The growth playbook everyone keeps using

I’ve spent enough years (umm.. decades..) in growth both operating and advising to notice something funny: as an industry we somehow keep coming up with the exact same brilliant growth ideas.

Every few years, we rediscover these tactics, give them a fresh coat of paint, and present them as groundbreaking strategic thinking. And I’m not judging. I’ve personally recommended most of these. With conviction. And slides. Occasionally with a budget request.

So, in honor of our industry’s remarkable ability to reinvent the same growth playbook over and over again, here’s my collection of my favorite 18 growth clichés.

Let me know if they sound familiar! Or if I missed any.

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1. ‘Let’s increase prices.’

I love this one. The conversation goes something like this:

We shall call it ‘unlocking willingness to pay.’ And hey, congratulations, revenue is up 20% post price increase! Maybe even 30%. The board thinks we’re geniuses. Oh well the churn is also up and acquisition is tanking and maybe, just maybe this will deteriorate our ability to grow 3 years from now? Well, let’s not get distracted by hypotheticals - this will be someone else’s problem anyway (see #5). For now, revenue is up and we’ve delayed our actual growth problem by exactly a year (till we hit y/y comp). #winning.

2. ‘Let’s move upmarket.’

If you don’t think of this idea by yourself, don’t worry, your board will suggest it for you. What if we just get bigger customers, bigger contracts, bigger ACVs, and start printing money? No one has thought of this before, and we’re going to be rich. Of course, this will mean that our finely tuned self-serve product needs an update… like, 14 salespeople, SOC 2, SSO, 6 months of procurement, and a dedicated customer success manager to explain why the product doesn’t have the features enterprise customers need.

Extra credit if you’re willing to try this straight from a consumer product. We can just use the same team that built this flexible, fast-moving product and copy-paste it into an enterprise environment, right? That will be easy… RIGHT?

3. ‘Let’s do a BIG launch.’

Everyone loves a launch. Including me. There’s nothing quite like weeks (months?) of preparation, a beautifully orchestrated marketing campaign, 200 celebratory Slack messages, and a chart that goes up. Well, in theory. In reality, most launches produce a barely noticeable bump in metrics that requires some creative chart formatting to look impressive.

Of course, that’s assuming you actually have something worth launching. Sometimes the big, ambitious product vision gets delayed, descoped, delayed again, and descoped some more, until your revolutionary launch is basically a minor feature update wearing a very expensive marketing video.

But either way, once the LinkedIn/X posts have gone out, the launch confetti has settled, and the retention curve looks suspiciously identical to the one from last month, there’s only one logical conclusion: time to start planning the next launch!

4. ‘Let’s hire a Head of Growth.’

Surely one magical human can solve our acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, distribution, positioning, and product-market fit problems. In their first 90 days. Let’s put them in marketing and give them no engineering resources. And if the new Head of Growth doesn’t deliver?

5. ‘Let’s fire our Head of Growth.’

Let ‘em go. Sure, this will reset the organization’s learning curve by about a year, but think of the fresh perspective we’ll get. By the time we’ve spent 6 months recruiting a replacement, another 3 months onboarding them, and another 3 months waiting for results, the new person will surely have discovered that magical growth lever the previous person inexplicably refused to pull. And if not… well, this tactic is great because it can be reused every year!

Note: This tactic can also be applied for your Head of Product, Head of Marketing, Head of Sales, or really any other leader.

6. ‘We need more acquisition channels.’

We haven’t gotten a single channel to work predictably, so naturally the solution is to add 6 more. But no additional resources for you. We call it diversification.

7. ‘Wait, no. Let’s 10x our best-performing channel.’

Why didn’t anyone think of that before? Surely the team that’s spent the last 2 years optimizing this channel just forgot to turn the growth dial from 1 to 10. But preferably with no extra budget please. #Optimizing

8. ‘It’s 2026, are we optimizing for AI search!?’

No matter how many other acquisition channels we have, we definitely need this one.

We’ve heard SEO is dying. Or maybe getting more important? Honestly, hard to keep up. But SEO sounds boring now. We need AEO! GEO! LLMO! Whatever acronym someone with a LinkedIn following invented this week. Let’s create an entirely new growth workstream, buy 3 new tools, and start tracking how frequently ChatGPT mentions us.

How do we actually influence these rankings? Well, the agency says we need more content. And mentions. And citations. And apparently ranking well on Google wouldn’t hurt.

9. ‘Let’s build a community.’

Community, we summon thee! I love this one because it treats human relationships like an acquisition channel you can just switch on (and monetize within 3 months). Sure, people aren’t organically talking about our product, our customers have nothing in common except the fact that they use our software, and there’s no obvious reason for anyone to want to hang out with each other. But didn’t you see how Notion and Figma grew?

In 3 months, leadership will ask why the community isn’t generating pipeline. 6 months later, we’ll just shut it down and pretend it was always intended to be a limited-time experiment.

10. ‘Let’s expand internationally.’

This one comes in two delicious flavors.

For US companies, global expansion is a guaranteed way to multiply revenue. We’ve barely figured out how to grow in our home market, but imagine the TAM if we launch in 30 countries! Let’s start with India - we don’t know how to monetize it, but there sure is a lot of usage. Or, maybe just all of Asia - because we do know how to monetize it, but no one knows how to drive user growth. So, how about we just translate the homepage into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. That’s most of the world’s population, right? International expansion: complete. Très bueno!

