1:1 training to
‍get more users

Approach 1: Hacking it yourself

You start by sending your product to friends, communities, old coworkers, and anybody you think would be a good user. You might get an early bump from press or a Product Hunt launch.

But it peters out quickly. Your network only has so many people.

Now, you need to figure out how to consistently grow — so you can raise your next round, hit profitability, or plain just reach more people.

So you turn to the internet (and maybe a few books). There's no shortage of material. But blog posts and video courses have a habit of being too generic and out-of-date. The material isn't tailored to your startup.

Most importantly, they lack hands-on feedback.

Deliberate practice lies at the core of good execution.

Many startups think they've followed the right instructions, but we find crucial gaps when we review their work. For example, we've seen people waste thousands of dollars targeting people "interested in" instead of "in" their ideal countries. We've seen them write off cold email when their emails got flagged as spam and never reached an inbox.

There are hundreds of little details like this, and they make a big difference.

It's no one's fault. You don't know what you don't know. But you need feedback from experts to learn properly.

We've built feedback into the core of our business.

We pattern-match from our experience growing hundreds of startups to give you exactly what you need the moment you need it. Quickly learn when to break rules and ignore traditional advice.

Pre-recorded courses and blog posts can't do this:

Approach 2: Sourcing a senior hire

This can work, but it's a big financial risk. Salaries and bonuses will run you well over $200K/year.

Just ask Glassdoor.

Good senior hires are hard to poach. Why would they leave a company they’re successfully growing?

Plus there's a big risk they don't work out. We see ~30% of senior growth hires stick around beyond 6 months.

It’s hard to vet their skills if you don’t have a growth background. For example:

• Can they MVP a referral program without involving the engineering team...and prioritize it against a promising content strategy?
• Do they tactically know how to run & optimize social ads?
• Where in the funnel should they be A/B testing?
• Can they write influencer outreach emails that actually convert?

Beyond that, many senior hires tend to specialize in one channel. If that channel doesn’t work, you’re in trouble. They don’t like to roll up their sleeves to run experiments; they outsource the real work to agencies and junior hires.

It all gets expensive quickly.

Approach 3: Hiring an agency or contractor

This is the right approach if you’ve validated a channel and want to scale it. Agencies are good at the technical parts of channels, like SEO site structure and optimizing ad algorithms.

But they can't understand your users as deeply as you do.

This means they tend to write poor copy and target the wrong audiences. You need to micromanage them to nail the details.

Otherwise, you risk writing off a perfectly good channel prematurely.

For example, one of our clients hired an SEO agency. Their writing was so bad, our client had to remove all the content from their site — after wasting six months and $50K. Not a good return on investment.

The proposal looked great, though.

Good agencies charge at least $15K/month. Many charge a percentage of ad spend, so they're incentivized to spend time on the clients that spend the most. If you're still figuring out what works, that's not you.

Bad agencies charge a fraction of that. They'll do a great sales call, then delegate to overworked junior hires who are trained to do the bare minimum.

You think you’re getting a deal when you sign up, but you eventually find yourself tens of thousands in the red — with work so bad you can’t run it.

Here's a real Slack about a client's PPC contractor:

Plus, agencies are built to specialize in one thing. They have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail, so they won't find the holistic strategy that fits you best.

If you're an early-stage startup, you need to make small bets to test what to spend money on in the first place.

With a proper setup, you don't have to spend more than $5-10K to validate a channel. Not per month. Total.