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We did an intense 12 week growth course and here's what we learnt

Been running GoSquared for over a decade, and never learnt more about growth than I have in the last 12 weeks.

We did a pretty intense growth with some smart folks based in London – including coaches who used to be at 500 Startups and PayPal.

I know this course is not in the budgets of everyone in IH, and also not really accessible to many of the non London based folks here, so wanted to share some of the most valuable takeaways for us.

Key takeaways for us:

  • No matter how big your team is, everyone's job is growth – and everyone has ideas for how they can grow your business. You just need find how to unlock and surface those ideas.
  • Having a framework for quick and dirty experimentation has been a game changing way to try whacky ideas out. It's made our growth and marketing process more like our product process, but even(!) more hacky – and it's helped us avoid investing too heavily in low impact work.
  • Spending time getting your key metrics right is time well spent – we had to make some really tough calls choosing our "North Star Metric" and it has changed the way we prioritise our work massively.
  • We're really bad at judging what will have impact – the only way to find out is to try things out.
  • Having an external coach / mentor / advisor is an amazing catalyst for changing things up if you've been going a long time.
  • Even in a small team, leadership is vital for maintaining energy and focus – leadership sets culture by praising and celebrating the behaviour you want to see, and can have a HUGE impact on the team.

Tried to write a bunch more down, and also we shared our Notion template for the growth experiment process we now run here: https://www.gosquared.com/blog/growth-course

Hope this helpful!

  1. 2

    Yes! I'd add that getting feedback from your audience after trying things is very helpful to know in what direction to orientate your work, or to know what is more likely to have a positive impact on what you're doing

  2. 2

    everyone's job is growth.

    yes.

  3. 2

    Hey James thank you for sharing brother! Is the course y'all did like DemandCurve.com but for the UK?

    1. 2

      same question - love the post, but I'm confused about what course you did

    2. 1

      Ah yes sorry for not making this clearer! The course is Startup Core Strengths – led by Matt Lerner who is ex PayPal and 500 Startups. I am not super familiar with Demand Curve but I have studied a lot of the Reforge content and the course covered a lot of that (and more!)

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