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Is CXL worth it? CXL is pretty darn awesome. Some content is slightly outdated, some of it is a drag. But other than that, I think the growth marketing minidegree and all-access pass is superb. Hi, I’m Khushi Lunkad. I'm a growth marketer working for SaaS and Ecommerce companies. I discovered my passion for growth marketing in 2018. Since then, I have completed over 60 online courses on Coursera, Edx, DataCamp, Hubspot, Facebook Blueprint, Google Academy, Copyhackers, Chase Dimond, Foxwell, CTC etc. If after reading this review, you realize CXL isn't right for you, I put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses tagged with budget, seniority and goals. Check that out as well! It’s been 20 months since I completed CXL’s minidegree and so far, I’ve managed to work with the best minds in the world. People know what CXL is and what is stands for. Edit as of June 2025: AI is evolving rapidly. I'm checking with CXL's team whether they'd update content, because otherwise you're at risk of learning outdated stuff for months. I heard back from the team. Review of ConversionXL’s growth marketing courses : CXL’s beginner’s courses were more actionable than the advanced courses from Google Academy. Their All-Access Pass is a little pricey and may be an opportunity cost for some. Most of the teachers at CXL institute are good at both — their work and teaching. Some (1–2) teachers are good at what they do but their teaching styles didn’t suit me. Know the Certificate requirements before you sign up. CXL does not take the quality of their education lightly. And I compare this with 60+ courses , some worth $4000 and some completely free that I have taken. You need to get 90% of the questions right to pass and the questions are tricky. But, it’s actually one of the best entry-level courses out there, no joke. The videos are incredibly well-edited and concise = 0% rambling. I’ve benefited greatly from the training at my job and consistently impress my colleagues by just applying the learnings. Every video has a transcript that you can search. Most lessons come with downloadable slides, lots of templates and reading material. The instructors share everything that they’ve got without any hesitations. But, this is what an instructor at CXL shared with me 😐 "CXL is very tactical. Some courses are also very beginner level. Some are good, of course. But I think overall Reforge is far more advanced." - An instructor at CXL So, what should you do? I don't really want to confuse you, but it is what the industry believes. CXL is tactical. It will get you started in the field and you won't find a better starting library elsewhere. Top experts in the industry, including the head of growth marketing at Loom and an EIR at Reforge, reviewed my resume. They noticed CXL and praised its credibility. Completing a 100-hour course shows hard work. So your efforts won't be in vain. CXL is better than free courses and some paid courses Here's what I regret: I was on Peep’s mailing list for quite a while and I wish I had decided to take this course earlier on rather than taking free courses on Google with their analytics and adwords. I didn’t store information properly in the initial days. But you can do better . CXL is even better than paid courses like Growthschool . Boy was I pissed after spending $300. Who is CXL not for? CXL is probably not for you if you have no experience with marketing. A basic foundation in marketing is necessary to make the most out of the course. If you’re a founder trying to learn marketing instead of hiring someone else, please don’t do that. CXL is too intense. Hire a marketer, a consultant, or even a mentor. This course isn’t for you if you just want a certificate, even though you get one. This course is for you if you want to get ridiculously good at data-driven marketing. If you’re not at all technologically savvy. If you're too senior in your marketing career, and already know your way around most of the stuff. If you want to specialize say in Google ads, then CXL might not be the right choice. You're better off going for a specialized course like God Tier Ads . View a list of all the courses I've taken. If you checked any 2 of those 6 statements, please reconsider before investing your time and resources. Other important details (I’m doing a brain-dump) I think they also give you access to a Facebook group. CXL shifted between a circle.so community and a FB community; not sure if any of them are still active today. The FB community helped me back in 2020 but now I have over 10+ Slack channels to get help. The growth marketing minidegree was amazing and we didn’t have a lifetime access deal like you have today. The current Black Friday deal is probably their best deal ever. The all-access may be in terms of optionality. But you can also have a decision paralysis with so many options, so know what works best for you. Everything is pre-recorded. CXL also has personalized/live courses called Sprints if you prefer. After every lesson in a course, the instructors give you an empty templates to refill based on your data. Super practical. I found some courses to be really interesting and useful like this and this . If you can start with any one course, I'd recommend this one. It made me cry tears of joy. I honestly did not like a bunch of courses like this and this one. Some courses can be outdated even if you wouldn't expect it like this one so use your judgement! Although, I see a lot of fresh courses that weren't available when I took so that's nice. CXL Alternatives Demand Curve’s Growth Marketing Training — Demand Curve is all text, no audio/video. CXL is audio/video/text/AMAs. Julian Shapiro’s content is really good but if you don’t have a startup, then you may not be able to extract the most out of Demand Curve’s training. [Edit: I took Demand Curve in early 2022, it's better for founders, not marketers. ] Reforge — quite expensive at $2000/year but considered the best in the industry. They give you access to 22 programs but you need to apply and get accepted. [Edit: Fun fact, I got a scholarship on April 28, 2022 ] Read the full post Growth Hackers : Their courses are backed up by a popular personality in the growth marketing world — Sean Ellis. But the courses aren’t taught by him. They are taught by partners. CXL does have 1 course by Sean Ellis :) Udemy : I haven’t personally ventured into this space because I found out that Udemy has a bare minimum instructor vetting system. If I have to try tens of instructors to find the right one, then it’s a waste of time. CXL Scholarship — They have a scholarship program as well but you need to apply, get accepted and then write a 1000 word blog post each week. Edit Jan, 2023: Scholarship is no longer available but they launched another alternative which costs $100. CXL course review by other nice people Take a look at some real reviews posted. cxl reviews for growth marketing cxl reviews for messaging course cxl reviews for analytics cxl reviews for content and seo cxl reviews for influencer marketing Bottom Line Look, if you’ve made it this far, it only points to one thing — that you’re serious about your future. CXL is one option to get started, and probably the easiest because of their 7-day trial . Next, take some time to understand how the industry works. I have an article here . If you want some course recommendations that aren't already on my course list, just ask me . I'm pretty resourceful as you'll see below. 