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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. Thanks for reading! - Khushi Lunkad

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

I take on projects where I know I can make a real impact or when there's someone on the team I’ve long respected. Most clients engage me in one of two ways: 1. Audit I will audit your existing flows, mine insights, and create a growth strategy. These are intense deep dives with tactical recommendations that your team can hit the ground running with. 2. Build Hands-on consulting for projects. The devil is usually in the details and Build ensures higher chances of success. What I do? I work across PLG and Marketing projects. This portfolio hasn’t been updated recently, but it’ll give you a sense of my work. You can also check out a case study on how we grew to millions of users with most of the F100 as customers all on a bootstrapped budget. I focus on solving two problems: how to get more users and how to make more money. What to expect? The first month is focused on onboarding and building a plan of action. I’ll speak with your team, interview customers, and dive deep into your data stack. Unless you have a very specific problem to solve, this preliminary deep dive helps me understand the business context and make more confident decisions. The output is a detailed deck that outlines high-leverage priorities. I’ll share the deck at the end of Month 1 and we’ll review it together. It will be tactical and actionable. Example screenshot, blurred for sensitivity. What do clients say after receiving it? "Wow. We would've paid a lot more money for this! " " You've really nailed our product " " A lot of ideas that I think we should work on . You were comprehensive to ensure that we are not missing anything. This is great. " and so many more! My goal is to give you a fresh outside perspective while getting my understanding of the business closer to yours. The deck is meant to spark discussion. Some ideas will stick, others won’t. That's the point. Once we align on the plan, we start execution in Month 2. What we focus on depends on the research. It could be lifecycle, onboarding, referrals, analytics, pricing, or new growth loops. I don’t take on performance marketing. Or core product development, unless I’m also a customer of the product. That said, I’m happy to refer specialists I trust. What's the motivation? I want to start my own company someday. Until then, this is how I learn, by working across problems, teams, and industries. The more surface area and reps I get, the better I get. If you’d like to understand how I think and work, here’s my manifesto and a few courses that have shaped my approach. You can also browse testimonials to hear from teams I’ve worked with. One last thing, you can pause our engagement at any time. This is helpful when design or engineering teams need time to build before we resume. This flexibility keeps things aligned with your pace, not mine. I will automatically initiate this on my end if we are not hitting the set hours.

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 :) More to come soon! It's a work-in-progress and updates roll out once a few months. Best, Khushi

Imagine this... You need to grow 10X but your budget is 1/10th. How would you win? If I told you that was possible and then some more, you’d probably call me crazy. In the past three years that I’ve worked at Streamline  (an icons and illustrations library), we’ve grown to millions of users. The majority of Fortune 100 companies use/pay us, including customers like Vanguard, Twilio, Bloomberg, and Booking.com. You’d probably find it hard to browse the internet without running into Streamline. Streamline is bootstrapped, calm , and without a sales team. The company has a zero meetings culture and sometimes our founder will even promote competitors. It is wild and beautiful at the same time. So, hi. I’m Khushi. I lead growth and marketing at Streamline . In this article, I’ll go beyond the common knowledge that we’ve already seen with PLG and marketing. I’ll share counterintuitive learnings with some starting ideas to implement them in your own company. Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn: Never market alone. You’re a small team. You need outsized impact. Find a horse to ride. Your free product should probably scare you. Don’t limit PLG to only the product. Expand it to your team’s time and everything else. Be shameless when asking for help and advice. and some more! #1 Tip: Find a horse to ride Finding a horse to ride is a concept from a book called Horse Sense . It means that you need to find something bigger than yourself to climb the next mountain. Maybe it is a rich dad. Or your successful partner. SurveyMonkey’s CEO was Facebooks’ COO husband, and that’s how they got the idea of a growth team ( source ).  It is a concept similar to piggybacking in international business. Piggybacking is a market entry strategy where you partner up with someone local and ride on their back. So, how did Streamline piggyback? 1. Piggybacked with channel partnerships Streamline created a plugin for Figma . Eventually, we won Figma’s best graphic design award in 2022 and became a top 1% plugin of all times. We also partnered up with Lucid. This gave us access to 60M users that could reach Streamline in 2 clicks. Channel partnerships  bring in users that retain. Unlike a paid ads campaign, you’re embedded in their workflow. 2. Piggybacked on end users with attribution Every person that uses Streamline for free is required to attribute to us with backlinks. Not everyone will honor these license rules but those that do helped us cross a domain authority of 74 with around 100k backlinks. When you think of attribution or watermarks, you don’t need to have a singular use-case. There are more ways to incorporate them , even with paid users. 3. Piggybacked on 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.

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

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

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. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

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