0-1 Growth for Early Stage Startups

Now that your startup is beginning to show signs of product-market fit, it’s time to invest in growth. You've figured out some things that work but progress feels random. You want to know what growth work to focus on, when to prioritize it, and how everything should fit together.

As the first Head of Growth at Slack, I built the team from 0 to 50 people while driving DAU from 500k to 6M+ and revenue from $10M to $200M. As a venture capital investor at Lightspeed, I evaluated an average of 25 companies a week. This course is built on what I learned founding and scaling growth at Slack and evaluating more than 1,200 companies a year as a VC and active angel investor.

This course prepares early stage startups to excel at growth. Go into your next business stage with the confidence that you're working on the right things, you're measuring the metrics that matter, and you understand what's working and why.

We'll do this in four live, interactive sessions. The course combines 6 hours of live modules with hands-on projects and take-home materials so you can immediately benefit from what you learn. The projects are uniquely designed for early stage startups: they consist of dashboards to build, audits to complete, user interviews to run, and product changes to make. These projects are not homework; they are templated versions of real work you should do now and over the next 12 months. Accordingly, the time spent applying these lessons outside of class will far exceed time spent in the classroom.

💡 Growth is a team sport – you’re encouraged to work with your team on the executable projects. In particular, the more quickly you complete the data analyses assigned during Session 1, the more value you'll get out of the course and office hours.

The course material is custom-built for the early stage of growth – it spans the entire customer lifecycle. We're not optimizing the edges of a user experience. We are building the growth machine.

📚 Your Course Summary

1️⃣ Build the baseline

2️⃣ Create and qualify top-of-funnel interest

3️⃣ Onboard, retain, and expand your customer base

4️⃣ Deliver on pricing & packaging, paid conversion, and sales

We start with an analytics template for defining and tracking the metrics that determine growth performance. The dashboards that you build based on this template establish the canonical view of your growth performance. These are also the metrics that venture capital investors use to evaluate startups. The dashboards you develop during this course are meant for you to share during board meetings and reference throughout your next fundraising process.

With those dashboards as our context, we will focus on specific methods for driving these metrics in each following session. Using modules organized by stages of the customer lifecycle and comprehensive audit checklists, we will cover must-have marketing, product, and sales capabilities. Depending on the gaps or opportunities you identify, you'll use different tactics than your classmates do. 

By the end of the course, you have board-ready dashboards, a roadmap of potential high ROI projects across marketing, product and sales, and a prioritized list of the smart bets you're focused on now. That's your foundational growth playbook.

🤐 But this isn't the right class for everyone...

• You must be approaching product-market fit. This means that you have your first partnerships/customers/dollars coming in.

• Or, you have product-market fit and are accelerating growth.

• You must be building software.

• Your customers must be companies or prosumers. (eg. Snowflake, Notion, Perplexity)

• You must have immediate access to your product analytics and business data.

• You must be a high agency founder, product manager or marketer with a growth mindset.

👩‍🦰 Why learn from Merci

Merci has 20 years of real-world experience as a 2x venture-backed founder, Slack's first Head of Growth, and as a venture capital investor and board member.

Merci is a former game designer and product manager who started Slack's first growth function in 2015. She built the growth team from 0 to 50 people while driving Slack from 500,000 daily active users and $10 million in revenue to over 6 million daily active users and $200 million in revenue. After leaving Slack, Merci was an investor & board member at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Tier 1 Silicon Valley VC firm.

🔮 What people say about Merci

💬 Rachel Hepworth, CMO at Notion & Head of Growth Marketing at Slack

"At Slack, Merci and I partnered together on growth and I saw firsthand her skills in hiring and coaching a strong team and crafting exceptional product experiences."

💬 April Underwood, founder of Adverb Ventures & CPO at Slack

"Merci's experience - building and leading the Growth team during Slack's steep ascent, as an investor who's supported founders at all stages, and as a founder herself - gives her the breadth required to be a partner to founders and leaders as their teams and businesses evolve."

💬 Kelly Watkins, CEO Abstract & Global VP of Marketing at Slack

"Merci is my first phone call whenever I have an important question - be that about something growth related or about my own career journey. Time and time again her experience and perspective has pointed me in the best possible direction."