😄 My recommendation is to start with CXL. They have a 7-day trial. You don't have to start the search process all over again. Maybe you’ll find the missing piece and use CXL as a stepping stone to a better future. Remember, CXL is not a magic bullet. The more you get into growth marketing, the more you'll realise what you don't know. CXL is the best way to get a step in the door. It's not the final step you'll take. Put simply, where you source your knowledge is far more important than how much you consume. Can I download CXL courses for free? 🙈 CXL is tactical, which means their courses constantly need updating. The problem with this is that you could download content that is already outdated. That'd be twice the amount of time you'd have to spend learning and re-learning. If you're lacking budget, I'd recommend CXL's New Scholarship Program. It costs a one-time fee of $100 and then they help you get hired too (which may or may not work. I've tried recruiting once from their pool but I didn't hire anyone.) If you want to take one or two courses, go for the $1 plan and skim through it. CXL also puts a LOT of content on their blog which in my opinion covers most of their content, but it's a bit too much to read through. Blog's free. You could force-download the content from their site using shady methods but it'll take longer to individually download the content than for you to consume it. Plus, you'll never watch it if it's downloaded on a hard drive that you have to keep plugging in to your laptop to watch. You won't have transcripts to read along the videos. The templates and files won't be easily accessible. You'll lose a lot of motivation along the way. It just won't be worth the effort if your time has literally any value but you could get access and download the content. I'm not sure if CXL's free courses are good or not. Better to go for the best quality of education out there if time and money constraints can be easily sorted out. About other minidegrees from CXL CXL Analytics Minidegree Content is outdated. They are still using UA instead of GA4 (as of July 4, 2023). Here's the feedback I received: My experience with GA and GTM is that the industry is shifting to Mixpanel Marketing Analytics and Segment. GTM is so unintuitive that even my developers struggle to use it, so no wonder we'll do too. CXL CRO Minidegree If learning is the goal, this minidegree is great. Content won't ever be outdated. However, it doesn't teach you how to do in-product experiments and CRO is sort of owned by Product . You need to stitch marketing site data to product metrics like activation, retention, and engagement metrics, which I don't remember CXL teaching. It's still useful and is a good alternative to the $1500 growth.design course. Liked this cxl course review? First of all, thank you for reading my experience at CXL Institute! I put in hours of effort into making the most comprehensive and honest review of CXL’s minidegrees. I’ll continue to improve it as time passes. Please leave a comment below if you feel like it. Or just say hi . It's good be friends :) And if you're feeling extra generous and thought this article helped you to make a purchase decision, please sign up using my affiliate link . 🤗 Why I wrote this article and why I want to improve it further? I wasn’t able to find any honest review of whether CXL Institute is good or not. Everything out there was unoriginal, useless or incomplete. Ever since completing the growth marketing mini-degree , I wanted to write a sincere review.

Lately, I've been thinking that you don't have to market too hard to win wars. You just need some fuel to start the racecar. Your seed distribution strategy. And then a solid referral strategy / PLG growth loop on the top of it should work. I want to share a few unique referral marketing examples I loved to study. I see so many SaaS products all the time that I wanted to explore other fields. Referral marketing examples 1. This bag of chips has a call to action to share to share with a friend 2. When Dunzo drivers are on the road to deliver everyday groceries for a customer, more potential customers see Dunzo and are reminded of the service. It was also a successful way of entry into a new market for Dunzo. 3. Defending your referral strategy: The execs at Apple refused to extend iMessage to Android users because parents would stop buying Apple phones if they could text their kids on Android via iMessage. Here's a leaked email . 4. Google literally relies on referral marketing on all their products. Even the largest company in the world knows that referral marketing is the best way to grow. Google photos has shared albums and daily spotlights highlighting a friend/family member that you are encouraged to share. Their entire UI design is to get you to share. 5. Vanta hands out badges to companies with vetted security processes. These companies add the Vanta certified badge to their website footer. These help the enterprise buyers check out Vanta for all their other procurement needs too. Plus, backlinks. No wonder, Vanta's founder and CEO is one of the richest self-made women in the world. 6. MyGate is a apartment security management app. MyGate throws up this massive poster that clearly says "Welcome to MyGate" for all societies using MyGate / or on their basic plan tier. Anyone visiting the society is bound to notice. Mygate is one of the fastest growing companies in India with 60 million users. This is 'powered by typeform" but IRL. 7. "Make the logo bigger" isn't just something marketing managers ask without a reason. Most fashion houses slap their logo on their cheapest product ranges. Take a look at the Sketchers shoe. There are 5 places on the shoe where the sketchers logo or wordmark is present. Each customer becomes a walking billboard. Regardless of which angle anyone else looks at, they'll see the brand name. I think Sketchers went a bit overboard with this though because it'll attract the wrong kinds of customers. 8. You'll hardly ever notice an ASUS logo on the laptop. But Apple's is unmissable. Their logo glows. It's larger. It's centre-aligned. Has better legibility. Everyone around you gets exposed to the brand (more touchpoints). Plus, it's on the inside and the outside. Compare that to ASUS. Even if ASUS got product placement in movies, it'd be much harder to recognize. The wordmark "ASUS Zenbook" is left aligned which is hard to see. And on the outside, you've got the brand logo which can only reflect light but not emit. 10. Like we saw with Peppy, Mr. Beast's chocolate brand "Feastables" is also relying on referral marketing to grow. SHARE is printed on the bar and is the first thing users see as they tear open the wrapper. 10. Passes , founded by one of the youngest self-made billionaires and co-founder of Scale AI, is an app similar to Patreon. Lucy Guo's company has a referral program, which essentially involves referring others and earning a commission. It is a single-sided incentive. This might work if you have a memberships based marketplace business model and need support on the supply side. 10. Rhode has these viral phone cases that will appear each time you take a selfie. With orders, they offer free tattoos. Tattoos are share-worthy. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

