One of the things that Bali hippies believe is “the rule of attraction”. That important things in life happen because “the universe wants it”, and that people can communicate by means of galactic beams, and things of that nature.

As far as I can tell, that doesn’t work.

You can’t expect users to randomly land on your door. If you want to get users, you have to go get them yourself

And then shortly followed by: “… and getting those users is much harder than it seems!”

So that’s where we’re at right now.

Of course I also “foreshadowed” that there is a way to solve this problem.
We’ll get to that in a sec.

But basically the question every entrepreneur struggles with, is…

“How do I get people to use our product?”
+ What can we do to hit those growth targets we’ve set for ourselves?
+ How can I get a steady stream of people signing up?
+ How can we get more revenue, so we can hire a better team?
+ How can we 5X the revenue this year… so we can finally pay all the bills?

And we tell ourselves…
“Ah, that’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out!”…

And most startups manage to get the first 10 customers. And most of them can find 25, if they #hashtagHustle a little bit.

But that’s where the trouble starts.

If you need 3 new customers every month, you can hustle to get them…
+ But what if you need 30 new customers per month? —That’s one new customer, every day
+ What if you need 300 per month?
+ What if, God forbid, you need thousands?

At that point, just being a “hustler” won’t cut it anymore. Unless you’re Gary V., you really shouldn’t hinge your entire business on something unreliable as willpower and “hustling really hard”.

What you need (to build a stable, scalable business) is a steady cadence of traffic, and a smooth flow of new customers.
In short: You need a much more systematic approach,. Something that generates traffic and qualified leads every month… virtually on autopilot.

And to get there, you’ll have to build some systems into your business:
+ You’ll need a system that ensures you can generate more traffic, at relatively predictable rates (= “growth engine”, more in tomorrow’s email)
+ You’ll want to capture that traffic and reliably convert leads into a flow of signups (= “sales funnel”, again… tomorrow)
+ … and with a steady flow of signups, you’ll want to build systems to ensure people get activated (= “retention system”)

If you have never heard of those terms, it might sound overwhelming. But this shit isn’t rocket science. We’ll unpack each one of them in more depth tomorrow.

For now, I want to stick to the “big picture”:

➾ If you want to get customers, we need to create those growth systems into your business

CAREFUL: one thing to keep in mind here…
A business is a complex system with many moving parts, just like —for instance— a car. You can’t build the car and at the last moment say “oh shit, we forgot the engine”… and then bolt the engine on top.

Similarly, you can’t just bolt those growth systems on. It’s deeply embedded in the “DNA” of your company. The sooner you integrate them into the fabric of your product and your marketing, the better…

So that’s where growth marketing comes in…
Growth marketing is simply a matter of building and tuning such systems. What used to be about “hacks”, is now turning into a set of professionalized frameworks that works as well for venture-backed SaaS companies as it does for a single-founder lifestyle business.

It’s all the same idea.
It’s the same set of systems.