|
👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I share deeply researched product, growth, and career advice. For more: Lenny’s Jobs | Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | Become an AI-Native Builder and my other favorite AI/PM courses
P.S. Get a full free year of Cursor, Notion, Replit, Lovable, Wispr Flow, Linear, ElevenLabs, Factory, PostHog, Granola, Brain.fm, Waking Up, and more, by becoming an Insider subscriber (while supplies last). Learn more.
Tom Orbach writes the most delightful and actionable newsletter for anyone looking to grow their product. When we began discussing a collaboration, I asked him to take the best of his newsletter and turn it into a single post. Below is the most specific and creative collection of growth ideas you’ll find anywhere.
As a bonus, Tom made it easy for you to feed this list into your agent to brainstorm growth ideas for your own product. I encourage you to share this post and the Markdown file with your team (and agents)—it’ll get their creative juices flowing.
Tom writes Marketing Ideas, a newsletter about unconventional growth tactics with over 100,000 subscribers, leads growth marketing at Wiz (now part of Google Cloud), and built the Viral Post Generator, which hit 2 million users, was covered by Business Insider, The Guardian, and BuzzFeed, and was acquired in under a week. Check out his newsletter, and find him on LinkedIn.
 |
A few years ago, I pitched my VP a growth idea that made zero sense on paper. It had nothing to do with our product, we had no way of knowing if it would work, and there was a real chance it would make us look ridiculous. But I ran with the idea anyway, and it became one of the biggest growth wins in the company’s history:
We built a fake toy store for cybersecurity executives.
We were a startup selling cloud security software, and we just wanted chief information security officers (CISOs) to notice us in a crowd of older, well-known brands.
The store “sold” a CISO panic button and blindfolds for your legal team. It cost almost nothing to make, went viral on Reddit, and brought 46,000 visitors in 24 hours. Our goal was to get attention, but our sales team ended up with hundreds of qualified leads—and in enterprise security, a single good lead can be worth seven figures.
 |
I don’t have to tell you that it’s almost impossible to stand out these days. Everyone seems to be running the same growth playbook: high-production-value video-led launches, paid influencers, SEO/AEO, social, email, maybe some (poorly attended) events. Your competitors are in the same channels, trying to innovate in the same ways.
But attention always goes to what people don’t see coming. The unexpected gets shared for free, remembered for months, and usually costs less than one week of ad spend.
I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to collecting unexpected growth ideas that worked. Every time I see a startup do something clever, it goes into my list. And most of the time, I dig deeper or even talk to the team behind it: How did they do it? How could I make it even better?
After four years of doing this, here are my 64 favorite creative growth tactics, organized by what you’re trying to do:
I want to generate buzz (without paid ads/influencers)
I want my launch to make noise
I want other people to spread the word for me
I want more leads and conversions
I want to outsmart my competitors
I want customers to pay more (and be happy