Most Growth Advice Is Wrong for Your Company

I’ve lost count of how many founders have told me they tried “the Dropbox referral strategy” or “the Slack product-led growth playbook” and it didn’t work.

Of course it didn’t. Those strategies worked for those companies, at that time, with those resources, in that market.

The Playbook Problem

Growth advice has a survivorship bias problem. We study the winners and reverse-engineer their tactics without understanding the context that made those tactics work.

Dropbox’s referral program worked because:

Cloud storage was new and hard to explain
Users had genuine motivation to get more space
The product was inherently shareable (file sharing)
They had the infrastructure to handle viral growth

If you’re selling B2B compliance software, a referral program probably isn’t your silver bullet.

Context Is Everything

The growth strategies that work depend on:

Your market: Is it established or emerging? Crowded or empty? Technical or mainstream?

Your resources: What’s your budget? Your team size? Your timeline to profitability?

Your product: Is it self-serve or sales-led? Horizontal or vertical? Sticky or transactional?

Your timing: Are you early to a trend or riding its tail? Is the market expanding or consolidating?

Building Your Own Playbook

Instead of copying tactics, focus on understanding principles:

Where do your best customers come from? Not where you think they should come from—where do they actually come from?
What makes them successful? The customers who stick around and expand—what do they have in common?
What’s your unfair advantage? What can you do that competitors can’t easily copy?

Start there. The tactics will follow.

The Uncomfortable Truth

There’s no shortcut. The founders who build sustainable growth engines are the ones who do the work to understand their specific situation—and resist the temptation to copy someone else’s homework.

Generic advice is comforting because it feels like a roadmap. But the map isn’t the territory.