I accidentally found myself down the partnerships rabbit hole recently at Streamline. Marketing channels can fade out over time and I'd rather develop skills in those that can never be obsolete. The Work 1) Partnered with Super Super makes website creation easy with Notion. They won the Golden Kitty award at Product Hunt and are quite renowned in the design world. I teamed up with them to craft a microsite using our free vector sets. This allows people to seamlessly copy and paste illustrations directly into Notion. Our partnership received a lot of love from the community . 2) Partnered with Lucidchart and Lucidspark Lucid has secured a place in the Forbes Cloud 100 List as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, boasting a valuation of $3 billion and a user base of 60 million. Thanks to our partnership, accessing Streamline is just a matter of two clicks in their app. I wrote about our experience in Lucid's blog here and on their lucid.co/developers page. Developer page includes my testimonial alongside friends from Slack and Headroom. Partner page has more context: Streamline was prominently featured as a partner in Lucid's press release , alongside other early partners such as Slack, Salesforce, and Notion. They hosted us at their developer webinar featuring our tech lead 3) Partnered with our indirect competitors This might be traditionally unheard of. The way I got this idea was by asking users in our post-purchase survey "What alternatives did you use before switching to Streamline" and saw a lot of users graduate to Streamline after using alternative products. So, I reached out to them and struck a partnership! Edit: Actually, partnering with even your direct competitors isn't all that uncommon. Adidas partnered with Bata while Puma did with Metro. It's wild and you should read about it! The Takeaway Partnerships take quite a while to get started, and there's a bit of talking back and forth that can happen. Sometimes, partnerships fizzle out. You need to figure out how much time and effort a partner is willing to invest to make the partnership work. And do they have good enough reasons to do it? Getting Mentored When I was working out the partnership with Lucid and acting as the PM to build the extension, I asked for advice from Michael Pici (VP of Product, Revenue at Hubspot) to draw upon his experience. I also had many video messages with Nick Lafferty , who used to lead Growth Marketing at Loom, to check if my decisions were on the right track. I always asked them questions like, "What am I missing?" or "Where could this decision go wrong?". For the partnerships with our competitors and other partners (redacted), I continue to have regular calls every month with Hillary Miller (Head of Growth at Whimsical). There are a lot of people who say nice things about me and are eager to watch my career grow but Hillary is the one making it a reality! It takes genuine effort to get into the weeds with someone and offer nuanced advice. And it is much harder to do that consistently every single month with no expectations in return! So, I cannot emphasize how important having a mentor is and I feel like I lucked out with her as mine! What I've learned so far is that the goal of a partnership is to make sure everyone wins: you, the partner, your users and their users. And if that combination matches, then no one is off limits. Sometimes, partners will promote you without you ever asking for it. Ask once, and if they like you, they'll keep featuring you. Figma mentioned that Streamline had one of the best community profiles on their marketplace. They featured Apple next, who are a big inspiration for us. No amount of money can buy a placement like this from Figma. Their team featured Streamline on their own 😄 With partnerships, there are templates, processes and better attribution mechanisms that can make the process better! Which you'll figure out over time. But the original creativity and the execution is where the heart of partnerships lies. I also want to touch on influencer partnerships a bit. The one thing that has worked for me is to be kind, especially when people least expect it. For example, I typically can tell if something's going to be delayed or not. You have two options. Either rush them to meet a deadline. Or, flip it out and go over and beyond. If creators ask for an extension, give them way more. I can go on and on... with screenshots. But you get the point. I've even offered our spot to another company if it makes the creator more revenue and I'd take another spot (if it costs me nothing to switch). Thanks for reading! - Khushi Lunkad

Tbh, this is an unsponsored appreciation post for Mixpanel. Insights that stitch marketing with product data were historically impossible to do so for us, and I now have data that I only dreamt of having. Goal: Un-silo marketing and product analytics Traditional growth marketing courses recommend using tools like GA and GTM. However, these tools keep data siloed. They lack detailed insights into user engagement, activation, monetization, and retention. The solution is to unify marketing and product data in one place. It'll save time and resources from spending money on the wrong channels. However, historically, this was challenging for small teams to accomplish. The starting point: Mixpanel vs GA4 When I first joined Streamline, our analytics were almost non-existent, resembling those of any new SaaS company. We tried multiple software tools, including Google Analytics, Matomo, and Plausible. Despite spending a significant amount on consultants, the data we got was inadequate. Our developers were particularly hesitant about diving into Google Tag Manager and marketing tracking, a common sentiment because of their unintuitive product. The most perplexing issue was that most conversions were showing up as 'direct' traffic . The complexities of setting up Google Analytics were far greater than we had anticipated. We couldn't even track across our entire stack. At one point, we even considered relying solely on intuition and post-purchase surveys for insights because analytics tools were failing us. The turnaround: embracing Mixpanel The game-changer came when we started using Mixpanel for product analytics as well as marketing analytics . With the help of our engineering team and a consultant, we implemented simple product analytics. We used server-side tracking to bypass adblockers, a crucial step since 30-45% of our tech-savvy audience uses them. Unlike GA, Mixpanel could track these users. The depth of our exploration The more we