Building A Growth Engine

In startups, few metrics matter more than growth rate.

For attracting investors. For keeping morale high. For delighting customers.

Why does growth rate matter so much?

Because it signals two things:

(1) You've built something people really want.

(2) You've built a repeatable and scalable growth engine around it.

To achieve an amazing growth rate, you need a growth engine.

Building a successful growth engine requires a profound understanding of your customers. How they communicate, how they think, and how they live.

When you understand your customers deeply, you can help them see the benefits you offer. You can address their concerns. You can earn trust with people in your market.

There are 3 parts to a growth engine: traffic, conversion, economics.

Traffic is the easiest part. You need to be able to get people into your funnel. It comes down to figuring out where groups of your customers hang out and getting them to feel intrigued to learn more about your product.

Conversion is hard. In marketing, you need to be clear about your benefits, building trust, and addressing objections the fewest words possible. In one-to-one sales, you need to listen intently and tailor your description of your solution. Your customer needs to hear how you'll help them reach a better future: one with less pain and more pleasure for them.

The economics part is moderately difficult. It's about earning more money from each customer than it costs to acquire them and get them to use your product. If you have problems with economics at a low volume, DON'T assume they'll disappear at a high volume. That's a deadly assumption.

Instead, you must strike a balance: profitable unit economics, plus the ability to scale them quickly. The best B2B growth engines (like ClickFunnels) find a way to make their growth profitable immediately. They don’t take months to cycle cash. They instead make sure that from the very first transaction, their acquisition cost AND their setup costs are paid back. That way, the growth engine has nearly infinite capacity. That's how a business can accelerate without needing to raise money (i.e. use expensive gasoline).

Finally: the best growth engines are built one channel at a time. Not two. Not three. Not five. One.

One source of traffic.

One conversion method.

One product with one set of economics.

That way, you can optimize the growth engine for maximum profitability.

It's a bad idea to try to manage two or more traffic sources, conversion methods, or products at once. You end up splitting your focus and getting suboptimal results that cripple your growth rate.

So don’t do that. Even if the other objects look shiny and good to add... they aren't.

Not until that first growth engine is as optimized as possible, with a full-time conductor keeping it efficient.

Then, you can layer other growth engines on top. That's how you build a growth machine that can accelerate from multiple finely tuned engines simultaneously.

The best position, ultimately, drives scalable, repeatable, profitable growth using multiple channels. That setup allows the business to grow rapidly until it bumps into local maximums, like market size.

And that becomes a good problem to have. At that point, it's time to find new markets and building growth engines to power that expansion.