10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)

1. Prioritize Career Optionality

View career optionality as your ultimate professional North Star, actively exploring diverse monetization models beyond traditional full-time roles (e.g., freelancing, advising, fractional work) to find opportunities best suited to your skills, interests, and life stage.

2. Embrace Progress Over Perfection

Prioritize continuous progress and learning over striving for immediate perfection, as the velocity of information and iterative improvement are more crucial for growth than a flawless initial outcome.

3. Seek Existing Solutions

Recognize that most growth problems are not unique; instead of re-engineering solutions from scratch, seek out people who have solved similar problems and learn from their experiences to patternize solutions and avoid wasting time.

4. Engage Growth Advisors

Hire advisors to accelerate your career and business growth by leveraging their network, data points, and pattern recognition; vet potential advisors through a paid workshop to assess their practical contribution before committing to a retainer.

5. Utilize Growth Loops Framework

Adopt the ‘growth loops’ framework to understand how actions generate reactions that create self-contained, sustainable flywheels for growth, moving beyond a linear funnel mindset.

6. Apply Race Car Framework

Use the ‘Race Car’ framework to categorize growth initiatives into engines (loops), fuel (paid marketing), turbo boosts (big events), and lubrication (optimizations) to better understand and manage their impact and timeline.

7. Explore Adjacent User Theory

Employ ‘Adjacent User Theory’ to identify and attract users outside your core ideal customer profile (ICP), optimizing their experiences to expand your product’s reach and growth without necessarily expanding product-market fit.

8. Delay Growth Team Hiring

Avoid hiring a growth team too early; founders should drive initial growth until solid product-market fit (PMF) and sufficient user data for experimentation are established, ideally beyond $1M ARR, to ensure the whole company owns growth.

9. Growth Teams Can’t Reverse Decline

Do not hire a growth team to fix a declining business; growth teams amplify existing product-market fit, but cannot solve fundamental issues with core product, go-to-market strategy, or a disappearing PMF. First, stabilize or reverse the decline with core product/marketing efforts.

10. Invest in Owned/Earned Channels

Prioritize developing owned or earned acquisition channels (e.g., virality, word-of-mouth, user-generated content) over solely relying on paid or organic search, as these channels are defensible, reduce long-term acquisition costs, and provide more control over your growth future.

11. Continuously Layer New Growth Models

Don’t rely on a single growth model; continuously evolve your growth strategy by layering new models (e.g., product-led, marketing-led, sales-led) to diversify, prevent slowdowns, and ensure long-term sustainable growth. Allocate 20-25% of growth team time annually to exploring new loops or channels.

12. Limit Growth Experimentation

Avoid testing every growth initiative, as excessive experimentation can paralyze teams and slow progress; trust intuition more, use pre-versus-post analysis for changes that can’t gather sufficient data within a month, and reserve rigorous testing for high-impact strategic pivots or high-traffic areas.

13. Avoid Rebrands for Growth

Do not undertake a rebrand or marketing site redesign with the expectation of immediate growth; these initiatives often lead to a temporary performance hit, requiring 3-6 months of optimization to potentially outperform previous results.

14. Don’t Copy Competitors Blindly

Avoid directly copying competitor tactics or flows, as each product’s experience is unique to its customer and channel; instead, use competitors for inspiration and as an input for ideation, but always follow with your own design, research, and experimentation.

15. Skip Color Optimizations

Do not waste time testing different shades of colors or color palettes; choose an accessible and bright color and move on, as these optimizations rarely drive meaningful growth results.

16. Third-Party Signups Not Growth

Adding third-party sign-up options (e.g., Google, Facebook) typically does not drive incremental acquisition, activation, or retention; it’s a customer experience improvement, not a primary growth tactic (unless for specific user types like developers needing GitHub auth).

17. Avoid One-Off Emails

Do not expect significant growth lift from a single email; instead, approach email as a strategic series of communications that interact with product messaging, as one-off emails have low open and click rates.

18. Don’t Just “Simplify Onboarding”

Avoid ‘simplifying onboarding’ as a roadmap item; instead, identify the root problem (e.g., confusion, users getting lost, lack of education), and then simplifying might be a solution, but it’s not a problem in itself.