Generally, here’s when to focus on each component:

1. When you’re just starting out, focus your energy on Kickstarts, and maybe a few Turbo boosts, until your Growth engine begins to drive the majority of your growth. Here’s a template to help you plan your GTM.
2. Once you have a working Growth engine, invest in Lubricants to help it run more efficiently**,** and the occasional Turbo boost to boost growth.
3. Once you’re at a meaningful scale, explore one or two Mid-stage accelerants.
4. Before your primary engine asymptotes, experiment with and kickstart an additional Growth engine, while continuing to Lubricate your existing growth engine(s).
5. [Future posts] To continue growing, layer on an additional business unit, expand to new segments (e.g. enterprise), and grow within existing accounts (e.g. increase NRR).

There’s really only four categories of growth engines: virality, SEO, paid ads, and sales

Why so few ways to grow? Think about it. How many ways do you find out about most new products? Either you see an advertisement (i.e. paid growth), you find it while searching online (i.e. SEO), someone reaches out and pitches you on it (i.e. sales), or a friend tells you about it and/or you see it shared on social media (i.e. virality).

Even more interestingly, the majority of startups grow primarily through just one of these engines. For example, nearly 100% of Tinder’s growth came through word of mouth (WOM), Calm’s through paid growth, and Thumbtack’s through SEO. This is true for nearly every startup out there, especially at first.

A common pitfall of early-stage startups is trying to invest in too many engines at once and not nail any. At scale, in order to win a market, you have to become world-class at your primary growth engine. To quote Dan Hockenmaier and myself from a post on this topic:

“Once you get to even moderate scale, each of these engines becomes highly competitive.

In the case of paid marketing and SEO, you are competing for a customer’s attention. Paid marketing becomes a business-model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that they can bid more than anyone else for that attention), and SEO becomes a ranking-algorithm competition (who can capitalize on their content in such a way that ‘deciders’ like Google want to continue to send traffic their way).”

Over time, most companies layer on an additional engine (usually paid growth, sometimes SEO) in order to continue to grow while their initial growth engine plateaus ([learn about S-curves](https://www.rocketsource.co/blog/s-curve-of-business/#:~:text=Once you get past the,tapering off as growth slows.) and adding layers to your cake). But timing those investments correctly is critical, and that initial engine normally continues to drive the majority of your growth.

Note, even though there are a limited set of strategies, there are infinite ways to be creative about how you execute each of them, e.g. Netflix infiltrating DVD forums, Hipcamp setting up tables outside REIs, Airbnb selling cereal.

Your job as a founder looking to grow your product is to (1) creatively execute two to three kickstarting tactics and (2) become world-class at one primary growth engine. That’s essentially your high-level GTM strategy. Here’s a link to the worksheet we’ve been using throughout this series to help you plan your GTM.

Here’s an overview of the growth engines behind today’s biggest consumer apps (second column):

Here are the primary growth engines of today’s biggest B2B products (second column)—essentially it’s always sales, though some products have a product-led (aka self-service) element: