Hire a growth hacker. no.
You don't have a growth problem.
You have a retention problem
wearing a growth costume.
Every new channel just pours more users into the same hole. Growth doesn't fix broken retention, it hides it, for about a quarter.
Why the plateau isn't a channel problem
The "tactics without strategy" trap
You're running ads, posting on LinkedIn, doing cold outreach, running webinars, writing SEO posts. And growth is flat. That's because more tactics don't equal more growth. Here's where it's actually stuck.
You're pouring users into a bucket with a hole in it
New signups from a new channel churn at the same rate as the old ones. More top of funnel just means more people finding the same broken onboarding, faster. Fix the hole before you turn up the tap.
Nobody on your team can say the CAC payback number
If you can't answer "how many months until a customer pays back what it cost to get them," you're not doing growth. You're doing spending.
Every channel is a science project you never finished
Ads for three weeks, then LinkedIn for a month, then cold outreach, then back to ads. None of them ran long enough to tell you anything. A channel needs six weeks of discipline before it has an opinion.
Three steps before you touch acquisition
Find the real payback number
CAC divided by gross margin per customer per month. If you don't know it, you don't know if growth is making you money or burning it.
Plug the biggest retention hole first
Find the cohort where the most users disappear, and fix that one before spending another dollar to fill the top.
Pick one channel and give it six weeks
Not five channels for one week each. One channel, run properly, long enough to actually learn something.
Read this before your next growth meeting
Retention is a UX problem, not a growth hack
Stop trying to email your way out of a confusing product.
AJ's Brutally Honest MVP Teardown Checklist
The same framework used to find out why a product isn't sticking, not why it isn't launching.
The Dashboard Detox
Kill 80% of your metrics. Keep the one that measures whether users are actually succeeding.
Fix the bucket before you buy a bigger tap
I'll find where retention is actually breaking, put a real number on it, and tell you which channel is worth your next dollar, and which ones aren't.
Book a teardown