1. Let’s nominate our leaders for awards! When they win the most innovative CXO under 37.5 years in top 3000 companies, both enterprise and self serve growth will boom. When our CXO wins an award no one has ever heard of, that’s the unlock for customer wallets.
2. Let’s go buy a company with “complementary” strengths. And let’s save even more money by not thinking about how the products will integrate or the CX, never mind we now offer our customers 8 different ways to solve one problem, with 8 differently branded websites and messaging.
3. We need to invest in Developer Experience. Just create better docs and give out cheap swag at developer conferences. Run a few hackathons in universities with the promise of free pizza and run cheap ads designed by marketing on Stack Overflow. Definitely do not consult an actual developer. Developer registrations will go through the roof and soon, all these developers will turn into paying customers who will just beg you to take their money.
#15 is more common than it looks, and it isn't only a sales problem. I've seen total growth look healthy while new sales were falling, because a few long-standing accounts carried the aggregate. Totals and averages hide who is actually producing. Before adding headcount, channels or incentives, split the base by cohort and ask who is really active. Most "we need more X" ideas die at that split.
14 is the one that gets me. Homepage copy changes are what teams do when they don't want to admit the positioning is off. People got the product fine, they just didn't have a reason to pick it.
Would add one to the list though… running the playbook before deciding who you're not for. Most of the rest goes wrong from there.
Agreed, these are all solid plays given the right situation. The title could have been "18 growth tactics guaranteed to enter your strategy (or lack thereof). Results sold separately."
In my experience, the Growth Wheel O’ Tactics is a symptom of a company that's either lacking a real strategy or the courage to give a good strategy enough time to develop.
It's too easy to "pivot" every quarter and feel like you're in control of the situation rather than double down on something that makes sense but might be wrong and needs time to cook.
One for the 2026 edition: "Let's add an AI feature." It's the new "let's add gamification." Same pitch, same slides, same budget request, and usually no answer to what job it finishes for the user.
The price increase one hurts because it works, just on the wrong timeline. Revenue is up this quarter, and the churn and CAC show up two years later on someone else's dashboard. I'd add one more: "Let's launch a podcast." Every B2B team rediscovers it about once a year.
I've been a Lovable user since the beginning of 2025, and I've watched #16 play out over the last year. The free plan getting a ceiling of 30 credits a month is one example. To be honest, I get the logic, but I'm curious if it increased conversion at all. As someone who's been on a paid plan for a long time, you need more than 5 credits a day anyway if you're serious about building a product.
The part I find harder to accept is what happens after you pay. We use Supabase for backend, and since we migrated to TanStack Start, Lovable no longer creates new backend functions in Supabase. That only works on Lovable Cloud now. This means that we cannot really build our product further in Lovable.
Lovable Cloud is billed, so I suspect every project that moves onto it is simply more revenue. It goes a step further than free-to-paid conversion. It's more "let's just reward loyalty with a migration so they can pay us more", which probably deserves a #19 of its own. 😅
I'm curious whether you'd count that as a growth tactic at all, or as a product decision made for the sake of the revenue model.
Three more strategies from big tech:
1. Let’s nominate our leaders for awards! When they win the most innovative CXO under 37.5 years in top 3000 companies, both enterprise and self serve growth will boom. When our CXO wins an award no one has ever heard of, that’s the unlock for customer wallets.
2. Let’s go buy a company with “complementary” strengths. And let’s save even more money by not thinking about how the products will integrate or the CX, never mind we now offer our customers 8 different ways to solve one problem, with 8 differently branded websites and messaging.
3. We need to invest in Developer Experience. Just create better docs and give out cheap swag at developer conferences. Run a few hackathons in universities with the promise of free pizza and run cheap ads designed by marketing on Stack Overflow. Definitely do not consult an actual developer. Developer registrations will go through the roof and soon, all these developers will turn into paying customers who will just beg you to take their money.
A new one im seeing everywhere: just add GTM Engineering
It’s been 9 years, still have to explain why these :(
#15 is more common than it looks, and it isn't only a sales problem. I've seen total growth look healthy while new sales were falling, because a few long-standing accounts carried the aggregate. Totals and averages hide who is actually producing. Before adding headcount, channels or incentives, split the base by cohort and ask who is really active. Most "we need more X" ideas die at that split.
I think I should hire FDEs (or better yet, save money and retitle my CSMs) :-)
14 is the one that gets me. Homepage copy changes are what teams do when they don't want to admit the positioning is off. People got the product fine, they just didn't have a reason to pick it.
Would add one to the list though… running the playbook before deciding who you're not for. Most of the rest goes wrong from there.
hahah! so right!!
I feel seen.
That was a fun read.
Agreed, these are all solid plays given the right situation. The title could have been "18 growth tactics guaranteed to enter your strategy (or lack thereof). Results sold separately."
In my experience, the Growth Wheel O’ Tactics is a symptom of a company that's either lacking a real strategy or the courage to give a good strategy enough time to develop.
It's too easy to "pivot" every quarter and feel like you're in control of the situation rather than double down on something that makes sense but might be wrong and needs time to cook.
the missing one has to be copying the Dropbox referral program, nothing gets people inviting their friends like invoice reconciliation software
This is very good 😁
One for the 2026 edition: "Let's add an AI feature." It's the new "let's add gamification." Same pitch, same slides, same budget request, and usually no answer to what job it finishes for the user.
The price increase one hurts because it works, just on the wrong timeline. Revenue is up this quarter, and the churn and CAC show up two years later on someone else's dashboard. I'd add one more: "Let's launch a podcast." Every B2B team rediscovers it about once a year.
I've been a Lovable user since the beginning of 2025, and I've watched #16 play out over the last year. The free plan getting a ceiling of 30 credits a month is one example. To be honest, I get the logic, but I'm curious if it increased conversion at all. As someone who's been on a paid plan for a long time, you need more than 5 credits a day anyway if you're serious about building a product.
The part I find harder to accept is what happens after you pay. We use Supabase for backend, and since we migrated to TanStack Start, Lovable no longer creates new backend functions in Supabase. That only works on Lovable Cloud now. This means that we cannot really build our product further in Lovable.
Lovable Cloud is billed, so I suspect every project that moves onto it is simply more revenue. It goes a step further than free-to-paid conversion. It's more "let's just reward loyalty with a migration so they can pay us more", which probably deserves a #19 of its own. 😅
I'm curious whether you'd count that as a growth tactic at all, or as a product decision made for the sake of the revenue model.
Moving upmarket has the longest tail. The SOC 2 and SSO questions start before procurement, when someone asks an assistant whether you even have them.
Let's build a channel so our direct sales can compete with the channel for the same customer.
Let's have our leaders constantly share being honored and humbled everyday on social media