u/Fit-Fill5587

Same disaster, three different companies. Growth automation sprawls. Someone builds a clever activation sequence, ships it, then leaves. Six months later nobody knows what it does or why it exists. You're scared to touch it. So you build around it. Then that person leaves too.

The entire PLG strategy becomes archaeology.

We finally started treating growth like code. Every experiment in a repo. Every trigger documented. Every change reviewed. Sounds obsessive until the third time a new hire asks wait, why do churned users get a win-back email before they've even finished onboarding? and you can just, show them the commit from 14 months ago where someone thought it was clever at 11pm.

Version control won't make your growth strategy smart. But it will stop it from getting dumber every time someone quits.

Spent three months convinced the problem was positioning. Rewrote the landing page twice. Hired a copywriter. Then ran a static analysis on my codebase looking for something unrelated and found a retry logic bug that silently failed onboarding for 23% of signups.

Not noisily. Silently. They just never got set up and left thinking the product didn't work. It didn't work. For them. Because of me.

Ran my entire growth operation from the terminal for two years. Scripts for everything. Curl requests to APIs. Awk-ing through CSV exports like some kind of feral data analyst. Felt incredibly productive.

Zero collaborators. Zero handoffs. Zero people who could touch it when I got sick for a week.

The command line is a single point of failure wearing a productivity costume. Everything that made it mine made it fragile. Growth that lives in your shell history: a hostage situation.

The tools that impress other engineers are usually the ones that quietly isolate you from everyone else.

Connected Skene.AI to our Supabase project and it generated our entire growth plan in minutes.

My first reaction was defensive. My second reaction was that it was more accurate than the deck we spent three weeks building.

Turns out when you remove the politics and the ego, the data just says what it says.

Paid for six SaaS tools before realizing four of them had free alternatives that were honestly better. The expensive ones just had nicer landing pages.

Turns out I never once questioned the onboarding. I just kept adding features, assuming users weren't sticking because the tool wasn't good enough yet.

Finally did five user interviews. Every single person got stuck at step three, which asked them to set up their organization hierarchy. These were solopreneurs. Consultants. One person shops. They didn't have a hierarchy. They had a to-do list and a headache.

I built that onboarding by reverse-engineering tools I admired, and every tool I admired was enterprise. So I accidentally made my users feel like they'd wandered into the wrong building. The fix took two days. Removing the org setup step, cutting from seven questions to two, activation went from 12% to 31% in three weeks.

The product was fine the whole time. I just built the front door for someone who wasn't coming.

Funded startups spend 40% of their budget making their product look trustworthy. Open source gives you that trust for free but only if your code is actually good.
That's the catch they don't mention. It's a filter, not a shortcut. Passed through it slowly and painfully.