used Mixpanel, the more we realized its capabilities. We were able to achieve full-funnel analytics across all our tech stack , and answer critical questions like: User Behavior and Engagement Where are users coming from? Track UTMs and referral domains. What is their behavior in the product? How many activate and take core product actions? How many people drop off at each stage in the funnel (e.g., from a pageview on the marketing site to copy/download to search asset)? Product Features and Metrics Which features are popular with different segments of the audience? Should we pivot to a different ICP? What happened to core metrics after we launched the redesign? Where exactly are people getting stuck in the product? Marketing and Outreach We could send cohort data to lifecycle marketing tools (e.g., send email to users that start a trial but never take core action event) Which partner is sending how many users? How many users sign up / start a trial / convert? To which plans? And when? If we run an ad on Twitter, how many users copy/download at least a single asset? How many convert after a period of X days? For people that use the free product, do they retain? Are we getting most of our new traffic from extensions and plugins? SEO and Content Performance Which SEO blogs perform best in terms of activation, engagement, and conversion? Which user converted from which blog? (Something GA won't tell you). How long does a user retain from each blog? Data Analytics and Modeling Map attribution models based on last touch and first touch data. Backport product signals to performance marketing and optimize for other goals besides conversions. What's the word of mouth coefficient for the app? Implementation team: who did what The setup was achieved by just a full-stack engineer and myself . For the initial product analytics setup, I brought on a consultant. This took a few weeks of work + additional few weeks of testing data. The work with the consultant wasn't very successful so we eventually took it on internally. For the marketing analytics this also took a month long implementation process. Our tech stack includes a react app, framer websites, a blog hosted on Ghost, a shopify store, and multiple plugins and extensions. We use a mix of server-side and client-side tracking to get the most amount of data. We ran through the analytics setup ourselves and made some mistakes. That's ok and was expected! Dev-details: For UTMs, we used Mixpanel's out of the box setup. To stitch prelogin and post login data, we used a combination of mixpanel.alias (backend) and mixpanel.indentify (frontend). If you are using only frontend library, then mixpanel.identify will do all the work for you. The UTM params are stored in the cookie but are only being sent on certain events and not all of them. I use the Initial UTM params on the profiles most of the time so it's not that big of a deal. But it can be a problem and you could use formulas to bypass this. Google Analytics vs Mixpanel We still have code lying around for GA4 but I honestly cannot stand their UX anymore. I don't recommend using it. Plus, Mixpanel integrates with Hotjar so you can see a lot more visual data alongside metrics. But this is on a business plan. Mixpanel's also free up until 20M events, which should be pretty sufficient to cover all pageviews and MAUs. Earlier, they had MAU based pricing and it was tougher to pay because all site visitors would get counted agaist an MAU based pricing. So, as far as Google Analytics vs Mixpanel goes, I'd pick Mixpanel all day. The Success The insights we get out of Mixpanel was historically impossible to do so and we couldn't be happier with the time invested. What we ended up with was a robust analytics system that I once only dreamt of having. This allows me to focus on channels that work and remove ones that don't. It also helps identify friction points in the product. The limitations (As I see today) 1) Filters display only 3,000 rows at a time. To view more, you can filter, segment, or export in CSV format with up to 10,000 results. However, for larger sites, especially in programmatic SEO, you'll need to analyse outside of Mixpanel. 2) There is no native integration with Search Engine Console. However, GSC data is sampled and not entirely accurate for low volume keywords in terms of click data. So Mixpanel is reliable in terms of click data. 3) Unlike Google Analytics, there's isn't a no-code integration with Looker or Data Studio. 4) Tag Manager integration is now available. I implemented it quickly on my site ( toption.org ) in 10 minutes, but it doesn't track 'time spent'. This might be an error on my part but could also not be. But the team is shipping fast. A month ago, they didn't have GTM but now they do (after I had a feedback session with their PM). So, tech is evolving in the right direction. [SOLVED: it works with "Session Duration", not "Duration"] 5) If you have a landing page that also acts as a navigational site item, it's much harder (or impossible to get data) on how many users land because you need to exclude users that just find the page via navigational search. [ SOLVED ] 6) You don't see metrics like bounce rate right off the top of Mixpanel but you could create a funnel report. [ SOLVED ] Thanks for reading! - Khushi Lunkad

The company I work at went viral today. Not by a coincidence. We make icons. The Wins 1. Earned 900+ backlinks overnight and it's on the road. 2. Hit the front page on Hacker News. 3. Which in turn, got us a featured in many design and dev resource websites such as this one. Influencers started adding us to their directories. I wondered if I could create a surprise and delight campaign with these influencers who organically promoted us. To test, I offered to create a custom drawn meme as a thank you. And it resonated! People had some really niche asks for memes. Which our design team turned around in less than 24 hours. Scale the Piggybacking Memes inherently are a viral product and very share-worthy. I wondered if I could 10x the success of the test above. In our monthly email newsletter, I usually send out new product launches. But this time around, I wanted to piggyback on our users. I launched a giveaway: Spread the word and win a free custom meme I wanted to keep things simple: ❌ No dev overhead. No complex referral marketing programs to integrate. ❌ No money or tacky incentives. Designers are really fun people, and have a true love for life. So didn't want to incentivize with money or credits which doesn't feel right, and can even be a headache to manage. And it blew up. People started tweeting about. Adding it to their directories. Sharing with friends. It made its way to our company Slack for recklessly being shared across the internet. ❤️‍🔥 I'm pretty proud of this piggybacking campaign. This is a classic case of piggybacking, and a win I'll remember for a long time. 🌈 I'm a small team, with a tiny budget. Our freemium business model doesn't support high CAC channels. So, I have to be creative and punch above my weight. The constraints led me here. Thanks for reading. Best, Khushi #NeverMarketAlone

