• Vendr worked with Got Users to crack partnerships, cold outreach, and digital ads — and drove over $1 million of profitable ACV within a year. They raised a $60M Series A and are now valued over $1B.
• Fair Square Medicare turned paid search into 20% of their revenue within two weeks. After working with us, they raised a $15M Series A.
• UnitedAg used a range of strategies, including reverse board meetings, podcasts, events, conferences, and sales letters, to achieve over $28M in new sales, a 90% retention rate, and an expected $260M in contributions within a year.
• Nomic worked with us to crack Linkedin ads, Google ads, conferences, and cold outreach. These wins led them to close an oversubscribed $42M Series B round.
• The Lanby cracked paid ads, email marketing, and events, helping them triple their monthly growth in three months.
• Anja Health used a combination of TikTok ads, Meta ads, Google ads, influencer marketing, and word of mouth loops to 5x their conversions in weeks.
• StratiFi revamped their onboarding flow, uncovered a customer partnership loop, and cracked targeted ads. Their qualified pipeline grew by 15x, and they hit $1 million in ARR.

To understand who uses you, we recommend interviewing your happy users.

Happy users are users that retain — they experience the core value of your product over and over again.

The goal of growth is to get more people (like your happier users) to repeatedly experience the value of your product.

To know if we’re doing that, a metric should improve.

Growth teams call this metric the North Star Metric.

Examples:

• Rides completed per week (Uber)
• Monthly active users (Facebook)
• Documents sent per month (DocuSign)
• Daily active users (Slack)

Bad Examples

• Signups. What if people don't actually take a ride, order food, etc.?
• Revenue. Revenue happens because of your NSM.

We have serious horror stories about teams picking the wrong NSM. Choose wisely.

Once you have a North Star Metric, you need to answer the question: who is doing your NSM the most? Then, interview those people to understand…

Figuring out why happy users use you helps you target and convert people just like them.

Many founders don’t know why users actually use them — other than a vague sense that their product is useful.

This is why we recommend filling out a value props sheet.

People use your product when they hit problems with “bad alternatives” (more here). The implications of those problems are very painful to deal with. You pitch features to solve those problems so your user benefits.

We use these details to brainstorm acquisition channels and copy ideas.

Writing out your buyer’s journey — the steps that lead users to buy your product — forces you to think about which boxes users have to check before they purchase.

A buyer’s journey determines things like messaging, how you handle objections, and at a high level, what experiments you’ll need to run to make sure people buy/use your product.

Here’s the buyer’s journey template we recommend clients fill out:

Here’s an example buyer’s journey for an engineering hiring company, EngTrain.

We’ll use your buyer’s journey to debug onboarding problems, figure out where in the funnel to run experiments, and more.

To make sure your experiments work, you need to track what’s happening when you run them.

We recommend clients measure every major step of their funnel, along with CAC.

For example:

• Traffic
• Sign Up
• Activation Event
• North Star Metric
• Revenue
• Referral

It should look something like this. Here's a template you can copy.

This usually starts in a spreadsheet, but you’ll eventually move to a data tool like Improvado, Databox or Google Data Studio so you don’t have to manually update it every week.

There are two main reasons to monitor your funnel:

1. You can debug marketing problems. For example, we’ve had clients who saw unusual dropoff between their landing page and checkout page, then narrowed the problem to their mobile site being broken.
2. You can track if experiments are working at a high-level. For example, if you’ve been writing a lot of content, you’d expect to see your site traffic go up over time. If you’ve been fixing your homepage, you’d expect to see signups go up.

You can read more about growth loops in our intro docs here, but to summarize, growth loops are when you take an output of your product and repurpose it as an input acquisition channel (where people put their attention).

Examples

Based on your user interviews, you may think of a growth loop to monitor, but growth loops aren’t always obvious. It sometimes takes researching & experimenting before you find it.

We like to run low-hanging fruit experiments as fast as possible before adding tons of process.

In conjunction, we recommend you create a simple backlog (see template here) to help you track experiment ideas (and after a couple weeks prioritize which ideas to run).

It’s vital you run experiments effectively.

You won't build on useful learnings if you don’t run experiments well.

How do you know if you ran an experiment poorly or if the experiment actually failed?

We’ve seen too many startups’ half-ass experiments. This means you waste weeks of time and tens of thousands of dollars — with no learnings to show for it.

This is one of the main reasons we built Got Users. We have docs that cover every major experiment, from running social ads to writing cold emails. We give detailed feedback so you only ship experiments that pass a high-quality bar.

Every week, before your growth call, you’ll send us a Slack message that includes the following:

• Experiment learnings (e.g., ”We tested new copy on the landing page highlighting our locally-sourced materials, and it performed 30% better.”)
• Metric learnings (e.g., ”There’s a huge dropoff after people sign up. I looked at Hotjar recordings, and they never leave the integrations page.”)
• User learnings (e.g., “A lot of users are emailing in confused about pricing.”)
• Blockers & Asks (e.g., “I need an estimate from Got Users of how long it will take to learn Google Ads.”)

The message should look something like this:

Our growth calls follow a loose structure, but we adapt the call to whatever you’re struggling with or need the most help with in a given week.

This is the rough structure we’ll follow:

• Review relevant learnings
• We’ll double-click on the learnings you sent us through Slack. (E.g, “You said none of the people you reached out to responded to your user interview email, tell us more about that.”)
• Post-mortem-ing & debugging
• We’ll post-mortem why any experiments were (or weren’t) run effectively and debug any blockers getting in your way.
• Strategizing & prioritizing new experiments
• After the first couple weeks, we should be running experiments that build on learnings. (E.g., ”The ‘7-day trial’ messaging is converting better on the pricing page, so lets A/B test it on the homepage too.”)
• They should usually improve a growth loop — so the results compound over time. (E.g., ”Let’s add a popup after the magic moment to ask for a referral” is usually better than “Let’s do a PR push.”
• Once we brainstorm experiments, we’ll prioritize experiments using RICE, learnings, and patterns we’ve seen across other companies.