Founder-led growth

Build distribution through your personal brand and network where your expertise and story attract customers who trust you before your company.

Founder-led growth

Founder-led growth

definition

Introduction

Why it matters

How to apply it

Keep learning

Growth orchestration

Get a grip on what's actually working and what needs course correction. Use data and experiments to make decisions instead of opinions. See how changes in one part of the system affect everything else. Random tactics don't compound, coordinated ones do.

Explore playbooks

Tool selection

Tool selection

Select tools across your growth stack using clear evaluation criteria. Avoid common pitfalls, ensure integrations work, and build a system that scales with your business.

Customer research

Customer research

Uncover specific pain points, validate assumptions, and reveal what actually drives buying decisions. Run research that produces actionable insights, not just interesting quotes.

Quarterly strategy

Quarterly strategy

Run quarterly business reviews that assess current state, set ambitious but realistic goals, build actionable roadmaps, and define key results that keep everyone aligned.

Monthly review

Monthly review

Analyse monthly performance data across all four growth engines. Identify what is working, what is not, and make tactical adjustments using a structured decision framework.

Related books

Founder brand

Dave Gerhardt

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Founder brand

A guide to purposeful visibility. Choose topics, set a cadence and turn posts, talks and interviews into warm conversations.

Rework

Jason Fried

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Rework

Short essays that challenge default habits. Focus on product, talk to customers and cut pretend work.

Company of One

Paul Jarvis

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Company of One

Lessons for keeping work simple and profitable. Focus on retention, systems and selective growth that preserves quality.

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Wiki

Compound growth rate

Calculate your true growth trajectory by measuring the rate at which your business grows when gains build on previous gains over multiple periods.

Contact management

Organise customer and prospect information to track relationships, communication history, and next steps without losing context or duplicating effort.

Unit economics

Analyse profit per customer to determine if your business model works at scale before investing heavily in growth and customer acquisition.

Pipeline coverage

Calculate how much pipeline you need relative to quota to ensure you generate enough opportunities to hit revenue targets despite normal conversion rates.

Trigger

Define events that start automation workflows so the right message reaches people at the right moment based on their actual behaviour not arbitrary timing.

Growth marketing

Apply disciplined experimentation across the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage through rapid testing and data-driven iteration.

Customer data platform

Unify customer data from every touchpoint to create complete profiles that power personalised experiences across marketing, sales, and product.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Track predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions to measure business scale and growth trajectory in B2B SaaS and recurring revenue models.

Pareto Principle

Focus effort on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of results, systematically eliminating low-yield work to maximise output per hour invested.

Workflow automation

Connect triggers to actions across systems so repetitive tasks happen automatically and teams can focus on work that requires judgement instead of admin.

Product-market fit

Achieve the state where your product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that's willing to pay and actively pulling your solution in.

Sales qualified lead velocity

Track how fast your pipeline of ready-to-buy leads grows to forecast sales capacity needs and spot when lead quality or sales efficiency changes.

Constraint

Identify and leverage limitations as forcing functions that drive creative problem-solving and strategic focus.

Deal stage

Define pipeline progression steps to standardise how reps advance opportunities and give managers visibility into where deals stall or convert unexpectedly.

First-touch attribution

Credit the channel that introduced prospects to your brand to measure awareness efforts and understand which top-of-funnel activities start customer journeys.

Growth plateau

Diagnose and break through stagnation by identifying which business mechanisms have reached capacity and require new approaches.

Control group

Maintain an unchanged version in experiments to isolate the impact of your changes and prove causation rather than correlation with external factors.

Stakeholder Management

Navigate competing priorities and secure buy-in by systematically understanding, influencing, and aligning internal decision-makers toward shared goals.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Track predictable monthly subscription revenue to monitor short-term growth trends and make faster decisions than waiting for annual revenue reports.

Minimum viable test

Design experiments that answer specific questions with minimum time and resources to maximise learning velocity without over-investing in unproven ideas.