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

The cockpit that sits above your four growth engines. Individual teams can excel at their own metrics, but without orchestration they're musicians playing different songs. This is where everything comes together and where improvements in one engine amplify gains in another.

Explore playbooks

Growth team tools

Growth team tools

The wrong tools create friction. The right ones multiply your output without adding complexity. These are the tools I recommend for growth teams that move fast.

Compound growth

Compound growth

Small improvements multiply. A 10% gain across twelve metrics doesn't add up to 120% - it compounds to 3x growth. This is the mathematical engine behind systematic growth.

Growth strategy

Growth strategy

Four decisions that shape everything else. When growth feels harder than it should, the problem is usually here. Get these right and execution becomes much easier.

Growth rhythms

Growth rhythms

Without rhythm, effort becomes scattered and progress invisible. A consistent operating cadence keeps your team aligned and your growth system continuously improving.

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 set up compound growth

Install tracking infrastructure that shows which metrics drive revenue. Build your scorecard and launch your first cycle with the right foundation.

Wiki

UTMs

Track campaign performance precisely by appending parameters to URLs that identify traffic sources, mediums, and campaigns in your analytics.

Contact management

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

Prioritisation

Systematically rank projects and opportunities using objective frameworks, ensuring scarce resources flow to highest-impact work.

Churn rate

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

Hypothesis testing

Structure experiments around clear predictions to focus efforts on learning rather than random changes and make results easier to interpret afterward.

Email sequence

Automate multi-touch email campaigns that adapt based on recipient behaviour to nurture leads consistently without manual follow-up from reps or marketers.

Event tracking

Capture specific user actions in your product or website to understand behaviour patterns and measure whether changes improve outcomes or create friction.

P-value

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

Activity tracking

Log emails, calls, and meetings automatically to understand what drives deals forward and coach reps based on actual behaviour rather than guesswork.

Stakeholder Management

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

Sample size

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

Marketing stack

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

Control group

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

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.

Growth hacking

Deploy fast, low-cost experiments to discover scalable acquisition and retention tactics, learning through iteration rather than big bets.

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-led growth

Win customers through direct sales conversations where reps guide prospects from discovery to close with personalised solutions and relationship building.

Cookie

Store information in browsers to track user behaviour across visits and enable personalised experiences without requiring login for every interaction.

Partner-led growth

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

Unit economics

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