There are three reasons why people share 1. Financial: Robinhood, Paypal (give get $10) 2. Personal: Whatsapp, Slack, Linkedin 3. Social/Word of Mouth: Tesla, Tinder, Stripe And, our new product wasn't relevant to our existing audience We were launching a great product. It was free and open-source. However, the product itself wasn't something our existing audience could use. This means, I couldn't piggyback off of our existing audience to get that first spike. Slapping money on the wall Given the circumstances, it would be impossible to get people to share the product organically. They had no skin in the game to share. So, the only option left to us was a financial incentive. Pay people to share. I'd say it was a weak financial incentive. A giveaway. Only 1 winner. So people know they might not win anything even after putting in the effort. A give and get program is much stronger in comparison because there's an assured return. Ours was worth $300 which was what many people in our audience earned in an hour. I was worried it'll fail So a couple of hours before the launch, I pitched the team to pivot away from the financial incentive. 🥲 The solution? The alternative I suggested looked something like this 👇 Instead of asking people to share with friends, I wanted to encourage people to share with influencers instead. This was the exact email I drafted: Without tracking referral links If I were cooler, I'd say that attribution is a myth. That's why I did away with unique URLs allowing people to track their referrals. But if I were honest, I just didn't have the time to set up something more polished. Plus, the email tool we use doesn't integrate with Sparkloop which is what I would've wanted to use. The campaign was a total success To be honest, I was impressed how well it performed. We've been featured in languages I don't speak. And the quality of posts are much better than had we paid for it. Here's why: The influencer gets a warm intro from an existing fan. The mention looks more authentic than a sponsored post. And the user doesn't have to create content on their own to share. All they have to do is forward an email to one person. Interestingly enough, we got featured by influencers that never do sponsorships. I know this because I did reach out to them right after they posted. This was the exact moment when I realized the campaign was a success. Influencers that took no sponsors promoted us for free. And I didn't even have to reach out to them. It worked at scale. Across different languages. Targeting both macro and micro influencers. Did it convert? It absolutely led to bottom line revenue. I have a form on the post-purchase flow sequence that asks people where they discovered us from. And a few people referenced these influencers. How virality works? I read an article on Substack that explained how ideas go viral. And you'd be surprised to learn that ideas don't go viral when one person shares with another. In fact, they go viral when someone shares with a lot of people and it explodes. So, if a tweet goes viral, more often than not there's someone famous that retweeted it. I used that as an insight to convert a referral marketing campaign to an influencer marketing campaign. Because even if 10 people shared it with an influencer, we would've gone viral. Final notes I'd recommend you try this out! It was a bit creative and I haven't seen anyone else do it. So, it's not overly used yet. Plus, I can't take full credit for this. I have a wonderful team. Supportive founder. Great product to market. Good luck and god's support. So, thank you so much for reading this long letter.

Hey, we lost our homepage 👋 If you were to visit streamlinehq.com today, you'll go straight to the app. No marketing site. No same old "get started CTA". And you can export as many icons as you want without ever signing up. For first time users, we display a welcome modal. Take a look here: It's a bit uncommon in SaaS to drop the homepage for the app, but not all that uncommon for several B2C companies. Reddit lets users interact right away. So does Instagram. Have you ever seen Instagram's marketing site? Nope, because people don't enter Instagram via the marketing site. They land on a profile page, an individual reel, a hashtag etc. So, what should you do? Make all pages that people enter via ungated? Not so fast. Let's take a look at how LinkedIn personalizes. 1️⃣ Direct visits to a profile page have a compulsory sign up. 2️⃣ But if a user lands on a profile after searching on Google, they soften the ask a bit. People landing via organic search can bounce off. So, they have the ability to 'close the popup'. 3️⃣ And ungate it altogether when users land on a singular post or a blog article written on LinkedIn. Linkedin matches the user's intent & motivation with the level of friction they can add. And that's the ideal goal. The larger a company, the better it can segment. Everything will always be a tradeoff regardless of whether you're a large company or a small company. You have to answer a few questions: 1) Do I gate or ungate? 2) Do I make it compulsory or not? 3) Do I use a soft nudge or a much stronger one? I'd like to share how we arrived at this decision. And what was the impact (good and bad) of doing so. After that, I'll share some more examples from other companies. The evolution of our homepage This was one of the versions we had 2 years ago. There was a navbar that I can't seem to add in the screenshot so please use your imagination! And by all means, this was a pretty good homepage. In fact, I later found out that it was featured in Jeremy Moser's guide calling it the "perhaps the best landing page hero on the internet". It's nice to know that a homepage performs well when you look at the data and reports. However, it's even more special when you discover that other people reference it too! Having external positive validation makes it more challenging to iterate because you don't want to break what's working :) But we did iterate. Our homepage evolution: Second version At the time, I thought it was pretty good. People understood our value proposition so well that they repeated it verbatim in user survey interviews. We also had buttons for people to install a Figma plugin. So, people could build a habit of using Streamline in their daily workflow. Our homepage evolution: Third version We had a rebrand. And here's what it looked like. In the previous versions, I had a very strong influence on the marketing site. I dropped screenshots and built out the wireframes. But in the third version, my primary goal was to let the art shine. My brief was "It shouldn't look like anything marketing has designed." I think for marketers, we tend to own the marketing site and logged-out website experience. But there may be times when you want to give up that control. More so, when you market to technical audiences like devs or designers. Our design team is incredible so I wanted to let their craft lead the process. In my case, I shared as much context as I could and supported the design process. I focused on CTAs, pain points, and value props. But beyond that, I didn't