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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 Some content is slightly outdated, some of it is a drag.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 I'm checking with CXL's team whether they'd update content, because otherwise you're at risk of learning outdated stuff for months. 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. Edit I'm adding this note on the 31st of July in 2024. I have an affiliate link down below so I can see how many people are purchasing the course and getting a refund. The money is not super important to me but lately, I've been seeing a crazy trend of a high refund rate. One out of every two purchases are eventually refunded so it points to one thing that people aren't really satisfied with the product or they're abusing the platform. Do with this information what you will. Thanks. Liked this cxl course review? First of all, thank you for reading my experience at CXL Institute! I put in hours of effort into making the most comprehensive and honest review of CXL’s minidegrees. I’ll continue to improve it as time passes. Please leave a comment below if you feel like it. Or just say hi . It's good be friends :) And if you're feeling extra generous and thought this article helped you to make a purchase decision, please sign up using my affiliate link . 🤗 Why I wrote this article and why I want to improve it further? I wasn’t able to find any honest review of whether CXL Institute is good or not. Everything out there was unoriginal, useless or incomplete. Ever since completing the growth marketing mini-degree , I wanted to write a sincere review.

Collecting Cancellation Data Stripe has this functionality in their billing settings that you can use to capture cancellation reasons. Once you have this set up, you get two types of data: MCQ options that people choose from Freeform text input field when people choose 'Other' option. Exporting Cancellation Data from Stripe Stripe will let you hover over each cancellation to see what they said. But you won't be able to export this data as a CSV. You'll have to use Stripe Sigma which comes with a 30 day free trial. I don't know SQL nor did I have the time to learn how to use it. So, I used ChatGPT. Fed ChatGPT some example codes from the template section of Sigma, and asked it to create one for this use case. Took me 20 minutes of trial and error but the outcome was pretty nice! You can paste both of these in the editor as is and then hit RUN. SQL Snippet #1 - Freeform field SELECT cancellation_reason_text, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason_text SQL Snippet #2 - MCQ field data SELECT cancellation_reason, COUNT(*) as count FROM subscriptions WHERE status = 'canceled' GROUP BY cancellation_reason Analyzing Churn Data Download the MCQ version and create a lovely bar graph to see the primary reasons why people cancel. For the freeform field, it'll require a bit more work before it's usable. You'll have to Import that data in Ch atGPT and ask it to run cluster analysis and 'group by themes'. Then, you can ask it to convert it to a table format, add numbers based on how many times the theme recurs, and expand on each! Making Decisions with Churn Data You'll know why people are cancelling before paying hundreds of dollars for a churn prevention tool. But once you know why people are cancelling, you can take better steps to across the product, starting with segmenting them at the onboarding. ⭐ I used this data to build our Churnkey cancellation flow. (Edit as of Jan, 2024: I joined Churnkey. Everything else on this page is unchanged.) If you're curious about reducing churn, visit fixingchurn.com for more tactical advice. It's a sister site!

The problem statement A B2C SaaS startup reached out to me to reduce their churn rate. "Churn rate is at 14.3%. By month 3, only 55% retain. And, across all our cohorts, only 32% remain over an extended period of time." Investigating high churn rate They were already using Churnkey's template which had brought down churn significantly. And after my investigation, I launched a new A/B test within Churnkey's portal. You can see that the % of people that retained were now roughly 30%. What this means is that if 100 people clicked on the cancel button, 30% of people choose not to cancel. This was much higher than what they had originally. 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. Churnkey's dashboards also show trendlines but I prefer to do it in a spreadsheet. 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 in Churnkey Adding that extra sentence of "This way, your data can be preserved" raised the number of people that abandoned the flow by 14.2%. How to reduce churn rate in SaaS? To reduce churn, we're also tackling it on multiple fronts. We're investing in product education and better UX. A/B testing Churnkey flows and making more segments (eg, early churners vs later churners) is also another strategy to work on. If you do end up using Churnkey, tell them Khushi sent you :) I've also been creating a sister site at fixingchurn.com so take a look? 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

