I've been working professionally in software for 11 years, and I've spent 7 of them on growth teams, with experience in both product-led and sales-led growth. In that time, I've picked up a lot of domain knowledge on what worked, but mainly on what didn't. This blog will contain the learnings I've found over the past few years, hopefully becoming more and more technical as I'm allowed to share company processes. Since we're not there yet, I'll start with a fun gimmick on this first post: a learning for each stage of the growth funnel.

Awareness

It's still old school—networking still matters. You have to show up to the big conferences, you have to have a funny hat, you have to scan badges. Sorry to say, but money still talks, the hottest VCs are still driving the hottest companies.

Acquisition

Anyone can spin up a marketing site. You must be vocal, and you must leverage your network. Content marketing works and is still working as of 2026. Using GenAI to generate 600 keyword-researched pieces of content will drive traffic to your site. Whether that traffic is actually ICP & converting is another question.

Activation

Enable users to get value ASAP. Ditch all the shadow tours, product guides, sample data, sandboxes, checklists, and welcome pages. Time-to-value drops as soon as you treat users as competent tech users with a job to do (hint hint, they are).

Retention

Growth loops are a must. If users don't have a reason to spend all day in your app, they should have a reason to check in once a day—even if it's a useless notification a la LinkedIn. Talk to your users. Once a month, around billing time, ask them how they're doing, get feedback, and remind them that you're actively engaged with them as users.

Referral

Let the users do the work, right? Wrong, do not be passive! Internal and external champions are the single most important people to contact in the entire funnel. Land and expand with trustworthy, high-value partnerships, marketing, increased ltv, poweruser feedback, all at once. Find those users, partner with them, write a co-blog post like "How X Uses Y," send them swag, and get them engaged and posting.

Revenue

Don't gate value. Allow users to do everything on your lower tier plans, but gate them on convenience and organization. Do not gate seats. You want 100 users in one team, because that quickly becomes overwhelming and unworkable without gated permissions. Let them expand, let them use your product enough that they run into scale issues. This is the gate that will convert. If the team is only seven seats, what's the point of gating them at five? Find your organizational tipping point, quantify it, alert sales, and profit.

Still Old School

It's still old school. AI is out there, but nothing much has changed. Cold emails still have low impact, despite AI-assisted enrichment and message drafting. You still need white-glove, old school, wine-and-dine sales touches. So pull out your Rolodex and reach out to those warm ICPs.