On growth, through an engineer's lens.
Field notes on Demand, Conversion and Systems. Not growth hacking slogans — actionable writing grounded in diagnosis, data and systems.
Growth architecture vs growth agency: which is right, and when?
A growth agency runs a single channel; growth architecture builds growth as a system across Demand, Conversion and Systems. We compare which is right when — and how they work together.
The growth problem is usually not where it appears.
The surface symptom and the structural bottleneck are rarely in the same layer. Before taking a brief to execution, you need to read where the problem actually breaks.
Most of the market isn't a buyer yet: the math of demand creation.
Playing only to the immediately-ready buyer inflates CAC and caps growth. Demand must be both created and captured.
Where is the funnel leaking? Five questions before CRO.
Before running tests, seeing at which funnel stage cohort consistency breaks down is the prerequisite for winning experiments.
Why leaving attribution to vendor reports misleads you.
Every vendor counts conversions by its own model; total divergence exceeds 30%. The single truth is built in the warehouse.
Most churn happens in the first week.
Without activation in place, retention is unpredictable. Losing existing customers silently while new ones are expensive is the costliest leak.
DDIO: diagnose first, then build.
Automating a broken engine scales the error. Decision before design, architecture before execution.
If the ICP isn't written down, channel choice is random.
In a company that can't describe in writing who it sells to, paid budget becomes a tax. Positioning comes before channel.
What is GTM engineering?
GTM engineering is the discipline of building the go-to-market system like a software system: manual flows replaced by automation, scattered data by pipelines, gut-feel operations by a decision log. It's the role that builds the growth system, not the one that runs campaigns.
I'm spending on ads but no sales come — where's the problem?
If ad spend rises but sales don't, the problem is usually not the campaign but your system: wrong audience, missing demand creation, a leaking funnel, or unmeasurable attribution. The fix is to diagnose which layer is broken — not to tweak the ad.