Growth notes
What we’ve learned helping early-stage products win customers: positioning, ICPs, outbound and product-led growth.
Series
Weekly · 2 episodesThe Product Sold ItselfHow free tiers, viral loops and bottom-up adoption let products sell themselves, told one company at a time, every week.Weekly · 2 episodesOpen RateHow companies grew through the inbox: email lists, daily sends and lifecycle campaigns, told one company at a time, every week.Weekly · 2 issuesBootstrapped WeeklyNews from companies that grew without outside money: exits, revenue milestones and launches, with every claim attributed. Every week.Harry's: 100,000 emails before the first razor
Harry's collected over 100,000 email addresses in a week before launch, 77% of them through referrals. Episode 2 of Open Rate.
How to write positioning for a product buyers don't understand
April Dunford's positioning components, put in a working order and applied to a hypothetical invoice-reminder app, ending with a plain description you could test with buyers.
Viktor: the team-wide adoption loop
Viktor lives in Slack and Teams: one person installs it, and its finished work demos the product to the rest of the team. Episode 2 of The Product Sold Itself.
Bootstrapped Weekly, October 25, 2026
What happened to bootstrapped companies from October 19 to 25, 2026: a closed acquisition and two revenue milestones.
Cold email for SaaS founders with no sales team: how I run it with AI agents
I do go-to-market alone. Here is how I run cold email with an AI assistant: the targeting bar, the sequence, and where I stay in control.
Grammarly: how going free built a $13B company
Grammarly nearly died as a paid product. Then it went free and grew to 40 million daily users. Episode 1 of The Product Sold Itself.
Groupon: the email list that built a $12.7B IPO
Groupon grew from 1.8 million to 83 million subscribers in 15 months, went public at $12.7B, then lost about 80% of its value. Episode 1 of Open Rate.
Bootstrapped Weekly, October 18, 2026
What happened to bootstrapped companies from October 12 to 18, 2026: a $30-35M acquisition with no outside funding, a $1B founder's new company, and two revenue milestones.
How to find your ICP when you only have a few customers
Most ICP advice assumes you have 50 customers to study. If you have three, here is what to do instead.