Growth Insights
Lessons from 247 conversations with growth leaders
Synthesized from 125 hours of podcast interviews across 40 shows in 4 languages. Every article quotes the people who actually built it.
Elena Verna on Why $100M ARR Doesn't Mean You Have Product-Market Fit
Elena Verna helped Lovable hit $100M ARR in 8 months—faster than any company in history. Here's why she believes they still don't have product-market fit and what that means for every growth leader building in AI.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Kate Syuma on Why Product Quality Kills More PLG than Bad Tactics
Kate Syuma spent six years at Miro scaling from 63 employees to nearly 2,000. Her most contrarian belief? Your growth tactics are useless if your product experience is broken.
Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder
Kate Syuma on Why Miro's Best Onboarding Experiment Failed Users Loved
Kate Syuma scaled Miro from no onboarding to 50 million users. The experiments that won Twitter praise often lost on metrics—here's what actually moved the needle.
Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder
Kyle Poyar on Why Going Enterprise Doesn't Mean Killing PLG
Growth Unhinged's Kyle Poyar shares tactical ways to test product-led growth without destroying your business model, and why companies going upmarket often make a fatal mistake with their self-serve motion.
Kyle Poyar · Operating Partner
Miro, OpenAI, Loom, and Splunk on Pricing as a Growth Lever
The pricing teams at Miro, OpenAI, Loom, and Splunk reveal how they use minimum seat counts, price drops, and packaging to drive growth—and why most experiments fail.
Alison Harmon / Akshay Sharma / Janie Lee / Carsten Holm · Head of Growth
Yuriy Timen on Why Growth Teams Treat Product and Marketing Like Enemies
Grammarly's former Global Head of Growth reveals why most companies split growth into warring tribes—and how to build one team that owns the full funnel instead.
Yuriy Timen · Growth Advisor
Kyle Poyar on Why PLG Sales Teams Fail (And How to Fix It)
Most PLG companies sabotage their own sales motion by making two critical mistakes: calling every free user regardless of fit, and confusing product champions with actual buyers. Here's how to layer in sales without killing what made PLG work.
Kyle Poyar · Operating Partner
Kyle Poyar on Why Community Isn't a Growth Strategy (And What It Is)
Kyle Poyar built a usage-based pricing mastermind that unicorn founders now ask to join. His playbook: start with no, listen for pull, and stop thinking about your KPIs.
Kyle Poyar · Operating Partner
Wes Bush on Why Most SaaS Companies Build Watered-Down Gatorade
ProductLed founder Wes Bush breaks down his 9-component system for building a product-led growth motion that actually converts, including the one exercise that boosted MRR by 20%.
Wes Bush · Founder
Darren Chait on Why Calendly's Viral Growth Still Requires Growth Fundamentals
When your product schedules millions of meetings a week and has natural viral loops, you'd think growth runs itself. Calendly's Darren Chait explains why that's never the case.
Darren Chait · VP of Marketing
Darren Chait on How Calendly Optimizes Virality Without Letting It Run Wild
Darren Chait breaks down how Calendly turns millions of weekly meetings into sustainable growth—and why viral loops still need relentless optimization to work.
Tom Smith · CEO & Founder
Pulkit Agrawal on Why Chameleon Killed Its $25/Month PLG Plan
Chameleon's CEO explains why a $25/month PLG plan nearly killed the company, how a sales-assisted pivot drove 1,000% ARPU growth, and what makes most product tours fail.
Maria Thomas · Chief Product Officer
Bruno Estrella on How Clay Built $500M Valuation with Controlled Chaos
Clay's Head of Growth Marketing reveals the unsexy reality behind scaling from 20 to 700 people: controlled chaos, billboard anxiety, and why PLG isn't for everyone.
Bruno Estrella · Head of Growth Marketing
Georgia Vidler on Why Canva Rejects Silicon Valley's MVP Obsession
Georgia Vidler built Canva into a product so intuitive that high schoolers teach their parents to use it. Here's how she kept it simple while adding 1,500 employees.
Georgia Vidler · Former Head of Product
Leah Tharin on Why Your Salespeople Are Killing Your PLG Motion
Most PLG companies past $5M have sales teams. The problem isn't salespeople—it's how you pay them. Leah Tharin breaks down the incentive traps killing self-serve revenue and what to do instead.
Leah Tharin · PLG Advisor
Darius Contractor on the 5 Signs of Top Growth Talent at Scale
The former VP Growth at Airtable breaks down exactly when to hire growth, how to spot business-driven mindsets, and why your North Star metric might be strangling your upside.
Darius Contractor · Chief Growth Officer
Elena Verna on Why Growth Is Now a Trust Problem (and Paid Is a Death Trap)
Elena Verna breaks down how Lovable hit $350M ARR in just over a year—without relying on paid ads, SEO, or traditional growth playbooks. Her contrarian take: growth is a trust problem now.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Vickie Peng on Why Product-Market Fit Starts With the Market, Not Your Product
Former Instagram product leader and Sequoia partner Vickie Peng explains why most founders fixate on solutions instead of problems—and how to categorize your market's readiness before you build.
