Build your Startup Growth Machine

4.5 (30)

2 Weeks

Cohort-based Course

Find your big growth levers and pull them. Adopt the framework we've used to help over 200 seed-stage startups grow 10X - 100X in 3 years.

Build your Startup Growth Machine

4.5 (30)

2 Weeks

Cohort-based Course

Find your big growth levers and pull them. Adopt the framework we've used to help over 200 seed-stage startups grow 10X - 100X in 3 years.

Hosted by

Matt Lerner, Nopadon Wongpakdee, and Lisa Kennelly

Startup growth leaders at PayPal, Klarna, Citi Ventures & 500 Startups

Previously at

Course overview

Great startups don't waste time on small stuff.

If you study history’s great startups, you’ll see a pattern: 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried.

Every great startup finds a “big growth lever.” They must. They can’t out-work established brands or out-spend them. They out-think them. But very few people can do this well.

99% of startup growth people can run playbooks, but only 1% can write them.

Generic tactics like paid ads, SEO and referral programs will only get you so far. Big levers are seldom obvious, they come from specific unexpected customer insights, and cut across organizational functions.

In this course, you’ll get a proven process to find your company's big levers:

1. Agree on your North Star Metric to help everyone prioritize the most impactful work.

2. Find language/market fit to explain your value more clearly to customers.

3. Run experiments and use data to find things that really make an impact.

4. Lead growth sprints to push the pace and quality of learning and execution.

5. Hire top talent and inspire your team to do their best work.

Who is this course for

Early-stage founders who need a faster way to find product/market fit & unlock their first big growth lever.

Impatient Seed & Series A Founders who want their teams to find big levers, rather than wasting time on small ones.

Early-stage founders who need a faster way to find product/market fit & unlock their first big growth lever.

Impatient Seed & Series A Founders who want their teams to find big levers, rather than wasting time on small ones.

What you’ll get out of this course

Find your North Star to focus everyone on the most impactful work.

Agree on your North Star Metric to break down silos and align everyone around growth. We'll help you stress-test it, and provide examples from SaaS, Marketplaces, apps, D2C and Ecommerce.

Use neuroscience to find language/market fit and explain your value more clearly to customers.

After a quick primer on the neuroscience of human perception, you'll learn to uncover your customers' unconscious biases and triggers and find the language that picks the lock. Then you'll learn to turn those insights into high-converting copy and validate it quickly.

Run growth sprints and experiment to find things that really make an impact.

See how to run growth sprints, how they're different from product sprints, and how to prioritise ideas (hint: not using I.C.E.)

Learn to design and run weekly growth experiments that go far beyond simple A/B tests. Master the Minimum Viable Testing: Small tests of big ideas.

De-risk your big growth hires.

Most startup growth hires fail, and that gets expensive. We'll use your work from the first 3 sessions to scope your next growth hire and figure out how to source and screen candidates with a high chance of success, and enable them to do their best work.

What’s included

Live sessions

Learn directly from your instructors in a real-time, interactive format.

Lifetime access

Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.

Community of peers

Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.

Certificate of completion

Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.

Maven Guarantee

This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.

Course syllabus

6 live sessions • 4 lessons • 6 projects

Week 1

Jul 15—Jul 21

Jul

Map your Startup's Growth Model

Mon 7/153:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)

Jul

Finding Language/Market Fit

Wed 7/173:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)

Jul

Optional: AMA Session

Fri 7/193:00 PM—4:00 PM (UTC)

Optional

Module 1 - Map your Startup's Growth Model

2 items

Module 2- Finding Language/Market Fit

3 items

Week 2

Jul 22—Jul 25

Jul

Growth Sprints, Experimentation and Minimum Viable Tests

Mon 7/223:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)

Jul

Optional: AMA Session

Tue 7/233:00 PM—4:00 PM (UTC)

Optional

Jul

Leadership and Mindset Shift

Thu 7/253:00 PM—4:30 PM (UTC)

Module 3 - Growth sprints, experimentation & Minimum Viable Tests

3 items

Module 4 - Leadership & Mindset Shift

2 items

4.5 (30 ratings)

What students are saying

What people are saying

We worried it’d be generic like other programs and we wouldn’t learn anything new. But the principles were directly applicable to our business. It transformed our failing methods into systems that converted prospects into customers.”

Darina Garland

Co-Founder, Ooni Pizza Ovens

They helped us create rigour around growth. We grew 22X in 18 months, and it would've taken us 3x longer to build our growth engine without their help."

Juan Andrade

Co-Founder & CEO, Rebank (YC-W19)

SCS made my job so much easier! Now I can get engineering resources and the founder actually listens to me."

Ivo Kostadinov

VP Growth, Love Electric

"Theory means nothing unless it's put in the practice. This course pushes execution and holds you and your team accountable so you understand the reasons and learn at a much faster pace.

Alex Depledge, MBE

Founder of Resi, prev. founder Hassle.com

Meet your instructors

Matt Lerner

Co-Founder, Startup Core Strengths, Ex. PayPal, 500 Startups

Matt Lerner started his career as a growth marketer, and general manager in Silicon Valley, and had his first exit in 1998. He joined the early growth team at PayPal in 2004, where he rose to GM of an $800M B2B business. He left PayPal to become Partner with the VC 500 Startups. He founded Startup Core Strengths, where he has helped over 200 early stage startups "find their big growth levers." Matt has been invited to lecture at Stanford University, Berkeley and Imperial College.

Nopadon Wongpakdee

Co-Founder, Startup Core Strengths, ex. Citi Ventures, 500 Startups

A digital marketer with 20+ years of experience, Nopadon has worked with 100+ start-ups as a consultant, Citi Ventures EIR and in-house growth hacker for 500 startups. As co-founder of Startup Core Strengths, Nopadon helps teams apply the Jobs To Be Done methodology to set up the foundations of a growth machine.

Lisa Kennelly

Product Marketing Strategy @ Klarna

2X startup CMO with 15+ years experience. Lisa leads product marketing strategy @ Klarna, previously CMO @ Fishbrain, and Director of Marketing @ Clue. She mentors with First Round Capital, Techstars, Antler, and of course Startup Core Strengths. Little-known fact: After earning a BA from Harvard, she started her career as a sports journalist covering the New York Yankees.