The Startup Growth Playbook
One useful idea on strategy, growth or AI, every other week. Written for founders and operators. No pitch, no roundup, no "5 lessons from" anything.
What arrives
- One argument per issue, with the reasoning shown rather than asserted
- Usually a number, and where it came from
- Something you can apply to your own company the same week
- Roughly 800 words. Never a link roundup.
What does not
- A sales sequence disguised as a newsletter
- Recycled frameworks with the sources stripped off
- Weekly cadence for its own sake, issues ship when there is something worth sending
- Your email address anywhere other than the platform you subscribed on
Recent thinking
All insights →The argument the newsletter opens with
Elite firms make billions installing a fifty-year-old methodology into very capable twenty-six-year-olds. The frameworks were never secret, Minto published the Pyramid Principle, Porter published the five forces, Lafley and Martin published the choice cascade, Kaplan and Norton published the balanced scorecard. Any of it can be read in a weekend.
The barrier was never access. It was operationalization: knowing which discipline a specific mess requires, running it on incomplete data against a real deadline, and producing something a leadership team will act on rather than admire. That takes a decade of repetition inside an environment that enforces it, which is exactly what those firms sell and exactly why the fee held.
What changed is the cost of the production layer. The analyst work that justified the pyramid (the models, the market scans, the synthesis) no longer takes an army. The judgment still does. That gap is the whole thesis of this practice, and it is what most of the writing here circles back to.
Before subscribing
How often does it go out?
Roughly every other week, when there is an argument worth making. Not on a fixed schedule, because a fixed schedule is how a newsletter becomes filler that people stop opening.
Will I be added to a sales sequence?
No. It runs on LinkedIn, so your email address is never collected in the first place. Subscribing is not a lead-generation event and it is not treated as one.
What is the difference between the newsletter and the insights pages?
Length and finish. The newsletter is shorter and more provisional, an argument being worked out. The insight pages are the versions that survived and got the full treatment.