Weekly calls, step-by-step docs, and daily feedback on all your work. Execute like a seasoned marketer without an expensive senior hire.
How the fastest-growing startups get users:
Need users?You've probably tried...
Approach 1:Hacking it yourselfApproach 2:Sourcing a senior hireApproach 3:Hiring an agency or contractor
Approach 1: Hacking it yourself
You start by sending your product to friends, communities, old coworkers, and anybody you think would be a good user. You might get an early bump from press or a Product Hunt launch.
But it peters out quickly. Your network only has so many people.
Now, you need to figure out how to consistently grow — so you can raise your next round, hit profitability, or plain just reach more people.
So you turn to the internet (and maybe a few books). There's no shortage of material. But blog posts and video courses have a habit of being too generic and out-of-date. The material isn't tailored to your startup.
Most importantly, they lack hands-on feedback.
Deliberate practice lies at the core of good execution.
Many startups think they've followed the right instructions, but we find crucial gaps when we review their work. For example, we've seen people waste thousands of dollars targeting people "interested in" instead of "in" their ideal countries. We've seen them write off cold email when their emails got flagged as spam and never reached an inbox.
There are hundreds of little details like this, and they make a big difference.
It's no one's fault. You don't know what you don't know. But you need feedback from experts to learn properly.
We've built feedback into the core of our business.
We pattern-match from our experience growing hundreds of startups to give you exactly what you need the moment you need it. Quickly learn when to break rules and ignore traditional advice.
Pre-recorded courses and blog posts can't do this:
Approach 2: Sourcing a senior hire
This can work, but it's a big financial risk. Salaries and bonuses will run you well over $200K/year.
Just ask Glassdoor.
Good senior hires are hard to poach. Why would they leave a company they’re successfully growing?
Plus there's a big risk they don't work out. We see ~30% of senior growth hires stick around beyond 6 months.
It’s hard to vet their skills if you don’t have a growth background. For example:
- Can they MVP a referral program without involving the engineering team...and prioritize it against a promising content strategy?
- Do they tactically know how to run & optimize social ads?
- Where in the funnel should they be A/B testing?
- Can they write influencer outreach emails that actually convert?
Beyond that, many senior hires tend to specialize in one channel. If that channel doesn’t work, you’re in trouble. They don’t like to roll up their sleeves to run experiments; they outsource the real work to agencies and junior hires.
It all gets expensive quickly.
Approach 3: Hiring an agency or contractor
This is the right approach if you’ve validated a channel and want to scale it. Agencies are good at the technical parts of channels, like SEO site structure and optimizing ad algorithms.
But they can't understand your users as deeply as you do.
This means they tend to write poor copy and target the wrong audiences. You need to micromanage them to nail the details.
Otherwise, you risk writing off a perfectly good channel prematurely.
For example, one of our clients hired an SEO agency. Their writing was so bad, our client had to remove all the content from their site — after wasting six months and $50K. Not a good return on investment.
The proposal looked great, though.
Good agencies charge at least $15K/month. Many charge a percentage of ad spend, so they're incentivized to spend time on the clients that spend the most. If you're still figuring out what works, that's not you.
Bad agencies charge a fraction of that. They'll do a great sales call, then delegate to overworked junior hires who are trained to do the bare minimum.
You think you’re getting a deal when you sign up, but you eventually find yourself tens of thousands in the red — with work so bad you can’t run it.
Here's a real Slack about a client's PPC contractor:
Plus, agencies are built to specialize in one thing. They have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail, so they won't find the holistic strategy that fits you best.
If you're an early-stage startup, you need to make small bets to test what to spend money on in the first place.
With a proper setup, you don't have to spend more than $5-10K to validate a channel. Not per month. Total.
Erik Torenberg
Co-founder of On Deck
"We recommend Got Users to all of our companies. They love it."
Why do we exist?
Asher, our founder, used to run an agency focused on paid channels.
Clients loved their work. But on calls, he'd learn that clients grew in surprising ways his agency didn't help with.
Beyond that, his agency would spend hours brainstorming clever A/B tests and beautifully-designed flows, but these ideas flopped compared to half-baked ones that clients pitched.
He realized something.
The startups that successfully cracked growth would constantly learn from users and build the research into their process. Founders and early hires naturally understood the customer better, so they had better ideas.
They just lacked the technical skills to launch them correctly.
So he changed his approach and started training people instead.
While working with hundreds of startups and helping them grow to tens of millions in revenue, he developed a framework that consistently helps companies get users. It revolves around five simple pillars.
The five pillars of growth
We follow the same process with every startup:
U
Talk with Users
S
Turn the learnings into a Strategy
E
Brainstorm Experiments within that strategy
R
Reflect on those experiments to...
S
Scale that strategy
We call this USERS (Users, Strategy, Experiments, Reflections, Scale) for short.
When we explain this process, people seem to get it.
They think they’re doing it right when they aren’t.
That’s their fatal mistake.
The WHAT is simple. The HOW is hard.
Knowing you should talk to users is easy. Writing an outreach email, asking the right questions, and flagging misleading answers is hard.
Knowing you need a growth strategy is easy. Creating one that compounds, fits your product, and builds on your customer is hard.
Copywriting is hard. Ad channels are hard. Conversion tracking is hard. Intent-based targeting is hard. Data analysis is hard.
So...
How do you learn growth?
You can't become dangerous by reading a blog post.
You need examples, step-by-step instructions, and feedback to properly execute.
You need mentors who have done it before.
You need experts who can pattern-match across startups.
You need tacticians who aren’t just good at growth but at teaching.
You need to understand how your experiments fit into your overall strategy.
You need to be a generalist.
You need real reps.
...That’s where we come in.