want to offer any direction on design. I only copy-edited. And once we shipped, we were pretty happy with it. The data also confirmed it was a good move. Our homepage evolution: Fourth version 🟢 After this, we dropped the homepage and moved it to a separate page. Now, when people land on Streamline, they are greeted with a welcome modal which they can close and continue with their experience. It took 2 designers, 1 developer, and me around a week to get this live. SEO constraints: It represented a step back in terms of SEO because a lot of the on-page SEO would be lost. As long as we delivered on the UX, our rankings wouldn't tank. You may also have duplicate pages so you'll have to handle some redirections. I'd recommend visiting Search Engine Console > Links to see which pages have more backlinks before you make the 301 redirection. Emojipedia/FSymbols handle this pretty well since their traffic comes via programmatic SEO. Test, if you can Quantitative : I had also A/B tested it over the years and we had data to confirm it would play out well. Qualitative : People enter Streamline in more ways than the homepage. It's just like tools like Wikipedia, ShutterStock, and Emojipedia. People don't follow a traditional path of the usual homepage ⮕ app pattern. With or without a modal window We wondered sending them directly to the app but having that first-time landing experience would help address some of the value props and hesitations even though some users may drop off. With or without an onboarding Rows has an onboarding whereas we don't. Excalidraw is a diagramming tool without an onboarding. It would depend on how intuitive your product is. And what are the current priorities for the team. If people fail without an onboarding, then you probably need one. Do I trust my gut or data? I don't think you can truly fully be data-driven. A lot of it will also come down to what your gut says. Handing analytics We've migrated to Mixpanel for marketing and product analytics. I wrote about our implementation here . Originally, we were using Mixpanel with localStorage and had to opt for cookies instead to make the subdomain tracking work. Our inspiration We were inspired by Typefully . They have a modal window and bento designed cards. Another inspiration was rows.com . They dropped their homepage and saw a massive improvement. Their Head of Growth wrote about it here . Sanity checklist Do users get a value out of the marketing site or do they only click on the first CTA to enter the app? Do you expect activation, retention and other key metrics to go up? Or are you only going to feed the app low-quality, de-motivated traffic. Marketing site can help raise the motivation levels. Are there more ways to enter the app and is the app ungated? What would be the simplest possible way for you to validate? Maybe via a paid ad split test? Change link in bios? Email CTA? Do you have a horizontal product with lots of use cases? Do you have enough traffic to make it worth it? Will the unit economics make sense? If people reset cache in their browser, could they misuse the platform? Are you ok with that? Is it reversible or do you have a lot of problems that can arise? Why didn't I share metrics? Lying with numbers is pretty easy and I could do that if I wanted to. But honestly, I don't trust when I see claims like "boosted revenue by 30%", or "bounce rate decreased by 24%" because more often than not, it only shows a part of the picture. I often question these claims. What if your bounce rate decreased but you only had 1000 visits a month? What if the activation rate increased because you found product-channel fit this month? If I did want to share numbers, I'd have to share everything with you. - User count - Activation metrics - Retention data - Vanity metrics like bounce rates - Qualitative feedback - Before vs after - With modal vs without modal - Impact on enterprise sales and so much more. Only then, should you trust my data. But since that might be too much information, I guess the only data point that you'd need from me is, "Hey this worked. It may or may not work for you but I hope you're inspired!". But you can still verify by some simple math: Say you have 100k visitors to the homepage. Of these, only 20% click through while the rest drop off. You could get that click through rate to a 100%. Maybe users are slightly less motivated and activate at 15% instead of 25%. Control = 100k*20%*25% = 5k users activated Test = 100k*15% = 15k users activated Thanks, Khushi

"Khushi seems to have 25 hours in a day" ​ - Director of Product Marketing EMEA at Adobe I have a lot of projects ongoing at any given moment. Full-time work, consulting projects, courses to take, personal life and events to attend. There are a lot of balls to juggle. And I cannot drop any of them. After a year of iteration, this is what’s worked for me First, I drop all tasks in Todoist . If it’s not on my Todoist, I will likely not do it. I used to pay for Todoist but their free plan is so good that they need to have some paywalls. Every task has three things:   client name: i have short codes for all. if it’s for my blog, i file it under TO . categorized: is it to be done now or can it be done later? links: to figma, slack or anywhere else the conversation currently happens so I don’t struggle for links I never add due dates unless there’s an actual pressing deadline. Because it’s a hassle to keep updating due dates. I also try not to accept tasks that aren’t actionable. For example, if I’m tasked to work on a project where I don’t see a clear vision, I try to probe deeper. In other cases, I will drop the task under “Ideas” categories. Or silo it into “Next Meetings”. Before I start my week, I plan out everything that I want to get done that week. Broken down by the exact day. Prior to that day, I’ll also make an hourly level plan so I know what I need to deliver. This happens outside of Todoist. On multiple whiteboards. You cannot do this on Todoist easily. There’s one more medium-sized whiteboard on the other side of the room. I only start actively executing once things are clearly laid out on the whiteboard. Every task gets broken down so I execute it quicker at the highest quality level. I don’t do well with shared team kanbans — they require a lot of manual updating to keep up with. Plus, everyone else likes to have their own visualizations. And I like to work in my own mess. Taking breaks I don’t like the pomodoro method where you work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. It forces you to lose focus. Instead, I work in stretches of 4-5 hours. Then, take a break to grab something to eat. And then work again for 5-7 hours again before I hit the bed. There are certain days where I’ll go play badminton. I might also go for a Yoga session downstairs in the society club. I like alternating between different sports to keep things interesting. On the weekends, I might go out for dinner/lunch. But I’m always back home within 2 hours. For friends who live in a different city, I schedule “Life Update” calls. This helps me keep up with what’s going on in their lives without