Growth Strategy Lab

The Thesis

Growth Strategy Lab started as a blog on growth tactics, but the real thesis behind it was narrower and more useful than “growth tips”: most early-stage founders either have no money to spend on growth, or they’ve just raised a first round and are about to burn a chunk of it on the wrong things. I wanted to build a B2B learning resource that taught founders how to grow with almost no budget, and — for the ones who did raise — how to spend that money on marketing that actually compounds instead of buying vanity numbers.

What I Built

A standalone site and newsletter, run alongside my early Substack writing, publishing frameworks and behavioral-science-backed growth tactics aimed specifically at solo founders and small teams — the case for treating growth as an experimentation problem once a product has real users, not a follower-count or impressions problem.

What Happened

I started it as a second, separate property, and over time the audience and the underlying philosophy turned out to overlap almost entirely with what I was already writing elsewhere. Running two properties with the same thesis meant duplicating effort and splitting a small audience across two domains instead of building one. I eventually consolidated: the writing, the newsletter, and the philosophy all moved into what’s now Lean Experiments and atticusli.com, under one name instead of several.

What I Learned

A clear teaching philosophy compounds faster concentrated in one place than split across domains.

• Check audience overlap before launching an adjacent site or newsletter — not a year later.
• Two properties with the same underlying thesis end up competing with each other for the same reader’s attention.
• Consolidating isn’t a loss — the writing and the audience just move to one home instead of several.