We built this program because we found that, with the proper time investment, founders and early hires can find a scalable way to grow in as little as a couple of months.
Under our guidance, companies have become profitable, raised their next round of funding, and found compounding wins they could put on autopilot.
They leave confident.
Why?
They trust they’ll prioritize the right experiments. They know they can 80/20 new ideas. They can intelligently accumulate learnings and rule out what doesn’t work.
They can call BS on bad agencies and vet potential hires.
And they can scale.
Who is a fit?
Early teams...
If you're not growing, team members have extra capacity. Put them to work getting users.
We've trained everyone from founders to bizops to engineers to social media coordinators.
Specific backgrounds matter less than caring deeply about your mission and user.
The rest can be taught.
...at startups with some traction...
Don't pour gas where there's no fire.
You need at least a few users who love you and stick around. They're the building blocks for your strategy.
5-10 users are enough to work with.
If you have fewer, we'll probably turn you away. You're better off doing things that don't scale and improving your product.
...who can spend at least 20 hours/week on growth.
This is not an online course. It's a daily, immersive bootcamp built into your workday.
It's meant to find you real wins quickly, unlike traditional "corporate training" or "learning and development" you can half-ass. Getting users takes work.
We're available 9am-12pm and 1pm-5pm (US/Pacific time) to unstick you and help you strategize. Think of us as a head of growth working with your team.
How we work
Weekly mentor calls
- Join a one hour call with a senior growth expert.
- Screen-share while you dive into analytics, optimize ads, debug tracking code, or get eyes on anything else you need.
- Run mock user interviews and sales calls.
- Sanity-check your strategy, share learnings, and prioritize experiments.
Detailed expert feedback
- We live in a private Slack channel with you. Ask questions about any task and get an answer in minutes.
- Get personalized feedback on every experiment with video teardowns, collaborative comments, and design redlines.
- Line-by-line feedback on outreach copy, ads, landing pages, onboarding flows, and more.
Step-by-step playbooks
- 65+ step-by-step projects, templates, and video walk-throughs.
- Tactical instructions for everything from running ads to fixing your onboarding flow.
- Constantly updated with learnings from clients and experts in our community.
- Want a taste? Read through our intro docs and user interview training.
Unfair technical advantages
- We keep a software engineer on staff to help with simple scraping, data, and coding tasks.
- We debug technical problems with conversion tracking and attribution in as little as a few minutes. Not weeks.
- Access proprietary tools we’ve built to help with ad optimization, copywriting, UTM attribution, and more.
Our founder
Asher King-Abramson
Before starting Got Users, Asher cofounded Bell Curve and Demand Curve (YC S19), a growth agency and training program trusted by thousands of startups around Silicon Valley.
Asher has taught growth at Y Combinator, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Google, and has helped hundreds of startups find customers.
Pricing: $6,000/month
Month-to-month. No minimums.
Frequently asked questions
Why should I trust your expertise?
The easiest way to prove this is to read our free intro docsfree intro docsget on a call with us.
But if you want the full pitch...our team has helped hundreds of startups make tens of millions in revenue, bootstrap themselves to profitability, and raise multiple rounds of funding — directly crediting us as a reason.
Asher, our founder, formerly founded Demand Curve (YC S19) and has taught growth at Y Combinator, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Google.
What's the time commitment? How long is the bootcamp?
Our most successful clients dedicate at least 20 hours of their week to growth. You can spend less time, but it’ll take longer for you to find wins if you do.
Most clients stay in the bootcamp for 1-3 months.
What does the bootcamp look like week-to-week?
Here’s what mentees generally work on the first few weeks:
Week 1: You’ll get onboarded into Notion and Slack, walk through our high-level growth process, pick a North Star Metric, start tracking key funnel data, learn how to prioritize a backlog, and begin training for user interviews.
Week 2: You’ll start to deliver persona docs and value props (see here), present ideas for growth loops (more info here), and brainstorm your first experiments.
Week 3+: You’ll run experiments with our growth playbooks and iterate based on the results of the first couple weeks.
If you want even more details, check out the doc we use to onboard mentees. Look at the bottom, in particular. (Some of the links won’t work until you’re in the program.)
I'm a founder. Should I go through the program or should my employees?
It depends on how much time you can commit. We expect clients to dedicate at least 20 hours per week to growth, or they won't see good results.
If you're a founder with that kind of time, you're a fit. Otherwise, find an early employee you trust and split the work with them. Anyone who works with users (doing customer support, sales calls, getting product feedback, etc.) has an intuitive sense of what users want. This easily snowballs into growth work.
We've trained everyone from operations associates to social media coordinators and engineers. You don’t have to make a new hire. Instead, you can make sure every employee is focused on high ROI work.
I’m not in a US time zone, can I still take the bootcamp?
We schedule our strategy sessions and answer questions from 9am-12pm and 1pm-5pm (Pacific time) on weekdays.
We're also away on federal US holidays and during the final week of every year.
If you’re willing to get your questions answered during those hours, it won’t be a problem. Otherwise, you may not be a good fit.
What topics do you cover? What does a playbook look like?
Check out an incomplete list of the topics we teach and an example playbook on user interviews.
If our playbooks don't cover a certain topic, we'll craft it with you in Slack on-the-fly.
If I want to test paid ad channels, how much should I budget beyond the cost of Got Users?
For most ad channels, we recommend setting aside a test budget of $3,000-5,000 per channel to get enough data.
You can test with less, but you risk ruling out a channel that actually may work.
Can multiple team members go through the program?
Yes!
We recommend putting one person fully in charge of the metrics, backlog, and user interviews (the "growth manager") — they're ultimately responsible for your growth. If you want to run many experiments at once (paid ads, cold outreach, partnership outreach, etc.), you can divide them among team members and we'll give them feedback in parallel.