r/GrowthHacking

Low-tech tactic that punched above its weight for us, sharing in case it helps someone stuck guessing where their funnel leaks. For months I "knew" our funnel in my head. Ad or post, landing page, signup, activation, paid. Felt simple enough that I never wrote it down. Growth was flat and I kept blaming the top (traffic) because that's the fun thing to blame. One slow afternoon I opened a free flowchart maker and actually drew every single step a user takes, including the boring in-between ones. Every email, every click, every screen between landing and paying. Then next to each arrow I wrote the rough number of people who make it to the next box, pulled from our analytics. Seeing it laid out visually did something that a spreadsheet never did. There was one step, the email verification screen right after signup, where a big chunk of people just vanished. Something like a third of signups never came back after it. I'd genuinely never noticed because I was staring at the top of the funnel. Turned out the verification email was landing in spam for a lot of people. Boring, unglamorous, fixable in an afternoon. After patching it, activation jumped and it flowed all the way down to more trials. The lesson for me: the leak is almost never where you think, and drawing the whole thing (even badly, in a free tool) makes the invisible step visible in a way numbers alone didn't. Do you map your funnel visually or just live in the analytics dashboard? Curious if others have caught a leak this way

People from around the world are using my product. 🌍

I know it might sound like a small thing, but as a builder, seeing real people discover and use something you created feels incredible.

Still feels a little unreal. ❤️

https://preview.redd.it/bhwu7srpeckh1.png?width=1134&format=png&auto=webp&s=294950f9faa48c440281ba543f3467833e502dc5

Curious how other growth leads and performance marketers are tracking organic search visibility these days.

In the past, showing that client keywords moved into top 3 organic positions was a straightforward win. But nowadays, between generative search summaries, featured snippets, and local blocks sitting at the top of the fold, being #2 or #3 organic doesn't yield the same click-through rate or brand exposure like it used to.

For teams managing search performance across multiple accounts or client brands:

• How are you measuring actual brand presence inside generative search features vs standard organic links?
• Have you adjusted the metrics in your monthly executive summaries to show real SERP ownership?

Would love to hear how other growth teams are updating their stack or reporting workflow for this.

We ran cold email hard in 2023 and 2024 on the playbook everyone was using. 7 step sequences, aggressive follow ups, volume volume volume. Reply rates strted dropping and we ended up burning thru 2 domains in a month.

Google and Microsoft tightened sender requirements, so we had to rethink our setup

We cap every inbox at 30-40 cold sends a day. Anything north of 50 and you start tripping bulk sender detection even if your copy is clean. (might be obv to you but wan't to us at first) Sequences are 3 touches, with the initial, follow up around day 3, last one about a week later. Thats it. If they didnt reply by the 3rd they were never replying to a 7th and all the extra follow ups did was feed the spam filter.

We do 4-6 weeks of warmup before a domain touches a cold list starting low and ramping. And we leave warmup running even after campaigns go live now

A bounce spike over 3% sets you back weeks imo. We run every list through verification now because bad data at volume can burn a domain faster than bad copy.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up on everything before sending. We also cycle in fresh inboxes every quarter instead of trying to rehab domains that are sliding.

As a result wee send about 40% fewer emails than we did a year ago and book more meetings!

Happy to answer any questions or hear what's working for you rn in 2026!

I spent the last 3 months building Meridian, an open-source developer tool, mostly without knowing if anyone would actually care about it.

When we finally had something I was happy with, I decided to launch it on Product Hunt.

We had zero paid ads and spent ₹0 on promotion.

Instead, we focused on getting the launch in front of people who were actually interested in developer tools, reaching out to people who had followed the project, sharing the launch with our existing network, and being around throughout the day to reply to everyone and keep the conversation going.

After a pretty intense launch day, Meridian ended up #1 Product of the Day.

What surprised me most was that the launch wasn't really about having a huge audience. It was about getting the right people to care enough to show up and support it.

I wanted to share what we did because I know a lot of people here are interested in organic growth and launching without throwing money at ads.

I recently built a bunch of mini products and from experience I know that submitting to directories improve backlinks, visibility etc. Though some of them are paid, it's so painful to create accounts in each and every one of them for each one of my products (mostly vibe coded).

But, with that said, I also understand the importance of it. Every good product I have worked with (I have 12 years of experience working with various startups), keep launching and keep adding to all the directories. One or some of them click and it works well.

Today, with all the AI, automations around, I just started using claude code + my browser to let it do these by itself. Not sure how efficient this will be. But I'm open to ideas from others in the subreddit on this. Especially launching consistently, submitting to directories etc.

Fifteen years writing copy and brand strategy, mostly fintech and SaaS. I have made my peace with the tools, mostly. But I keep running the same test for clients and the result keeps embarrassing the machine, so here is one with numbers.

A fintech client wanted to cut their content budget. Fair. The pitch they got elsewhere was to run everything through an ai content generator and ship volume. Before they committed I asked to run a straight test on their highest-traffic comparison page, the one that actually drives signups.

Two versions. One was the generator output with light cleanup. The other I rewrote by hand, same offer, same structure, same length. Split the traffic evenly for three weeks.

The generated version: signups held about flat versus the old page, bounce a little higher. The hand-written version: signups up a bit over a third, and time on page noticeably longer.

The difference was not quality in some precious sense. It was specificity. The AI version explained what the product does. The human version named the exact moment the reader is stuck, the thing their finance team says no to, the fee they got burned by last time. The machine writes the category. A person writes the reader.

I am not here to tell you never to touch the tools. Volume has its place for the boring middle of a funnel. But on the pages where money actually changes hands, generic costs more than it saves, and most people never measure it because the cheap version feels productive.

Curious if anyone here has run the same head to head on a page that matters, and whether your numbers agree or I am just protecting my own job.

Has anyone of you been noticing something similar? Or is it just localized effect it is happening for all my clients across France, Netherlands and Belgium.

In-house social for a small skincare and wellness brand, four years in, and I've stopped chasing every new platform feature because it just resets my numbers every time. So instead of the whiplash I ran an actual test I could log.

The question: does polished graphic creative from an ai poster maker beat rough UGC-style video shot on a phone by our own team? We'd been leaning on the clean branded graphics because they're fast and they look like the brand. Ran both side by side for two months, same products, same offers, spend split evenly.

UGC won on the metrics that actually matter to us, saves and profile visits and add-to-carts, by a wide margin. But here's the part I didn't expect. The polished posters did fine on reach and impressions. They just didn't convert. People scrolled past them the way you scroll past an ad, because they looked like an ad. The messy phone clip of a real person using the product got treated like content, not a promotion, and that's where the trust and the clicks came from.

The takeaway I'm sitting with: in a category built on trust, looking professional can work against you, because "professional" now reads as the brand talking at me.

For anyone running social in a trust-heavy category, skincare, supplements, finance: are you seeing the same flip, where the rougher stuff outperforms the polished stuff on the down-funnel numbers? Or is that specific to beauty?

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

In my previous B2B SaaS Startup, after we found PMF and knew what we sold, who bought and how to close, the problem became throughput; Every time when we wanted more in the pipeline, the answer was 'hire another SDR' or 'buy another tool' and the cost went up faster than the results.

The GTM was a mess, with lot of tools; one for list building, one for enrichment, one for sending and a CRM to see what's happening.

It's was fragmented and felt like we were spending too much to keep it running.

For those of you past the "we have real revenue" line, but not yet a big GTM/RevOps team:

#1 Where did it actually break for you? sourcing, personalization, follow-up, tracking, or just the glue between them?

#2 Did you solve it with more people, more tools, or by ripping something out and simplifying?

#3 If you could wave a wand and fix one part of your GTM motion tomorrow, what would it be?

P.s., trying to figure out if this was just us or if everyone at this stage is duct-taping the same thing together.

hey everyone,

i got tired of trying to find a linkedin engagement group in telegram without endless spam, shady promo drops, and low-effort scammy posts. at some point you realize you don’t even want to like that content, and honestly you don’t want those accounts liking you either.

so i created my own group - lnkdn_nggmnt

no bullshit. no fake engagement pods. if you’re building something serious and actually working on your linkedin content, drop your posts. if you have something meaningful to say, say it. if not, let’s not dilute the space.

maybe someone here knows a genuinely solid group and i’ll happily join instead. if that happens, mine can just stay a small circle for friends.

either way, join, share, invite others. i doubt i’m the only one who’s tired of the current “engagement” ecosystem.

UPDT OF 2026.08.09

PLS CAREFULLY READ THE RULES BEFORE POSTING.

IF YOU DONT FOLLOW THEM, YOU WILL BE BANNED IMMEDIATELY.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, DONT HESITATE TO MESSAGE ME DIRECTLY ON TG.

It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?

If you ask five GTM engineers what tool they use to automate sales signals, you'll probably get five totally different answers because signals mean different things depending on what you sell. If you're trying to automate this without ending up with a mess of webhooks, here's how I look at the main tools:

1, For website & dark funnel visits: Koala

If people are already visiting your site, Koala is great for de-anonymizing company IPs on high-intent pages like /pricing or docs and dropping an alert in Slack.

2. For cross-channel & technical community intent: Scale Intelligence

If you sell to developers, engineers, or technical buyers, they don't fill out lead forms but they do hangout and discuss tooling problems publicly. Scale Intelligence connects to 75+ sources (monitoring discussions across reddit, github repo, discord, job changes, and CRM touchpoints), resolves those signals back to accounts and scores buying readiness so team gets high-intent opportunities routed straight to Slack or any agent stack.

3. For executive job changes: UserGems

If your motion relies heavily on past buyers or champions moving to new companies, UserGems automates that tracking cleanly into Salesforce or HubSpot.

The takeaway:

- If your buyers are on your site $\rightarrow$ Koala
- If you need an autonomous engine tracking developer & community intent across 75+ channels $\rightarrow$ Scale Intelligence
- If you track past champions $\rightarrow$ UserGems

Since every outreach thread has someone saying cold email is not dead, here's my actual numbers.

