Playbooks
Several tactics in order, with the timings between them.
- Community-led growth: when it works, the operating model and the metrics
Community-led growth makes users who help each other the reason new users arrive and stay. When it works, a 90-day plan and the metrics to report.
- Founder-led marketing on LinkedIn and X: the cadence, formats and what to measure
Founder-led marketing: the founder posts on LinkedIn and X on a schedule. Start at 2 LinkedIn posts a week and track visits, conversations and signups.
- How to Grow a Newsletter: Recommendations, Swaps, Paid Ads, Referral and What Each Subscriber Costs
Grow a newsletter with free swaps, paid recommendations at $2 to $7 per referral and Meta ads at a $1 to $2 target cost, then add content and referral.
- Product Hunt Launch Strategy: A Timed Plan From 30 Days Out to 7 Days After
Start 30 days out, launch at 12:01 AM Pacific, self-hunt, ask for feedback not upvotes, and judge results by activated signups over the following week.
- Reddit Marketing Strategy for Startups: What Gets Removed, What Gets Upvoted and How to Measure It
A startup Reddit marketing strategy: listen, answer existing threads within community rules, post your own material later, and measure signups, not upvotes.
- Referral program examples that worked, and the mechanics behind them
Dropbox, PayPal and Morning Brew paid rewards close to the product only after real use. Here are their mechanics, worked numbers and a template to copy.
- Waitlist launch strategy: how the referral queue and the gated waitlist work, what converts, and when a waitlist backf
A waitlist launch collects signups, then controls access by referral queue or onboarding gate. Median confirmed rate is 46.4%; referrals add little.
Tools for these pages
Calculators and templates these pages link to, each with its formula or method on the page.
- A/B test sample size and duration calculator, with the formula
A 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 copy
A 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 table
A 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.
Elsewhere on Race to Scale
- Guides
How the mechanics work, with the evidence and the arithmetic.
5 pages - Tactics
Every tactic with the hours it takes, the days until a signal, and how strong the evidence is.
31 pages - Benchmarks
Split times for growth metrics, each with its source and its sample.
5 pages - Teardowns
Real pages redrawn as their structure, with what each part does.
3 pages - Tools
Calculators and templates, with the formula and a worked example on the page.
7 pages - Cases
Short cited accounts of what a company ran and what happened.
43 pages - Digests
Public reports read for you, with their key numbers.
1 page - Glossary
Growth terms defined in a sentence or two, with where they apply.
12 pages - Agencies
Growth agencies for startups and small companies, A to Z, with facts checked on each agency's own pages.
- Voices
Posts from people who run growth that teach something specific, with our label and our take.
How these pages are made
Every factual sentence on a Race to Scale page is checked against a passage on a source page that was read for that page, and numbers are computed in code from those sources, not typed from memory. Each page lists its sources and links them where they are used.
Every page shows the day it was first published and, when a fact changes, the day it was updated; no date is set earlier than the day a page went up. The full method is on How we work.