constantly texting them. This might feel like I have no work life balance. And I don’t. But this is my dream life. When I was in Paris during my student exchange program, I took the maximum number of courses along with a 20 hour work week internship gig. This was tough — I wanted to top all the courses, make all of my own meals (no vegetarian options in Cergy), do housework, plus do an internship well enough to extend even after I returned to India. This is the life I chose. And I’m not going to shy away from it now that I have it all. Streamline’s a calm company, which means there’s no pressure to do this. I can scale up or down depending on my mood. I also don’t take all my holidays. The only ones I take are for weddings or birthdays. Or rest days. When I don’t feel like my output’s going to bring any value to the company. Work life balance is not on my cards today. I’d much rather put 100 hour work weeks and get the experience of someone in 1 year what would take 2.5 years to get. I can relax later if I wanted to with a stacked up skill set. Ending the day I also like to maintain a simple gratitude journal following John Fish’s pattern. It has these things: Schedule: minute-by-minute planner Goals: what are my main goals? Motivation: what’s motivating me to deliver? Happiness: what made me happy that day? You can also use the Journal app by Intelligent Change ( Android / iOS ). It's got similar questions and a far better UX. I don't stick to it because I worry about the data I share and because I have to fill it twice. That’s pretty much it! I don't want to make things look easy. It took a lot of effort and even more luck to get here. I'm going to need a whole lot more luck to get to where I want to go in a few more years. Thanks for reading. If you want to follow along my journey, please drop your email below. Best, Khushi

[Trigger Warning: This post talks about death.] On the 13th of Jan, 2025, I lost my best friend forever. Meet Ginger. I spent the majority of my life with her. I loved her most of everything I ever loved. She was home. Death teaches you more about life than life ever does. Her death wasn't sudden. I was expecting it since she had been sick. Three days before she passed away, our vet had prepared us of what's about to come. Pro tip: If you have a dog, there's a new medicine that's a preventive tick fever tablet. Check with your vet if you can give it to your pet once every month. Tick fever can relapse and it's often hard to keep recovering. Ginger was 13 years, 2 months old when she passed away peacefully. She wanted to be petted until the very last minute and we did round the clock shifts to make sure someone kept petting her every single minute. Even though she put up a tough fight, her body gave up at the end. This is the probably the closest I've been to experiencing death. As I get older, I'll start to lose more loved ones. And every date will be reminder of a good day or a worse one. The reason I write this post is to share a few things: How marketing shifts when you have this context Some examples To honor Ginger After the disastrous event, I didn't really care about anything. I cancelled all my calls. Told a few people about what happened but honestly, nothing really mattered. So, how would I handle this with empathy if I was on the other side? I remember working for a company a few years ago. The founder had a distressing relationship with her parents. Canva sent an email prior to Father's Day to let her opt out of what's about to come. She really appreciated receiving this email and shared with the entire team. It looks like Etsy also does the same: The default CTA is to opt-out. And it's not a tiny hyperlink. It's a proper button. I find Etsy's email better than Canva's because it's more targeted to Mother's Day vs isolating the customer from every special occasion. At another company, the founder fell sick. He wasn't able to work even a single hour a week. He didn't care that his payments to subscriptions failed. Recovery was most important. When the Customer Support rep emailed the founder, all he got was crickets. And kept wondering whether his email copy was good? Or whether the offer was good? There are a lot of times that things aren't in our control. People are suffering through losses. And they just don't care. Just having this context is probably going to make me a better communicator: People can lose their family (parents, partner, children, pets, siblings) The age range is important. Elder people must've had more suffering than younger ones, on average. Problems vary. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's someone passing away. Maybe it's their own health. Maybe they lost their home (check Palisades fire). You can't even control the trigger moments. I wake up if I hear the sound of a dog barking. I'll wake up if it's even a whimper. There are just so many trigger moments that it's impossible to control. We don't need to walk on thin ice nor do we want to feel sorry for people. This is what life is. But, what we can do is be different. Having a bit of empathy will immediately force you to make some tweaks. Will you send a price increase email with 2 weeks notice? For example, Wix sent me a price increase a week or two before my card would be charged. And they increased prices by 100%. This seemed very off-brand for Wix to do, because my experience with them has been great. But their monetization team decided to sacrifice user's trust (and recommendations/word of mouth) at the cost of a short-term revenue gain. 1) If your business has a lock-in and you need to increase prices, grandfather existing users to the features they originally subscribed to. If they want your newer features, let them opt-in. Bait and switch when you have a data lock in is risky. What you can do instead is remind people of the amazing discounts they got at the point of churn. You can code this yourself or use Churnkey. 2) Don't advertise a cheaper price if you can't honor it. Sometimes, people get too excited with a free plan and are overly generous. Then, they bait and switch because they have bills to pay or launch newer features that need adoption. 3) Disclose renewal rates up front if you want to discount. For transactional businesses that have no lock in, do as you'd like! It's actually better if your prices fluctuate a lot. Regret minimization is a real thing. I used to hold back on certain decisions but I might not going forward. Life is short as is and I don't have as much time as I think I do. So, I'm not going to spend my life wondering about decisions that don't matter much. The older people get, the faster they make decisions. Ginger was the greatest dog I could've ever asked for. She was and will always be my best friend. No one can ever replace her. But I'll never get another dog. I know my heart will never be able to go through this pain again. So if marketers feature dogs in their ad campaigns, it might drive my attention but I'm not sure if it'll make me feel the way they intend to. That's all, thanks for reading! If you've got more examples, please share them in the comment section below.