Setup: 6 domains, 12 Google Workspace inboxes, 3 weeks warmup, Instantly, lists from Apollo. SaaS with funding, mostly AI stuff. 3-step sequences, first line personalized off their profile or a recent funding round.

~2,000 emails in 4 months.

• Replies under 1%, mostly "not interested"
• 3 meetings
• 0 clients
• Both domains now land in spam for everything. Dead.

Cost a few hundred bucks in tools. The real cost was 3 months believing volume would kick in eventually.

Why I think it died:

1. Everyone on that list gets 30 of these a day from the exact same stack. My personalized line looked like everyone else's personalized line.
2. My timing was off (I grabbed funding since past 1 year). I referenced funding rounds, but the data was often a year old. Congratulating someone on last year's raise tells them you scraped a database.
3. By the third campaign I was spam before anyone read a word. New domain, same sequence, same list source. The pattern was flagged, not the address. Deliverability never came back.

Same period on LinkedIn, only messaging people who'd posted or commented on my market that week and opening with what they said: 52% replied.

My first paying customers came from that and from people finding me through AI assistants. Zero from cold email.

Killed the Workspace seats last month.

Some persons are probably making money from call emails. I'm not part of that. I do think it's getting harder and harder with everyone getting so much of those typed of mails. Which is why I think I decided to do other ways.

I did end up building a tool around the LinkedIn side because doing it by hand was killing me, but that's not the point of this post.

Sharing a small experiment because I keep seeing "just have AI write your landing page" advice and wanted real numbers, not vibes. Setup: early-stage B2B SaaS, one main landing page, steady-ish traffic from a couple of channels so a split test was doable. Our original page copy was generated by a landing page AI tool when we were rushing to launch. The experiment: we ran the existing AI-generated version against a rewrite I did by hand. Same design, same layout, same offer. Only the words changed. The rewrite was based on actual phrases from our last ~20 customer interviews, so the headline named the specific pain instead of saying "streamline your workflow." Ran it for about three weeks to get enough conversions to not fool ourselves. Rough results: - AI version: signup conversion sat around 2%. - Human rewrite: closer to 3.5%. Not a massive absolute jump, but that's roughly a 70% lift on the same traffic, which is meaningful when you're paying for it. What I think actually happened: the AI copy was grammatically perfect and completely generic. It could've described any of ten competitors. The rewrite was clunkier but said the exact thing a specific buyer was thinking. My honest takeaway isn't "AI copy is useless." It's fine for a first draft or a skeleton. But the conversion lift lived in customer language the model had no way to know. Anyone else A/B'd generated vs hand-written copy? Curious if the gap holds at higher traffic or if it's just a small-sample thing for us.

I recently launched a solo iOS app called Untilly — it photographs receipts, contracts, subscriptions, and invoices, detects the relevant date (return deadline, trial-to-paid conversion, invoice due date), and reminds you before it's too late.

The pitch I keep coming back to: most people forget to return something once a year, or let one free trial quietly turn into a paid subscription. That single mistake usually costs 15–30€. The app is free to try, and even the paid tier is a fraction of that — so realistically it pays for itself the first time it actually catches something.

I think that's a strong hook, but I'm not sure I'm using it right. Where I'm stuck:

For TikTok: is this a "POV: you forgot to cancel X" skit, a straight-up "here's the math" video, or something else entirely? I have some raw footage (bank statement reveals, notification stacks) but haven't found the format that makes the cost concrete without feeling like a scare-tactic ad.
For Reddit itself: is a message this transactional ("this saves you money") even a good fit here, or does it read as too sales-y no matter how it's framed? Curious if anyone's had luck with a "here's a dumb mistake I almost made" angle instead of leading with the product.

Not looking for someone to build the campaign for me — just want a gut check from people who think about this stuff daily: is the hook actually good, and what's the smartest format to put it in?

I've been trying to grow website traffic and I'm starting to wonder which one is actually harder.

With SEO, it can take months before you see meaningful traffic, and there's no guarantee the pages will rank.

With paid ads, you can get traffic much faster, but getting people who actually convert can become expensive pretty quickly.

So I'm curious what other growth people are seeing.

Which has been harder for you: getting consistent organic traffic through SEO, or getting profitable traffic through paid ads?

And if you've tried both, which one has given you better results over time?

I'm trying to understand how other growth marketers decide who to target.

A lot of people talk about getting more traffic and users, but I'm wondering if the bigger question is which stage of the funnel you're actually targeting.

For example:

TOFU for reaching people who don't know your product yet.

MOFU for people who already know the problem and are considering solutions.

BOFU for people who are actively looking to buy.

I've been wondering whether it's better to focus heavily on one stage instead of trying to target everyone at once. The traditional framework still uses these three stages, although modern buyer journeys aren't always this linear.

What are you targeting most right now?

TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, or a combination?

And what channel has worked best for reaching that audience?