Early stage growth course icon

Early stage growth Course

Advanced
104 lessons total
Self-paced learning
Interactive content
Last updated: Sept 2025

Discover how to move beyond your first customers, keep them engaged, and set the foundation for sustainable growth.

What you'll learn

  • Design features people want to share
  • Show believable proof that reduces risk
  • Turn content into a growth engine
  • Activate word-of-mouth and referrals
  • Get SEO basics right quickly
  • Test paid only when ready

Who this is for

  • Founders with early traction
  • PMs owning growth KPIs
  • Indie hackers past v1
  • Teams seeking sustainable growth

Course Modules

Understand growth at early stage module icon

1. Understand growth at early stage

16 lessons

Growth at early stage doesn't follow playbooks, it's messy, fast, and manual. This module helps you understand how traction really works when you're small. You'll learn how to avoid common traps (like chasing vanity metrics), how to spot signals that matter, and how to build your first tiny growth loops. The goal is to give you clarity and confidence before you start experimenting with more structured channels.

Make your product shareable module icon

2. Make your product shareable

14 lessons

Products grow faster when users naturally want to talk about them. In this module, you'll learn how to design shareable moments inside your product, from small wins to public outputs, and how to make sharing frictionless, rewarding, and authentic. You'll explore tactics used by successful builders to turn every user into a distribution channel.

Leverage social proof and public signals module icon

3. Leverage social proof and public signals

12 lessons

People trust what others already use, praise, or share. In this module, you'll learn how to turn early traction, user feedback, and real usage into trust-building signals that attract more users. From testimonials and public replies to changelogs and transparent roadmaps, you'll learn how to use what you already have, even if small, to show credibility and momentum.

Use content as a growth engine module icon

4. Use content as a growth engine

15 lessons

Content is a powerful, compounding channel that helps you attract the right users without paying for attention. In this module, you'll learn how to create helpful content that solves real problems, how to test what works before you invest too much, and how to distribute it effectively across platforms. You'll also learn how to use AI tools, user questions, and even your product work to generate content consistently, without burning out.

Activate word of mouth and referrals module icon

5. Activate word of mouth and referrals

14 lessons

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful and cheapest growth drivers. But it doesn't happen by accident. In this module, you'll learn how to trigger organic sharing, create manual referral loops, reward the right behaviour, and scale what already works. You'll start from first principles (what makes people share), and end with practical tools, templates, and systems to turn users into amplifiers.

SEO and discoverability basics module icon

6. SEO and discoverability basics

15 lessons

Getting found through Google (or other search engines) is one of the most scalable and cost-effective growth channels, but most builders ignore it because it feels slow or complex. This module teaches you how to make your product, content, or tools discoverable with just enough SEO. You'll learn how to choose the right keywords, set up programmatic content, write for search without sounding robotic, and measure what's working, all with modern tools and no fluff.

Paid growth (only if ready) module icon

7. Paid growth (only if ready)

Coming soon

Ads can be a powerful way to test messages and acquire users, but only if you're ready. This module shows how to approach paid growth with discipline and small budgets. You'll learn how to choose the right channel, write effective ads, build high-converting pages, and track real metrics. No fluff, no gambling, just focused experiments that help you learn and grow.

Track and improve growth experiments module icon

8. Track and improve growth experiments

14 lessons

Growth isn't a one-time tactic, it's a repeatable process. This module teaches how to run lightweight growth experiments, track what matters, and make smarter decisions over time. You'll learn how to define your own metrics, spot useful signals, run small tests, and build a habit of improvement, even with limited traffic or tools.

What you'll walk away with

  • A prioritized growth roadmap
  • A simple growth metrics dashboard
  • Evidence on what to scale vs stop

Frequently asked questions

How long to see results?

Weeks, not months, if you run focused experiments.

Do I need a big budget?

No. Most of this can be done scrappily.

What students say about this course

Real feedback from product professionals who took the Early stage growth course

"This course helped me 3x our user growth in 6 months. The growth loops framework is pure gold - I use it for every feature now."

Emma D.
Growth PM

"I went from 100 to 10,000 users using these strategies. The content marketing approach especially worked wonders for us."

Chris T.
Founder

"The referral system we built using this course generates 40% of our new users. The frameworks are battle-tested and work."

Nina P.
Product Lead
Portrait of Andrea Mezzadra, course instructor

Meet your instructor

Andrea Mezzadra

Product Director | MBA

Ex Product Director turned Independent Product Creator.

Further reading

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