For non-US companies, the strategy is even simpler: ‘Let’s win the US!’ If we don’t win the US, are we even serious about being in tech? The US is a gold, shining star on every startup’s Official Cool Company Report Card, so we can’t afford to miss that. Yes, that’s where the most competition is and we’ll have to fight upstream against all of the companies who actually have their headquarters in the Bay Area, but YOLO.

11. ‘Let’s add gamification.’

Have we tried badges? Streaks? Points? A leaderboard? Imagine the excitement when customers log in to reconcile their invoices and discover they’ve unlocked the Bronze Bookkeeper badge! Only three more reconciliations until Silver! Retention guaranteed to go up.

12. ‘Let’s send more emails.’

Users aren’t activating? Email them. Not retaining? Another email. Not converting? 7 emails.

Not opening emails? Try a more provocative subject line. It may not actually increase product engagement, but we sure can report on the number of emails that were sent. That’s the same as earned impressions, right? We just need to make sure to keep reporting on open rates and click rates to a minimum. And if someone says the words ‘Unsubscribe Rates’... Let’s try #5.

13. ‘Let’s create a new category.’

Every marketer’s ultimate fantasy. Our market sure is crowded, so… why don’t we just create our own category? Why compete with our competitors when we can invent the category of AI-Powered Autonomous Revenue Experience Orchestration? We’ll spend the next 3 years explaining what it means, but at least we can introduce ourselves as the category leader. G2 visionary quadrant, here. we. come.

14. ‘Let’s do a rebrand.’

Because nothing fixes slowing growth quite like a new logo, a $5M agency bill, and 6 months debating whether we’re ‘bold’ or ‘playful.’ Oh and a fancy billboard. The product and the customers and the retention all stay exactly the same, but at least the new shade of blue is looking great.

A fun alternative to this: Just change some copy on the homepage and call it a rebrand. This has the double benefit of giving your entire design and product teams a heart attack, while also gaslighting your customers when you announce it and they can’t tell that anything changed.

15. ‘Let’s hire more sales.’

Our spreadsheet says each salesperson generates $1M in revenue. So if we hire 10 more, that’s $10M! That’s just math.

Slight complication: That average came from one $3M deal that the founder closed (with his brother-in-law’s company). The 3 reps we have now are begging for leads because there’s no inbound demand and the pipeline is bone dry. But surely adding 10 more will fix that. Or maybe hiring a new sales leader? Oh, I know - we’ll just have them cold call. I hear Millennials and Gen Z love talking on the phones.

16. ‘Let’s just increase free-to-paid conversion.’

What we actually mean is crush the f*^#ing life out of the free plan to squeeze 1% more conversion to paid. Free plan is WAY too generous. Let’s remove the best features, add more usage limits, shorten the trial, and make sure users hit a paywall before they can access product. We call this ‘improving monetization efficiency.’

It doesn’t matter if this cuts our organic signups by 50% and the sentiment analysis on our subreddit is surfacing keywords like ‘looking for alternatives’ and ‘so betrayed’ and ‘dead to me.’ It’s fine. Let’s just continue to model last year’s free-trial signup rate and this year’s free-to-paid! When things don’t work out, let’s do #5?

17. ‘Let’s invest in thought leadership.’

How will people know we have a valuable product if our executives aren’t all seen as industry visionaries? Let’s publish some bold perspectives about innovation, transformation, and the future of our category. If we don’t have any of those bold perspectives, we’ll just hire a content agency to think of some for us. Also, make sure legal approves it - they always add a certain sanitizing flair to content that just makes it POP.

And yes, I recognize the irony of writing an article about growth clichés in a growth newsletter that I publish to establish myself as a thought leader. Please respect my privacy at this difficult time.

18. ‘Let’s run more experiments.’

Our growth is flat because we aren’t experimenting enough. So let’s increase experimentation velocity! Test 14 button colors, seven headlines, 3 pricing page layouts, and whether the CTA should say ‘Get Started’ or ‘Start Now.’ Let’s also test changing the button from blue to green. Maybe even orange, if leadership is feeling particularly innovative.

No traffic, no problem. At this rate, our revenue may not go up, but at least we’ll have completed so many studies we can publish our findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Friends don’t let friends Gamble with Growth.

All of these growth clichés are around because every single one has worked at some point. Except the rebrand. I don’t know if rebrands have ever actually worked. But all of these are legitimate growth levers, and I doubt there’s a single successful company that hasn’t used most of them at some point.

The problem is when companies start grabbing for these options because spinning the Growth Wheel O’ Tactics is a lot easier than a tough conversation with your team about something that’s totally broken deep down in the product. Or in the whole company.

But those are uncomfortable problems. They don’t fit neatly into a quarterly roadmap.

So instead, we spin the wheel again. And yeah, I get it. I’ve been there. These tactics feel productive! They give us something to work on, something to assign owners to, something to put in a beautifully formatted quarterly plan. We can track milestones, celebrate deliverables, and give executives an update about how much progress we’re making.

But the more time you spend spinning the wheel, the less time you spend actually solving the core problems.

But great growth people aren’t great because they know 100 tactics. They’re great because they know which problems are worth solving and which tactics actually fit those problems. So focus on that. Or brace yourself to watch all of the exact same ideas get proposed again next quarter.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

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