Elena's Growth Scoop

Verna lists the seven things founders wrongly believe PLG means, including that it replaces sales. Reading it early saves you from building a motion around a misunderstanding.

Product-led growth is many things. But here is what it's NOT.

From Elena's Growth Scoop by Elena Verna 8 min read

The nine models she actually uses, led by growth loops versus funnels. Read this first, because everything else she says assumes you think in loops.

My 9 Favorite Growth Frameworks

From Elena's Growth Scoop by Elena Verna About 12 min read

• Growth loops beat funnels: a user adds content, shares it, the recipient becomes a user, and it compounds.
• The racecar framework splits growth into loops (engine), optimizations (lubricants), one-off tactics (turbo) and funnels (fuel).
• Adjacent user theory: find the user just outside your core, which is how Instagram went from 400M to 1B.
• Founders should own growth themselves early, since nobody understands the product and market better.

A real growth org mapped out pod by pod, plus the correction most people need: Dropbox does not run on the famous referral program any more, and it never worked in B2B.

Growth at Dropbox: An Inside Look

From Elena's Growth Scoop by Elena Verna About 10 min read

• Dropbox has built over 2 billion dollars of ARR through product-led growth.
• Referral loops no longer drive it: file sharing and marketing loops are the main engines today.
• Referral incentives fail in B2B because nobody stakes their reputation with colleagues to save a few dollars.
• The activation sequence they run is set up, aha moment, habit, then team invites.