Craig's GrowthLed Newsletter

5 key flows you need for amazing lifecycle marketing

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:32:41 GMT

Hi everyone,

There are a few critical lifecycle marketing flows for email & SMS that you should consider adding to your marketing mix. While customer acquisition is critical, but once you reach early stages of product market fit, it’s likely much of your growth will come from doing more with who you acquire. This is where lifecycle marketing comes into p…

Importance of retention in startup growth

Craig Zingerline — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 19:32:16 GMT

What's more important to you? Acquisition or retention?

Probably depends on stage - most early stage startups are way more focused on customer acquisition while most later stage companies obsess over retention.

While both are super important, strong retention enables much more sustainable growth.

Now - if you have no customers or users, retention doesn’t …

What I've learned after a month of vibe coding

Craig Zingerline — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:28:52 GMT

Hi Everyone,

It’s been almost a month since I started working with various “vibe coding” products to use AI to build applications. I’ve built three products so far ranging from straightforward and easy to fairly complex. As I mentioned in my last post, I believe we’re about to see an explosion of entrepreneurship as the tooling and process to build produ…

We are seeing an explosion of entrepreneurship. Start thinking about distribution now.

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:16:44 GMT

We're about to see an explosion of entrepreneurship. Scratch that…we already are!

And it’s great to see.

With new rapid development apps popping up and enabling non technical founders to go from idea to li…

ICP Positioning and Messaging for founders

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:13:11 GMT

Acquiring customers is hard, but we often make it overly complex. It doesn't have to be.

I’m not going to tell you that you can skip the hard parts of growing your business, but if you’re having trouble acquiring customers, you may be operating with too much complexity - or lack of clarity - at the top of your funnel, starting with how you position your…

PSA to service providers, consultants, and agency owners.

Craig Zingerline — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:41:15 GMT

This email is based on my recent LinkedIn post. Feel free to read it and comment on it here.

PSA to service providers, consultants, and agency owners.

If you meet a new potential client and your spidey sense goes off - maybe the person trashed their last contractor, maybe they are overly aggressive with metrics, or they just don't seem...nice...

And especi…

Mind the gaps

Craig Zingerline — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:56:27 GMT

Sometimes your biggest growth levers are actually quite simple to execute on - if you can find them!

I recently worked with a company who did an amazing job at onboarding new customers, driving very strong retention off of a great product.

From market validation to traction: how to gain early stage startup success

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:31:57 GMT

Introduction

Navigating the early stages of a startup can be exhilarating yet daunting. Every decision and strategy can significantly impact your business's trajectory. The focus early on needs to be on market and customer validation, but so many founders try to skip this step of company building and move right into building products. In this post, I exp…

Something new - my $1000 course, FREE

Craig Zingerline — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 01:13:24 GMT

For the past 10+ years I’ve been helping early to mid stage companies grow. For the earliest stage companies, the challenge is almost always trying to reach product market fit.

For slightly later stage companies, the challenge is usually around honing in on repeatable growth loops that enable more rapid, ultimately more efficient startup growth.

How constraints impact revenue

Craig Zingerline — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:19:52 GMT

Constraints.

In life and in products, they can be great.

Have kids?

Then you know how important it is to build in some level of constraints so that your kids don't become monsters. If I let my kids do anythi…

How to build a Startup Growth Model – an introduction to growth modeling for startups

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:02:28 GMT

Featured in Lenny’s Newsletter

Before we begin, I’m a huge fan of what has built with his amazing and in depth content. A few years back I was happily surprised when I was featured in his article talking about SaaS growth metrics and tracking:

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-important-bottom-up-saas-69d

Let's be more real

Craig Zingerline — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:15:09 GMT

Hello again! Hope you all had a great (long) weekend, and that you got some down time in during the last couple weeks of summer. For many, I’m sure you’ve been working away, looking to get ahead of what will likely be a busy fall.

In today’s newsletter, I want to point out a theme that I keep seeing over and over and over again especially on social chan…

Quick updates & I'm on Intro

Craig Zingerline — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 19:04:05 GMT

Hey there, hope you are doing well! Sorry it’s been a minute….or 4 months to be more specific. A lot has been going on behind the scenes in a short amount of time. Here’s the TL;DR:

I started doing a lot of work with Runzy. We’ve purchased a few companies and are rolling them up into one product with three components: Media company, Race registration pla…

The case for not building a product

Craig Zingerline — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:50:12 GMT

This week I talked a founding team out of hiring an engineer and building a product, and instead talked them into 3 more months of manual DIY work to service the clients they are getting.

It's not because their idea was bad, it was because they were way too early to spend their limited cash on product development, when they could instead just focus on ha…

Get into the weeds

Craig Zingerline — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 14:53:22 GMT

Almost every great founder I know is deeply rooted in the minutiae of day to day work for a very, very long time after starting their companies.

Normally they don’t get out of the minutiae until they have found real product market fit or beyond. I’m talking about the stage most startups never get to, where you feel like you’re being pulled along and the …

Why understanding customer intent is key

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:38:48 GMT

If you are a founder reading this, you’re probably focused on finding customers.

I ran a poll at the end of 2023. I simply asked what the main focus for early 2024 would be. Here are the results:

So, just about everyone is interested in finding more customers.

But how do you actually go about doing that? Is it easier said than done?

Unfortunately, much of w…

How to build amazing landing pages

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 16:32:44 GMT

In a recent talk, I ran through a highly tactical set of lessons on building highly effective landing pages. The response was so positive that I figured I’d share the key points with you here. Namely, I’m digging into:

What is a landing page & when are they used?
What makes a great landing page?

Let’s dig in!

What is a landing page & when are they used?

Fi…

The real vs pseudo entrepreneur

Craig Zingerline — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 19:32:19 GMT

A couple days ago I was scrolling through various social platforms, looking for something meaty around company building to learn from. I’m particularly interested in deeper concepts around customer discovery right now, so thought I’d find an interesting article or video explaining in detail how other companies at scale are doing this for new product dev…

Why do so many startups fail?

Craig Zingerline — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 20:14:52 GMT

Running a business of any kind is damn hard. Running a startup comes with additional pressure, as the expectation of a most startups is that you eventually sell it to a larger company, get to an IPO, or otherwise “exit” the business and pay back the investors you likely borrowed money from to get it off the ground. Or, if you didn’t raise capital you li…

Overcoming Skill Gap Anxiety & Finding Your Superpower

Craig Zingerline — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:30:25 GMT

A few years ago I worried a lot that as a multi-time founder, I was losing my "core" skills. As a mid-career professional, I started to feel lost - not really knowing what I was actually good at.

I kept coming across other growth people who: