing stint for Lovable Copy Krishna P Unny : very good communicator. Good vibes. Can partner for research, art, and design writing. I'm sure there are more people that I have missed out on. Especially designers! My work at Streamline gave me access to the best designers, since only the most skilled designers would purchase Streamline. There are lots of free/cheaper resources available, but they cared enough about their craft to buy the most premium library out there. 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. Cool 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.

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 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

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 :) 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

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 hundreds of companies. 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. Read more . 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 send me a message 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 :)

Music is a hard career path. So how do you market yourself? How to grow a music career? Henry Moodie is a musician and a lyricist. Henry Moodie's Instagram The way he uses social is radically unique in comparison to other musicians who rely mostly on their talent. Henry doesn't do that. Instead, he takes popular songs, changes the lyrics to match 2022's internet culture and asks people to tag/share. Henry Moodie's strategies Piggybacking off of popular songs - feeds the algorithm and uses their brand authority to build his own reputation Changing the lyrics - surprises and delights users + is a cover demonstrating his talent. Keeping captions short - one sentence usually with a clear CTA to ask people to follow, remix or tag their friends. And it's clearly working for him. Tiktok growth for Henry Moodie Tiktok growth for Henry Moodie What about non-piggybacked stuff? For original content, the call to actions are even stronger. His songs themselves are very shareworthy. See this one: Henry could've written songs about heartbreaks, romance, life, etc but he chose to write an original song about friends. Most people have more friends than they have lovers/exes so the market share is a lot larger. You're more likely to send a piece of content to a friend than to someone else. 😉 When to piggyback? So Bira, an indian beer brand started out as a challenger brand. The way they acquired market share quickly was to ride the 'hip hop' culture wave that took India by storm. You cannot always ride an existing culture wave. So, this is an alternative strategy to piggyback off of other older things. You have more control on the timing and the flexibility to think through things. Piggybacking is one of the best ways to grow a business. It's lazy, profitable, and scalable. Piggybacking in SaaS Wynter rides on the popularity of other marketing tools that its target audience is known to use. Wynter started out with one test and then made the "Do you even resonate" into an entire series because it was the best way they could showcase their product without being repetitive. Have another idea or example? Drop them in the comments below!

Tribalism builds the the best marketers and community builders. Most of religion, terrorism, veganism and politics is great marketing. You sell a vision. Religion gives you better values and a guiding way to live life. Terrorism lets you believe that you are changing the world for the better. Veganism lets you believe you have the power to leave the world better than you found it. Politics helps you see that your future can be a lot better at the press of a button [ballot]. If you ever need marketing inspiration, look beyond your competitors or products catering to your industry/target audience. Changing people's behaviors is one of the hardest things to do so look for tribes that push the limits. This is where the real innovation happens. In India, religions are able to migrate someone off of one religion to another usually for money or love [if you do inter-caste marriage]. Terrorist organizations find weaknesses to leverage. Sleeper cells have a degree of hate for their country and terrorist organizations give them a way to act on it. Veganism brings people in by unveiling the reality of the animal industry. You could potentially swipe this tactic if your product's alternatives have hidden costs that people don't know about. In Philippines, for example, a cheap face cream has carcinogenic products but people aren't aware of the downsides. For B2B products, maybe you provide a faster SLA time than competitors. Arelcon RMC, an Indian ready-mix supplier provides on-time delivery and is a more premium solution in the market. The challenge they face is that the purchasing manager doesn't realize how many man-hours are lost with delays or with damage-control work that their team has to do after using poor quality concrete. If you're interested in how to affect consumer behavior with offensive humor, check out Elwood Dog Meat . It's pretty genius. Political marketing is pretty impressive too. We even share the word 'campaigns' with them. Tribes are where innovation in marketing happens. Whether that is anti-vax communites or holding Gamestock shares. Anything out of the ordinary requires changing consumer behavior. People who are able to do this are the best marketers imo. Enjoy and don't be a marketer people hate. - K