All the ways to grow your product

Growth engines, turbo boosts, lubricants, kickstarts, and mid-stage accelerants

👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work. If you know someone who would benefit from this, feel free to forward it along.

---

🎖 Big week of milestones

What a week:

1. The newsletter crossed 200,000 total subscribers yesterday 🫣

2. The podcast is now at over 1,000 five-star reviews across Apple and Spotify, and over 450,000 total downloads 😬

3. The Talent Collective made its 1,000th introduction between a candidate and a company

4. We’re also the #1 business newsletter and the #2 podcast across all of Substack 🫠

I can’t begin to describe how thankful I am to you for being a subscriber and for supporting this work. You allow me to do the most meaningful work of my life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart ♥️

---

Now, as our six-part series on kickstarting and scaling a consumer business comes to a close, I’ll be transitioning back to our regularly scheduled programming—answering questions from wonderful readers like you. Here’s this week’s question…

Q: I loved your consumer growth series, but I’m also wondering, are there other growth tactics or levers, beyond what you’ve shared in the last few posts, that founders found effective?

Yes indeed, there are. There are two additional growth levers that I didn’t get to cover in the series because they were neither growth engines nor kickstarting tactics. But before I explore them, let’s quickly review where we stand.

Coming back to the Racecar Growth Framework, there are five components that help a startup grow:

Kickstarts—the seven ways to acquire your early users and get your engine rolling:

1. Reaching out to friends and colleagues (e.g. emailing your friends)

2. Reaching out to targeted strangers (e.g. DM’ing celebs)

3. Going where your target audience hangs out (e.g. college campuses, Reddit)

4. Enlisting influencers (e.g. people with large Twitter followings)

5. Getting press

6. Creating viral content

7. Getting physical placement (e.g. flyers, stickers, signs)

Growth engines—the four self-sustaining growth loops that drive your growth:

1. Paid ads

2. SEO

3. Virality

4. Sales

Lubricants—the four optimizations that make your growth engine run more efficiently:

1. Conversion

2. Retention

3. Activation [Haven’t written about this topic much yet]

4. Brand [Haven’t written about this topic much yet]

Turbo boosts—one-off growth spikes that quickly fade:

1. PR (e.g. Snapchat Spectacles launch)

2. Viral content (e.g. Dollar Shave Club video)

3. Influencer posts (e.g. Kylie Jenner and Casper)

4. Marketing campaigns (e.g. contest, giveaway, billboards)

5. Co-marketing campaigns (e.g. Uber and Spotify)

6. Events (e.g. Hinge launch party)

7. Stunts (e.g. Half.com renaming a town in Oregon to Half.com)

8. Mini product launches (e.g. Calm’s donothingfor2minutes.com)

9. Getting featured by a highly trafficked platform (e.g. Amazon on Yahoo’s homepage)

10. Creating controversy (e.g. DHH vs. Apple)

Now, coming back to your question, there are two additional growth levers that we haven’t covered, which I call mid-stage growth accelerants:

1. Channel partnerships: Getting distribution through someone else

2. Geographic expansion: Doing the same thing in more places

These are rarely useful in the early stages and aren’t really growth engines (thus why I didn’t cover them in the series up to now) but, when used effectively and at the right moment, can significantly accelerate your growth. Here are stories from founders who utilized these levers to great effect.