Growth tactics, on the clock.

Growth tactics with their evidence: effort, time to signal and what to measure, for startups and small companies. Every row reads the same way:

Effort: Hours of work to ship it once.
Time to signal: Days until the first readable result.
Evidence: How strong the public record is, in four grades.

Newest tactics

All 31 tactics, with filters

8 tactics, newest first.

hours, scale to 160

days, scale to 90

Answer how-to questions in other products' forums
Community. Founders answer how-to questions in other products' forums, then mention their tool. Zapier's early customers came this way, at roughly 10 to 20 visitors per forum link.
Community
Effort20 h
Time to signal21 d
EvidencePractitioner report
List the product in a platform's app marketplace
Partnerships. List your product in a platform's app marketplace. Standuply grew from about 200 to 1,000 teams after a Slack feature, and Importify saw day-one paid upgrades.
Partnerships
Effort60 h
Time to signal30 d
EvidenceCase with numbers
Pay writers for tutorials that answer your buyers' setup searches
Search. Pay outside writers for setup tutorials your buyers search for. DigitalOcean raised its typical payout to $300 per tutorial in 2018, and an outside estimate ties its library to 5M+ monthly visits.
Search
Effort40 h
Time to signal90 d
EvidencePractitioner report
Book customer interviews by cold email before you write code
Validation. Cold-email target customers for an hour-long interview before building anything. At WP Engine, the founder reports 40 of 50 agreed to talk and 30 became customers.
Validation
Effort25 h
Time to signal14 d
EvidenceCase with numbers
Make the premium tier the visual default
Pricing. Give the top pricing tier more space, larger type and the main button color. One third-party write-up reports 78% of Refactoring UI buyers chose it, alongside other changes.
Pricing
Effort12 h
Time to signal28 d
EvidencePractitioner report
Give the core product away and charge on transactions
Pricing. Make the core product free and earn on payments, payroll or loans run through it. Wave and Square show fast adoption, but their published numbers are reported, not tested.
Pricing
Effort80 h
Time to signal45 d
EvidenceCase with numbers
A free standalone micro-tool that feeds sign-ups to the main product
Free tool. A free, separately branded tool that does one narrow job and hands users into your main product. Eraser credits its DiagramGPT sidecar with 30% of new sign-ups.
Free tool
Effort80 h
Time to signal30 d
EvidenceCase with numbers
A free tier for people who will never pay, to reach the people who will
Free tool. Give a capped free tier to people who will never pay but sit near buyers. Algolia and GreyNoise show large free usage, but neither ties those users to sales.
Free tool
Effort60 h
Time to signal90 d
EvidenceCase with numbers

Cases

99designs spins SitePoint's design contest habit out into its own product99designs, 2008, Worked
Airbnb paid for professional photos of New York host listingsAirbnb, 2010-2012, Worked
Algolia gives DocSearch free to documentation sites in exchange for a search linkAlgolia, Mixed result
Avvo built a rated profile for nearly every US lawyer plus a free Q&A forumAvvo, 2018, Mixed result

Teardowns

Tools

Product-market fit survey: the Sean Ellis test, how to run it and how to read the scoreThe Sean Ellis test asks users how they would feel without your product. Score the share saying very disappointed. Ellis set the line at 40 percent.
A/B test sample size and duration calculator, with the formulaA 5% baseline needs 31,234 visitors per variant to detect a 10% relative lift at 5% significance and 80% power. Formula, inputs and run time.
Growth experiment template with ICE scoring, a weekly cadence and a backlog you can copyA growth experiment template gives each idea a hypothesis, an ICE score from 1 to 10, one owner and one metric, then ranks the backlog every week.
Growth model template for startups, with inputs, a cohort layer cake, a loop row and a sensitivity tableA growth model template in four sheets: inputs, a cohort layer cake, a loop row and a sensitivity table, with worked numbers you can copy this week.