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 a marketer, I can immediately tell when we a brand starts to use psychological tactics like these. Piggybacking off of Sai Ganesh But Growth School’s biggest lever was Sai Ganesh — the then CMO at Dunzo. And I’m a Dunzo fangirl because of how ridiculously good their marketing is. So if this was a chance for me to take a look at their behind-the-scenes operations, I was going to take it up. But, boy was I disappointed. Sai’s content is good but I don't think he taught brand marketing. Instead, the entire course was more or less about social media marketing sold under a guise of brand marketing. I absolutely don't do social media marketing so idk what I'll do with all this newfound knowledge. 🥲 Growth School’s positioning is also really odd. Is the brand marketing course by growthschool.io worth the money? Their price point is incredibly high even when you compare to CXL and Reforge — both of which are industry standards and globally recognized. Reforge — which is like the Harvard of growth schools costs $1000-$2000 for a yearly access to 22 programs + incredible guest sessions + live lectures + brilliant software + amazing Slack group + recognized brand. CXL — same like Reforge, except it’s more tactical and entry-level. I also put together an interactive list of growth marketing and growth product courses if you're looking for an alternative. Is growth school good, overall? Their marketing communication is very immature and geared towards people who would need to be motivated to join a course they paid for. Constant, noisy upsells on Whatsapp. I still don’t understand why they use Whatsapp and publicly share our numbers. Then they began hosting community led sessions. Anyone from the community could volunteer and take up a course. Great UGC and easy content for them, I’d say. Obviously not what I had in mind when I spent my money. If I wanted community-generated content, I could go on YouTube. We paid for Sai’s lectures + guest lectures. The guest lectures didn’t happen on time, we weren’t given any visibility on when they would happen and people had to proactively reach out to their team for information. The worst part? The management. Look at some other reviews by students at growthschool.io. GrowthSchool doesn't even know how to use Google Calendars. Of all the live courses, I’ve been a part of, no one scheduled courses worse than Growth School did. It's madness. The discord community that they heavily promote? It doesn’t exist. The last message is more than a month ago and no one uses it. Not to mention, Growth school constantly runs surveys for their own benefit, guising it as beneficial to our community. They’ve asked for our LinkedIn and Instagram profiles. Reviews are always incentivized instead of being organic. People were really mad, and left brutally honest reviews for growthschool publicly in the chat. Their software always crashes on me. No transcripts on videos. Slides are shared via a google drive link instead of being embedded in the course material. No templates are shared, so you’ll have to spend a lot of time recreating those. 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

If I told you that... Watermarks don't have to be visual That they could still be added to users who've paid you money in order to... remove watermarks. Or that they could even be added to your enterprise customers in a very sales-led org Then, you'd probably call me a liar... Well, watermarks don't need to have a singular edge case. They don't have to look like a brand vomit, making your product impossible to use in production. There are more ways than one that benefit free users too. Let's look at some examples. 1. Streamline uses suffix in the name When users download free icons/illustrations from Streamline, a suffix is added to the icon name. The suffix is a combination of the brand name (Streamline) and the icon family (Ultimate). It also shows up when users copy/paste the code: Alert Bell Notification 2 Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

12 months later, here's my unbiased... Review of Reforge Growth Programs Is Reforge worth $2000/year? Could I, should I download Reforge for free? Reforge vs the alternatives An unbiased review of Reforge Growth programs An overview of what Reforge looks like on the inside 👀 What I don’t like about Reforge Some guest passes Is Reforge right for me? I have taken seven programs from Reforge 1. Growth Series 2. Growth Marketing 3. Monetization and Pricing 4. Growth Leadership 5. Advanced Growth Strategy 6. Product Led Growth 7. Retention and Engagement I’ve chain-smoked many MANY courses in the past It’s more than 60+ online courses so far and I can confidently say, I’ve seen the best and the worst of online courses. I’ve taken a little too many marketing and product courses: altMBA by Seth Godin , growth.design's psychology course, CXL , Demand Curve , Copyhackers , Common Thread Collective for FB ads, 90DaySEO , Foxwell , Chase Dimond for Email , Social Savannah Tiktok , Ahrefs and Moz courses for SEO, the super basic Hubspot and Google courses, Interface Design from Shiftnudge , Programmatic SEO from Preetam Nath, Content Marketing 201 from Amanda Natividad, Attribution and Marketing Mix Modelling from Vexpower and so many more . It’s endless, really. The point that I’m trying to drive home is that I’ve seen enough courses to have an opinion about Reforge. This article is 100% un-sponsored. No affiliate links, whatsoever either. No self-promotion either. It’s 100% unbiased and written on a whim. No ROI on this article but hopefully I’ll get to know you and make some friends. Anyway, let’s answer the questions you have before this starts to feel like a recipe blog that takes forever to get to the actual recipe. Reforge pricing and costs Membership to Reforge costs $2000 / year for unlimited access to all their programs and live cohorts. Live cohorts happen twice in a year (in April and Oct). The teams plan is their newest addition. 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,