Growth Levers and How to Find Them

Great startups don't waste time on small stuff. If you study the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried. But most needed years of experimentation to find their growth levers. This book aims to shortcut that process.

Generic tactics like paid ads, SEO and referral programs will only get you so far. Growth levers are things like the professional photographs that made tens of thousands of customers trust AirBnb when they otherwise wouldn’t—a crucial move that unlocked explosive growth. They are unique to each startup; they’re seldom obvious. They come from specific unexpected customer insights, and cut across organizational functions.
In this book you’ll get a process to find your big growth levers:

• Map your growth model to find points of leverage where you can focus for the greatest impact
• Uncover your customers' unconscious biases and triggers
• Find your prospects at their moment of highest need
• Discover the exact words to explain your value clearly to customers
• Run experiments and use data to find the most impactful work
• Run growth sprints to push the pace and quality of learning and execution
• Shift the team from perfectionism to a scrappy bold mindset

Matt Lerner and his team have helped over 200 startups find their big growth levers as the founder of SYSTM. Previously, he was on the early growth team at PayPal, a partner at a Silicon Valley VC fund, and a past guest lecturer at Stanford Business School.
This book shares the framework that Matt and his team have used to help over 200 seed-stage startups grow as much as 100X. It’s packed with examples and clear, step-by-step instructions.