Notes on growth.

How to be the only human in the loop without being the bottleneck

If everything routes through you, the fix isn't delegating decisions. It's delegating the analysis and keeping the call. Here's the brief format that makes a real decision answerable in one word.

Running parallel AI coding agents: how I got to 400 commits a week solo

How to run parallel AI coding sessions on one repo without shipping broken code. Seven weeks, 1,439 commits, one person, and a 6x gain that had nothing to do with prompting.

The new bottleneck in product is judgment, not research

The old center of gravity in product, months of research to guess at a solution, is losing its relative importance. AI made building cheap and comparables made most solutions knowable. The scarce skill now is judgment, and that means more opinionated understanding of your user, not less.

Speaking at Business of Apps NYC.

On "The Ideal Flow: top strategies from high-converting onboarding flows and paywalls," September 17 in NYC.

The best B2C teams don't plan a launch

A launch is a spike that fades. The teams that win build a system that compounds from day one: ship early, test the paywall early, and improve the loop every week.

Referred users are worth about 3x. Your referral landing page decides whether you keep it

Referred users generate about 3x the revenue of cold ones (Branch.io). The referral landing page either keeps that value or wastes it. Here is the exact template I use with clients.

Your paywall is the highest-leverage experiment you have

One paywall test moves lifetime value across your entire base. The difference between 30% and 60% choosing annual can decide whether the business works. Six tactics to test first.

Targeting is dead. Paid accounts are won on creative now

If the first thing you touch in a Meta account is a stack of interest audiences, you are optimizing the wrong thing. The algorithm picks the audience now. You win on creative.

The pricing and trial structure most subscription apps overcomplicate

Fitness needs a 30-day trial. Education and wellness usually need 7 to 14. Almost nobody picks the number on purpose. Here are the proven patterns, in order.

Your team doesn't need to be good at AI. It needs to be top 0.1%

"We use AI" now means about as much as "we use the internet." The gap that matters is how far out on the curve you are, because the returns pile up in the tail.

The right go-to-market for a B2C app, from zero to one

Most founders overcomplicate B2C go-to-market. The strategy is three levers, in order: product-led, then paid, then organic. The sequence matters as much as the levers.

A free teardown of your signup flow.

Calling PMs, designers, and founders building education apps: want a free assessment of your signup flow?

51 onboarding flows, 105 insights, one Figma file.

I tore down 51 subscription onboarding flows and pulled out the 105 patterns that actually move conversion.

"Do things that don't scale" is outdated

The YC line was right for its era, when shipping took weeks and prototyping meant engineers you didn't have. You can stand up the real product in an afternoon now, and that changes the question.

I tore apart the onboarding of top wellness apps.

Weeks of teardown across the top wellness apps, distilled into the patterns that actually drive activation.

Education and wellness apps don't have a content problem. They have a motivation problem

When an education or wellness app churns, the team reaches for more content. It rarely works, because the content was never the problem. Motivation is what leaks.

Education App Retention: The Unfair Fight (And How to Win It Anyway)

Education apps face an unfair fight against entertainment for users' attention. Here's the playbook to win anyway: commitment-driven onboarding, aggressive activation, and relentlessly closing the goal loop.

Understanding Referrals as a Growth Channel: A Framework for Realistic Expectations

Most referral programs deliver 10-20% incremental acquisition. Learn the 3-level framework for building effective referral strategies without chasing viral dreams.

Referrals and k-factor won't save you from high CAC. Here's the math

A good referral program delivers 10-20% incremental acquisition. That's a k-factor of 0.1 to 0.2, not the hockey stick most founders are dreaming of. Here's the framework I use instead.

AI-Enabled Couples Therapy: The Massive Market Opportunity Everyone's Missing

People spend thousands on individual therapy but avoid couples therapy over stigma and cost. AI changes the economics, and that underserved middle is one of the biggest opportunities in mental health.

Product Foundations Part 2: Prioritization

Part 2 of Product Foundations: 5 levels of backlog prioritization, from intuition and voting to grading, measuring, and a risk-mitigating bets portfolio.

Product Foundations Part 1: Ideation

An in depth guide for how to maximize your product features roadmap using best practice ideation techniques.

The 4 Stages Of A Good Growth Process

4 key stages of a good growth process, where most people tend to fail, and a way to help you figure out if you are doing the steps right.

How To Use And Optimize A Growth Model

A growth model does for resourcing what a financial model does for budgeting: a shared, quantified view of how each growth lever moves revenue, CAC, and LTV, so decisions stop turning on the loudest voice.

My Experience at MasterClass

I’ll tell you why I joined MasterClass and what excites me about where we’re headed, about how I think we stack up in the key areas that I evaluate companies on, what makes MasterClass unique, what th

Impact, Confidence & Effort (I.C.E.) Prioritization

Force-rank your growth roadmap with ICE: impact over effort, wrapped in confidence. What each factor means, why confidence is the one everyone skips, and how to split the backlog.

The Top 5 Reasons Why Companies Fail

The top reasons startups fail, why 3 of the top 5 come down to focus and execution, and what Goldratt's The Goal says the goal actually is.

20 Insights From Top Growth Leaders

Takeaways from conversations with 20 growth leaders at Pinterest, GrubHub, Lyft, Morning Brew and more, spanning traffic, sign-up, engagement, and process.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 3

Part 3 on growth experimentation: why success metrics are the wrong frame, evaluating results as value versus cost, and quantifying tests in revenue terms.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 2

Part 2 on growth experimentation: scoping tests around the solution you would implement, why A/B testing comes later, and ICESRR scoring for prioritization.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 1

Part 1 on growth experimentation for early stage startups: growth as a process, the 5% rule, and brainstorming in questions instead of hypotheses.

Testing Principles, Not Solutions

Minimum Viable Value (MVV) is the new MVP

7 Keys To Innovative Ideas From The Book "Originals" By Adam Grant

Summary notes from Adam Grant's book Originals: 7 themes on recognizing original ideas, timing, alliances, identity, group dynamics, and emotion.

The 1 Step That Everyone Forgets w/ Decision Making

Why validation is the most commonly skipped step in hypothesis testing, and a simple way to sort-rank ideas before committing weeks to a test.