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All startups are created in chaos, but the beauty is in wrangling that chaos. When there’s organized chaos and a method to the madness, that’s when we create progress. While there’s a ton of content around WHAT to measure, there isn’t enough on HOW. That’s why the first time I saw Libby Weissman’s growth sprints, I was blown away by the structure of it.

Libby is a Fractional CMO and a brilliant B2C Marketer, bringing together her experience leading the Caviar Marketing team through the DoorDash acquisition & COVID pandemic, building Marketing from scratch at Realm (a seed-stage renovation marketplace) to acquire the first 50k customers, and supporting 15+ clients in her consulting practice over the past three years.

She’s also a featured guest on my upcoming podcast and an all-around kind person. Below, she shares the framework she uses to help founders find an audience for their product and build a repeatable customer acquisition playbook.

Libby’s Growth Sprints (✏️ to Libby)

For B2C startups still figuring out their Marketing playbook—what I call discovery Marketing — running a structured experimentation process is an absolute must. (Emphasis on “structured” here: this is what helps you avoid throwing a lot of things at the wall and not getting any closer to the answer.)

Just as product, design, and engineering teams work in “sprints” to tackle key customer problems, Marketing and cross-functional growth pods can run “growth sprints” to test customer hypotheses and accelerate learning.

This process has helped me:

• Identify a more compelling positioning for a food subscription company, dropping cost per add-to-cart from $60 to $15.

• Unlock the right ad hooks and patient onboarding experience for a telehealth business, decreasing new patient CAC from > $3,000 to < $500.

• Uncover a highly motivated customer segment for a functional medicine provider, reducing cost per lead from $5 to $1.50.

How do the growth sprints work?

Designed to help us learn faster, Growth Sprints are a monthly process of running Marketing experiments against customer hypotheses.

One question I often get from those new to discovery Marketing is: “Why focus on learning? Shouldn’t we be focused on results?”

The answer is simple: faster learning is the fastest way to better results. I always return to my favorite analogy from Reforge: growth is a game of Battleship.

• On one side of the board are us marketers, making guesses about what our customers want and placing pegs to track what we’ve learned.

• On the other side are our customers and the secret roadmap to building a profit-generating, long-lasting business.

• We focus on learning because as we understand more about how customers react to our Marketing, we get more thoughtful about where to place our next pin.

• Ultimately, this leads us to better results—or, in the case of Battleship, sinking our opponent’s boat.

There are 3 key phases to my Growth Sprints process:

1. Establish Customer Hypotheses: Anchor your experiments in customer problems, not Marketing ideas.

2. Run Experiments: Test your hypotheses with clear, measurable experiments.

3. Extract Learnings: Analyze results and refine your next steps based on what you uncover.

Establishing customer hypotheses

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