Vickie Peng · Partner
Gilles Bertaux (Livestorm) : comment tenir son positionnement sur un marché saturé
Gilles Bertaux a cofondé Livestorm à 25 ans sur un marché de dinosaures. Sept ans plus tard, il dirige le leader européen privé du webinar. Voici comment il pense positionnement, concurrence et choix technologiques.
Gilles Bertaux · Co-founder & CEO
Victoria Colombato: Cómo Duplicar el Conversion Rate en Mural (Ex-PM Growth)
Victoria Colombato fue la primera persona contratada en el equipo de Growth de Mural. En su segundo quarter duplicó el conversion to paid. Aquí está el manual que usó para lograrlo.
Victoria Colombato · Head of Growth
Hila Qu on Why PLG Is Really DLG (Data-Led Growth)
The former Director of Growth at GitLab explains why most companies fail at product-led growth, how to avoid giving away your product for nothing, and the leverage points that drive actual conversions.
Hila Qu · Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Reforge
Elena Verna on 10 Growth Tactics That Always Fail (But Keep Getting Tried)
Elena Verna has seen the same growth mistakes play out at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox, and dozens of companies she advises. Here are the tactics that never work—and why teams keep trying them anyway.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Elena Verna: Why 95% of Growth Is Now Innovation, Not Optimization
Elena Verna has thrown out 60% of her growth playbook at Lovable. Here's what actually moves the needle when you're scaling to $200 million ARR in 12 months.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Elena Verna on Why 95% of Growth is Now Innovation, Not Optimization
The head of growth at Lovable explains why traditional activation tactics don't matter anymore, how shipping velocity became the ultimate retention strategy, and why she's spending 95% of her time inventing new growth loops instead of optimizing old ones.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Christopher Miller on How HubSpot Built a PLG Empire on Free Software
HubSpot launched a free CRM in 2015 without a clear plan for what came next. Christopher Miller shares how an aggressive growth team turned self-service revenue from a side project into the company's core engine.
Christopher Miller · VP of Product, Growth & AI
Yuriy Timen on Why Growth Advisors Should Never Control the Sausage
After scaling Grammarly to half a billion in revenue as its first go-to-market hire, Yuriy Timen spent four years advising 35+ companies. His biggest insight: the things you think are coupled—growth and product, dunning and access, advice and execution—almost never need to be.
Yuriy Timen · Growth Advisor
Wes Bush on Why Your Free Model Is Probably Watered-Down Gatorade
The founder who helped 324 SaaS companies generate over $1 billion in sales argues that the next decade won't be won by those who build the best products—but by those with the sharpest go-to-market motion.
Wes Bush · Founder
Victoria Colombato: Cómo construir growth cuando nadie sabe qué es growth
Cuando Victoria Colombato entró a Mural, su instrucción fue "haz que esto crezca". Su primer cuarto no lo pasó corriendo experimentos, sino reduciendo un mar de métricas a solo tres números.
Victoria Colombato · Head of Growth
Vanessa Hope Schneider on Building AI-Native Marketing Teams Without Chasing Efficiency
The head of marketing at Descript believes the nearest-term objective of AI adoption isn't efficiency—it's rewiring your brain. Here's her three-level framework for getting teams there.
Vanessa Hope Schneider · Head of Marketing
Inside Tom Smith's Growth Intelligence: How the GWI Founder Thinks About Consumer Research
Most founders obsess over their product. Tom Smith built an entire company around obsessing over everyone else's customers—and turned that insight into a growth engine.
Tom Smith · CEO & Founder
Raman Malik on Why Growth Teams Should Fail More and Spend Less
The head of growth at Perplexity thinks your team is running too many A/B tests, playing it too safe with big bets, and obsessing over the wrong activation metrics.
Raman Malik · Head of Growth
Maria Thomas on Product-Led Growth: Why Buffer Prioritizes Product Experience
The Chief Product Officer at Buffer reveals why the self-serve model isn't a magic formula, and how running out of money forced her team to rebuild their entire go-to-market strategy around what customers actually needed.
Maria Thomas · Chief Product Officer
Luke Harries on Building Growth Teams That Don't Need Product Managers
Most growth leaders preach focus. Luke Harries built one of the fastest-growing AI companies by ignoring that advice—serving developers, creators, and consumers simultaneously with discrete growth teams for each.
Luke Harries · Head of Growth
Leah Tharin on Why Product-Led Growth Isn't About Products Selling Themselves
The PLG advisor who survived two hypergrowth companies believes your product doesn't sell itself—and that's not just okay, it's strategic. Here's why commoditized markets demand free trials and how Flash demos evolved into trackable conversion machines.
Leah Tharin · PLG Advisor
Lauryn Isford on Why Activation Rates Should Be Lower (Not Higher)
Most growth leaders chase high activation rates. Lauryn Isford, who rebuilt Airtable's onboarding and drove a 20% lift, argues the opposite: lower is often better, experiments are expensive, and tooltips are mostly dead weight.
Lauryn Isford · Head of Growth
Laura Schaffer on Misattribution, Self-Serve Pricing, and Career Growth
Laura Schaffer added questions to Twilio's signup flow expecting disaster. Instead, conversion improved 5%. The lesson: sometimes friction creates clarity—and executives are further from customers than they think.
Laura Schaffer · VP of Growth
Kyle Poyar on Why Community Must Betray Your KPIs
The OpenView partner has a rule: if you build community to hit your own objectives, you'll never hit them. His contrarian take on PLG, pricing, and why sales reps calling every free user is a death spiral.
Kyle Poyar · Operating Partner
Kieran Flanagan on Why Growth Teams Will Disappear and AI Will Own GTM
The HubSpot CMO predicts growth teams will vanish—replaced by AI innovation pods that collapse product-led and sales-led motion into a single, agent-driven experience.
Kieran Flanagan · CMO
Kate Syuma on Why Big Bets Don't Work at Scale
The former Head of Growth Design at Miro spent six years learning that what users love on Twitter can tank your metrics, big redesigns cost more than they're worth, and asking one extra question might 3x your revenue.
Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder
Hila Qu on Why Product-Led Growth Is Really Data-Led Growth
The former GitLab director turned Reforge entrepreneur-in-residence has watched enough companies botch their PLG launches to know: giving away your product for free without data infrastructure is just leaving money on the table.
Hila Qu · Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Reforge
Gilles Bertaux : le playbook Livestorm pour dominer le webinar en Europe
Le fondateur de Livestorm décode les bilans financiers de ses concurrents publics pour anticiper les mouvements du marché. Une approche que peu d'entrepreneurs osent partager.
Gilles Bertaux · Co-founder & CEO
Georgia Vidler on Why Simplicity Is the Hardest Product Metric to Measure
The former head of product at Canva thinks most product teams add too many buttons. She spent years making sure hers didn't become the bloated tools they set out to replace.
Georgia Vidler · Former Head of Product
Everett Butler on Building Go-to-Market in a Category That Doesn't Exist Yet
Most marketers debate what to call their product. Everett Butler ships language into the world and lets customer behavior reveal the truth—because in AI, the syntax is being written in real time.
Everett Butler · Head of Marketing
Emma Robinson and Kristine Segrist on Canva's B2B and Consumer Growth Engine
Most companies treat B2B and B2C as separate kingdoms with strict borders. At Canva, two marketing leaders run the business as "two parts of a whole"—and the result is a $3 billion revenue engine with zero attribution finger-pointing.
Emma Robinson / Kristine Segrist · Head of B2B Marketing
Elena Verna's Growth Machine: How Lovable Broke Every Rule
The head of growth at Lovable—now at $350M ARR in barely a year—has thrown out 70% of her playbook. No optimization. No rebrands. Just innovation, building in public, and giving product away.
Elena Verna · Head of Growth
Ed Baker on Why Growth Leaders Should Do Less, Not More
At Uber, Ed Baker found that 1 or 2 initiatives each year drove more growth than hundreds of other experiments combined. His approach: obsessive focus on the North Star metric and the discipline to ignore everything else.
Ed Baker · Angel Investor and Growth Advisor
Darren Chait on Building Viral Growth Without Forgetting the Fundamentals
Most viral products fail because users see the share button but never understand the value. Calendly's VP of Marketing explains why experiencing the product as a scheduler—not just a sender—changes everything about retention and conversion.
Darren Chait · VP of Marketing
The Darius Contractor Playbook for Growth That Doesn't Scale (Until It Does)
Most growth leaders optimize for scale. Darius Contractor spent a decade at Dropbox, Facebook, and Airtable learning that the best growth comes from knowing exactly when not to hire a growth team—and how to let your best people outgrow you.
Darius Contractor · Chief Growth Officer
Christopher Miller on How HubSpot Built Product-Led Growth Before It Had a Name
If your growth experiments succeed more than 30% of the time, you're thinking too small. Christopher Miller built HubSpot's product-led engine by failing fast, pitching drunk executives at Guinness parties, and claiming problems no one asked him to solve.
Christopher Miller · VP of Product, Growth & AI
The Cem Kansu Playbook for Building Product 10x Faster with Smaller Teams
The Duolingo CPO who put ads on a beloved app believes consumer products live and die in the pixels—and that "unhinged" is the highest compliment a product change can receive.
Cem Kansu · CPO
Bruno Estrella on Building Growth Engines Through Ecosystem Economics
The most underrated question in startup land isn't how fast you're growing—it's whether you actually know why you're growing at all.
Bruno Estrella · Head of Growth Marketing
The Pricing Playbook: Harmon, Sharma, Lee, and Holm on Growth Through Monetization
The best pricing leaders treat it like any other product feature—something that shapes customer behavior, drives outcomes, and evolves constantly. Here's how four top growth executives think about monetization.
Alison Harmon / Akshay Sharma / Janie Lee / Carsten Holm · Head of Growth
L'acquisition payante est morte, vive le mobile-first et le PLG
Les spécialistes français du growth ne s'accordent sur presque rien en 2026 : certains parient tout sur le mobile-first et le product-led, d'autres défendent l'outbound multicanal et l'automatisation agressive. Ce roundup explore les tensions qui façonnent la croissance en France cette année.