The work itself is growth. Acquisition, activation, and the economics of a channel, which is where most of the confusion lives. People assume everything can work for everything, that paid search can carry a five-dollar-a-month, low-frequency product, and it doesn't really work that way. And there are poor assumptions floating around about what activation even means, so a lot of folks in acquisition never look at it at all.

Founders come to me wanting more clarity and more actionable insight on how to actually move the needle. A lot of them are unaware of what they should be doing, they've seen all this poor advice floating around, and they're doubting their own capabilities, whether they're doing it right or wrong. It's incredibly hard out there for a lot of folks, and my job is to share a perspective that cuts through some of that.

I review their business and I categorize it, then I categorize the challenge, whether it's a marketing problem or something more product-specific. Based on the challenge they've shared and the problem they're trying to solve, I come up with probable root causes to discuss with them on the call. If someone is savvy enough, I do have plans to go a little deeper into the data too.

I don't lean on a single rigid formula. There are a bunch of folks who do recurring mentorship with me, and I've met some really amazing people that way. What has worked really well is this: if there's an intrinsic motivation in the mentee to learn and grow, I build a framework specifically for that person, a path forward, be it a career path or an organization growth path. That usually leads to a very successful outcome.

The hardest ones are the solo founders trying to bootstrap their way through growth, facing issues in marketing and product at the same time, plus general burnout. That's far more complex than a straightforward acquisition or product-specific question. You have to understand every single thing about their business, build out your models, sometimes go as far as identifying how their growth loops really look, because there's a ton of ambiguity in there. When someone comes to me about Google Ads it's relatively straightforward, but when they say 'what is it that we should do,' that's the super challenging part of the equation.

We get a lot of disagreements too. There are people with go-to-market plans who aren't really measuring anything. What we can usually agree on is the outcome, so we lean toward outcomes and toward better testing methodologies whenever an argument comes up. If there's no evidence and it's their experience versus mine, then just test it out, unless it's super expensive to test. That usually works well.

I do follow-ups, and they reach out to me with their goals and how they're progressing. At this point I'm talking to mentees I first spoke with a year ago who are still in touch. They drop me Slack messages and LinkedIn messages, and even if they're not on GrowthMentor anymore, they find a way to get in touch.

Usually we check in quarterly, or after every six months, on how their goals are progressing. That long tail is part of what makes it rewarding. It isn't a single thirty-minute call and then nothing, it's a relationship that keeps going as their business does.