Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Growth isn't something you add to your business— It should already be built into your business model.”
Nine months after launching Lean Canvas, I was stuck.
400 new signups every month… losing 300.
Net growth: 100 users.
At that pace, we’d hit 10,000 users in 8 years.
I was trying every growth hack imaginable. Optimizing landing pages, A/B testing email sequences, working 12-hour days, trying to optimize everything.
That’s when I realized I was working on the wrong problem entirely.
Growth wasn’t something I needed to add to my business—it was already there. I just didn’t know how to unlock it.
But once we found our built-in growth loop and removed the friction blocking it, we went from 100 to 1,000 users per month in 90 days.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Growth comes from feedback loops, not linear funnels.
Most founders think growth works linearly: acquire customers, make them successful, done.
But successful businesses work like systems. Growth comes from feedback loops where past customer actions fuel future customer acquisition.
Every business has two factories: a Customer Acquisition Factory (turns unaware visitors into trial users) and a Customer Success Factory (turns users into paying customers).
Growth loops connect these factories.
For Lean Canvas, our breakthrough came when we noticed founders were sharing canvases in coaching sessions and pitches. Advisors were recommending it to multiple startups. Every canvas became an acquisition tool.
II. Focus beats spreading yourself thin.
While mature companies run multiple growth loops, startups should optimize a single primary growth loop first.
You counterintuitively go faster by focusing rather than spreading yourself thin across multiple half-done systems.
The job of your primary growth rocket is to propel you to product/market fit. After that, you can consider additional loops.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Map your customer factories.
Identify the key macro steps in your customer acquisition factory (how unaware visitors become trial users) and customer success factory (how users become paying customers).
Look for natural connection points between the two—these are your potential growth loops.
Want to download a fillable template, click here.
II. Ask the three growth loop questions.
- Revenue Loop: “How could you reinvest customer revenue to systematically acquire more customers?”
- Referral Loop: “What do customers naturally want to share, and how can you make sharing easier?”
- Retention Loop: “What valuable content do users create that could attract new users?”
III. Run 90-day growth loop experiments.
Once you identify a promising growth rocket, set aside 90 days to build and optimize it.
Start with small experiments to make it repeatable, then scalable. Measure the feedback loop connection—are customer success actions actually feeding new prospects into your acquisition factory?
Building a growth rocket takes effort and requires running many small iterations to determine what works.
That’s all for today. See you next week.
Ash
Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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P.S.
Check out his week's video:
