Google Analytics

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Innovation4 steps

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

Brainstorm high-value actions, correlate them with conversion and retention, then experiment to prove causation

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

Stand in the future you designed and look back — don't forecast forward from today's constraints.

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Build AND Buy

Reframe build-vs-buy as build-and-buy: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% that differentiates.

Leadership5 steps

Building the PLG Team and Org

Start with a growth PM and an analyst, then formalize into a cross-functional PLG org with three growth heads

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

Choose a centralized CDP stack or a warehouse-plus-reverse-ETL stack based on your engineering resources.

Leadership7 steps

Culture as a Product

Every company builds two products: one for customers, one for the team. Culture is the second one.

Damming the Demand

Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.

Leadership3 steps

Deadlines as P-Zero

Have few deadlines, but make each one a P0 that nothing else can touch — and cut scope to hit it

Leadership6 steps

Debate, Decide, Unite: Systematic Decision-Making

Name the decider, list the factors, stack-rank them, then unite behind the call — with calories proportional to consequence.

Innovation7 steps

Design for the Most Complex Use Case First

Architect for the hardest customer you'll ever have, then choose what to ship first.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Designing Yourself Out of Your Weaknesses

Refuse to spend years becoming passably okay at something — negotiate the constraint at founding, in writing.

Productivity3 steps

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Communication3 steps

Emotional Discovery: Feel Bad Like the Customer

On customer calls, dig until you feel the exact emotion the customer wants to avoid, then build to remove it

Innovation5 steps

Fight for Simplicity: The Third-Order Cost of Complexity

Entropy always wins unless you fight it — price every feature at its dimensional cost, not its build cost.

Leadership5 steps

Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale

Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage

Frame, Name, Claim the Problem (Languaging & Point of View)

Use new language to reframe a problem so people see it differently and want a new solution.

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

Instrument first and last UTMs on day one so you can move to multi-touch attribution without waiting.

Leadership6 steps

Go and See: Walking All the Way to Ground

Product leaders become the world's foremost expert in their domain by going to the source themselves.

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Influence4 steps

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List

A short force-ranked list every team must absorb — defined by what it excludes.

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Strategy7 steps

International Market Entry Stack Rank

Assume you'll need everywhere, order by demand, then re-rank by build cost, strategic value, and long poles.

Influence4 steps

Interview as Discovery: Be the Solution to Their Burning Problem

Treat a job interview like product discovery — find the hiring manager's burning problem and position yourself as its solution

Lightning Strike Go-to-Market (Supers, POV & Word of Mouth)

Concentrate firepower on super consumers with a reframing POV to ignite word of mouth.

Leadership3 steps

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data

Productivity3 steps

Problem-People-System (PPS)

Diagnose a systems request by problem and people first, never jump straight to the tool.

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Innovation4 steps

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

Build the most extreme version along one attribute, feel it, repeat in the opposite direction, then find where they meet

The 10% Working-Version Rule

Have a testable working version by the time 10% of your time budget elapses, not at the halfway point

Marketing11 steps

The 11 Zero-Day Marketing Exploits

Eleven recurring meta-patterns for engineering an unfair go-to-market advantage.

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

Leadership6 steps

The Assumption-Break PM Interview

Give a case study too big to solve, break one assumption, and watch whether they rattle off the implications.

The Attributed Influencer Launch Sequence

Stagger tracked influencer shares over days, then weaponize the leaderboard.

The Better Trap

A 'better' copy of an existing solution to a well-understood problem almost always fails.

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

Leadership7 steps

The Decision Tempo System

Never leave a decision in the room: decide now, pull in whoever is missing, and let deadlines actually bite.

The Double Triangle: PM as Go-To-Market Discipline

Sit the PM between two triangles — build (eng/product/design) and sell (sales/marketing/PM) — and originate the customer's language

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The Five PLG Readiness Components

The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

Productivity5 steps

The Four Levers of Velocity at Scale

Small missions, a real platform, leaders in the trenches, and a team you keep recalibrating.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Four P's: Potential, Probability, Passion, Prowess

Score any idea on four factors — and always compute potential before probability.

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The Full PLG Funnel Audit

Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

Entrepreneurship8 steps

The Internal Founder Pod

One entrepreneurial engineer, one designer, a platform apprenticeship, and a new product line in 6-9 months.

Mindset5 steps

The 'Just Evil Enough' Ethics Test

An Occam's-razor line between subversive-and-clever and actually evil.

Communication7 steps

The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote

Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow

The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks

Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

The three infrastructure layers plus per-funnel-stage tools every PLG motion needs

The Recon Canvas

An 18-square grid for scanning product, medium, and market for subversive openings.

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Subversive Mindset (System Awareness → Novelty → Disagreeability)

Get a system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend, in three learnable steps.

Leadership7 steps

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

Leadership3 steps

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

Defer black-or-white judgments about decisions and people until the last responsible moment.

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

Screen martech candidates for curiosity, engineering scrappiness, and freedom from tool bias.

When to Centralize a Martech Function

Use the 100-150 person threshold and b2c/b2b axis to decide when and where to own martech.

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets

Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.