Unit economics

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

Unit economics

Unit economics

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

Startup growth engines

Sean Ellis

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Startup growth engines

A tour of growth case studies. Identify engines, spot patterns and design experiments that fit your context.

Fix this next

Mike Michalowicz

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Fix this next

A decision tool for prioritising growth work. Diagnose where to act, then pick a small change that unlocks progress now.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Bill Aulet

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Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Step by step approach to define customers, test value and design a go to market path that leads to repeatable revenue.

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.

Related chapters

4

How to double revenue without doubling the work

Small improvements across 12 metrics multiply into exponential growth. Learn how engines connect, why improvements compound, and where leverage lives.

5

How to run quarterly business reviews

Deep strategic reset with full performance analysis. Identify system-level bottlenecks, validate strategy, and set the next roadmap.

Wiki

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.

Constraint

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

Churn rate

Measure the percentage of customers who stop paying to identify retention problems and calculate the true cost of growth in subscription businesses.

OMTM (One Metric That Matters)

Focus your entire organisation on the single metric that best predicts success at your current growth stage, avoiding distraction and misalignment.

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.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Select metrics that reveal whether you're achieving strategic goals to track progress and identify problems before they become expensive to fix.

Eisenhower Matrix

Prioritise tasks systematically by sorting them into urgent-important quadrants, focusing effort on high-impact activities.

Go-to-market strategy

Plan how you'll reach customers and generate revenue by choosing channels, pricing, and sales models that match your product and market reality.

Value proposition

Articulate the specific outcome customers get from your solution to communicate why they should choose you over doing nothing or using alternatives.

Drip campaign

Send a series of scheduled emails that educate prospects over time to stay top-of-mind without overwhelming them with aggressive sales pitches.

Contact management

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

Marketing stack

Organise the tools that capture leads, nurture prospects, and measure performance to automate repetitive work and connect customer data across systems.

Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

Document your repeatable processes in clear, step-by-step instructions that ensure consistency, enable delegation, and capture institutional knowledge.

Partner-led growth

Scale through partner relationships where other companies distribute your product to their customers in exchange for commissions or reciprocal value.

P-value

Interpret experiment results to understand the probability that observed differences occurred by chance rather than because your changes actually work.

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.

Sample size

Calculate how many users you need in experiments to detect meaningful differences and avoid declaring winners prematurely based on insufficient data.

Pirate metrics

Track your user journey through Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue to identify which stage constrains growth most.

Growth plateau

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

Stakeholder Management

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