No one dreams that they will become a marketer when they grow up. You could be a scientist pushing humanity forward. A surgeon saving lives. Or even a founder solving problems. Marketers? We're most commonly know to spam. Growth practitioners? We're most commonly know to suck the life out of a good product. Clearly, everyone hates marketers. It's not a secret. So, why on earth would I knowingly choose this profession? Re: "I love you" I once sent a newsletter. The response I got was "I love you" from one of our users. In a world where marketers spam, this is my KPI. Where people actually want to hear from you. Look, I know. Marketers don't build a product. All we do is amplify. We help good products reach more people. Like journalists, we amplify stories. Too often, good products die out because no one thought how to bring it to market. And build a real business around it. It's not this black and white with "good" and "bad". Amongst all of this, my aim is simple. Great products deserve to win, and then some more. And I do that in four ways: acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention. I almost never touch the core product but strongly influence the product depending on what the market wants and what we can win against. If your goal is entrepreneurship... Then solving marketing & growth is a great skillset to have. Consumer behavior is notoriously hard. People don't act the way they think. They don't think the way they act. It's as much of an art as its a science. Your company depends on you... Who do you think gets fired if the company fails to make money? Company doesn't perform well? They say "oh, our marketing isn't great". CMOs have the shortest tenure. Driving income is a huge responsibility that marketing and growth team shoulder together. The life of the company depends on how many people resonate with you and draw money out of their pockets. Marketing teams can no longer be siloed into these awareness-only buckets as they have been historically. You have to influence the product. You have to be on top of bugs, monetization model iterations, algorithm changes etc. You can't be accountable for revenue or poor performance if you don't have influence over every part of the company. * By influence, I don't mean ownership. Much to my mother's disapproval, I have rejected bonuses too. This is how I justify it. Bonuses can be as high as 40% of my income. And I will still want us to reinvest it back into the business. This is definitely not financially smart. I also get to work with awesome people, who put me first. Failure and feedback loops Marketing and growth teams are close to the customers in two ways. Failure is real. It cannot be sugarcoated by user count or qualitative feedback. Instead, if you're not making money, you're responsible. We have the shortest feedback loops. Product takes months to build. Design iterations take longer. Engineering has to get through several sprints to ship. We can ship an experiment and train our intuition almost immediately. It's as real as it gets. Customer support is close to customers but doesn't have revenue accountability (except for mature companies). We talk to customers to map out their buyer journey and trigger points. We know how we compare to our competition and what changes are they making in their product in real-time. Having short feedback loops and being close to customers gives us so much more insight into what works and doesn't. Given all that context, here are some founding principles of how I think about marketing and growth. My growth and marketing manifesto 1. No traffic for the sake of traffic Target people that will get value out of your product. It's easy to believe every channel can work for you. If you're a B2B brand selling solar home installations that cost tens of thousands of dollars, posting generic drowsy content on IG is never going to work. Be honest to yourself and look for early signals to lean into it or pivot away. Essentially, there are two types of users we want: 1) People who can get real value out of our product 2) People who offer us feedback to improve 2. Ship with intensity and urgency Focus on things that matter. And then execute best you can. I've made mistakes of hiring people that simply cannot get things done. Or they need a hundred feedback rounds to ship even the little things. It's hard to find people who love what they do so much so that intensity and urgency is a by-product. They don't count the hours they spend. And they *want* to spend their weekends advancing in their field. If you don't love what you do, you'll just get burnt out. To win, you need four things. Mediocrity is competitive. But there's always room at the top. And that's where you should want to go to. Here's a tweet by the founder of Runaway to better explain what I mean: 3. Never market alone Find a horse to ride and piggyback on anything . You're a small boat in an ocean. You cannot make big waves by doing it yourself. Let the wave carry you. 5. Find out what is working So you can double down on what is working and what isn't. Very hard to execute in real life though because buyer journeys aren't simple. I used a lot of stuff at Streamline to get clarity (qualitative interviews, post-purchase surveys, product marketing analytics data, marketing mix models). Start with the easy stuff. Then layer on. 6. Chase insights, not revenue Revenue is an outcome and focusing too much over it just leads to stress. I hardly check Stripe to see how much money we make every week. Instead, I mine insights. And use those to form winning strategies. And eventually, you'll see you've come pretty far. See how one insight helped us reach 60 million users . 7. No fluff If something's not working, we have to be honest about it. Cut down fluff from everywhere. I don't like to spend time working on stuff that truly doesn't matter. And hate it when copy is unnecessarily wordy or stuffed with adjectives. 8. Play with sportsmanship No belittling competitors. At Streamline, our competitors often promote us. Vincent promotes our competitor launches. It's kind of weirdly healthy. It won't apply to every industry but we don't throw shade. 9. Be honest with your audience, no clickbait-y content or dark patterns I don't like to receive click-baity zero value content. And I don't want users to receive content like this either. It's simple. Treat your users like they're already customers. 10. Be curious and invite feedback Feedback is a gift. I often publish my work in Slack inviting feedback from whoever is willing to give it. Earlier in my career, I would feel bad when I received harsh feedback. But now, I actively seek out feedback. And it really helped me improve. 11. Optimize for happiness I took a class at Essec called the Science of Happiness and it taught me more about psychology than anything ever could. Many people aren't truly happy. We are in a loneliness pandemic. 😶‍🌫️ It honestly doesn't cost much to put a smile on people's faces. It's free to do. At least, most of the times. An example of this is when I had to send a discount code to a guy named Marq. The coupon code I sent to him was called "MarqMyWords," and he was surprised I took that time out to be unnecessarily creative. When I provide harsh feedback to someone on my team, I now try to do it in a way that brings them joy. It's challenging, and I admit that I fail at times. 12. Aim for inbounds, over outbounds Over the years, I've tried outbound multiple times and realized that the ROI never works out. Maybe they churn faster or the conversion rate is lower or you're terribly impacting your brand equity. Inbounds are the way to go. Here's an example. I received an inbound message from Shaan Puri back in 2021 that said something along the lines of if I was consulting for growth marketing or had an agency. Shaan Puri is pretty well known! There was no way I could reach him via outbounds. Or, from Kyle, who is pretty much defined the PLG space as we know it today. And another inbound from the person behind one of the most viral UNO campaigns ever. She created the “You can’t draw 2 on draw 2” post. She also worked with government intelligence agencies to fight terrorists, using data and marketing! Absolute badass. You might argue, "Hey Khushi, it's probably because you're bad at outbound". Well, maybe I am. But I do know that I don't like to be on the receiving end of outbound sales messages. Asking for feedback via outbounds is great though but direct sales wasn't something I could ever see work. And the only time outbound sales sort of worked for me was when Stefan Bader from cello.so reached out. It was mostly because I was already interested in his work and I sent him a connection request first. 13. A no is better than a maybe or a yes If I come to you for feedback or suggestions, I prefer you say no to a certain project idea vs a maybe or a half-yes. Aggressive prioritization is the name of the game. Thank you for reading my rather long manifesto. I'll make it shorter in the future. It is essentially a guideline about how I think about marketing and growth. And why I am still excited by a field that nearly everyone hates. I'm always looking for good talent, so if you'd like to work with me, send me a message. Best, Khushi

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

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

"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.