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Elena's Growth Scoop

elenaverna.com

A must-have resource for anyone in the growth, marketing, or product space. Click to read Elena's Growth Scoop, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Tech news / industryEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’23’24’25’26
Posts
162 from 24 Feb 2023 to 27 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (38 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.elenaverna.com/feed

2026 31

  1. Here is what women want from AI.
  2. I'm not doing 996.
  3. What on earth is going on with AI pricing and packaging?
  4. How to survive a double life as an operator-creator
  5. What it’s like to work at an AI-native company
  6. Your company needs a pricing constitution.
  7. Congrats, your sales problems in PLG are completely unoriginal
  8. How to give away free product and make money doing it
  9. Report: What people *really* think about IC work.
  10. So, you want to be a content creator?
  11. Please stop the AI Confidence Theater
  12. The AI era requires a different kind of experimentation.
  13. The Mom-and-Pop SaaS era has arrived
  14. Your AI strategy has a trust problem, not a tooling problem
  15. How I think about hiring
  16. Your Job Is Changing Faster Than You Think
  17. IC work is the new career flex
  18. The biggest takeaway from my Stripe Sessions talk
  19. Who's got time for Product Marketing?
  20. Your product has a new user. It’s not human.
  21. Confessions of a Millennial in Tech
  22. How I built a new composite qualitative metric - The Lovable Score
  23. 5 of my favorite new retention techniques that you may not have tried
  24. Revenue addiction kills companies.
  25. The Minimum Lovable Product Era
  26. There’s a short window to get radically ahead by going AI-native. You need to act now.
  27. We stopped forcing the subscription model on our users. Here is what happened.
  28. Death to Lead Magnets! All Hail Satellite Apps.
  29. It’s time to start your content creator era
  30. Why every exec should be vibecoding
  31. Growth Is Now a Trust Problem

2025 41

  1. Growth lessons behind Lovable’s $6.6B valuation (shared on Lenny’s podcast!)
  2. Why AI doesn’t mean the end of Freemium
  3. Building In Public is scary. Do it anyway.
  4. The Product-Market Fit Treadmill: Why every AI company is sprinting just to stay in place
  5. My beef with AI credit pricing
  6. 6 months at Lovable and why I had to throw out most of my playbook
  7. Brand… a Product job now?
  8. Marketing attribution is a LIE.
  9. I’m worried about women in tech.
  10. 11 hard truths about working in growth
  11. 9 ways growth is different in AI companies
  12. A solopreneur’s guide to pricing yourself
  13. I want to eliminate my own job
  14. Here is how I approach starting a new job
  15. The rise of the AI-native employee
  16. Retention: The situationship of SaaS
  17. Why AI startups are blowing past revenue milestones that old-school SaaS could only fantasize about.
  18. AI is kicking off the next revolution of B2B PLG
  19. I’ve joined Lovable to lead growth 🚀
  20. How to sequence your growth squads
  21. 10 pricing and packaging optimizations you should prioritize, like yesterday.
  22. So you want to price your AI features…
  23. You should probably form a monetization council.
  24. The future of full-time employment is changing.
  25. Offensive vs. defensive data analysis
  26. Subscription churn metrics and benchmarks for operators.
  27. Growth at what cost? Balancing user experience and revenue
  28. Five PLG tactics every sales-led company should do
  29. Good and bad growth job descriptions
  30. Company blogs are no longer worth the investment
  31. AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving - let's look at the data
  32. Examples of proven sales plays to create a sales pipeline on top of self-serve usage
  33. How to build brand awareness through product impressions, not marketing
  34. Your B2B product-led motion is more of a data problem than a product problem
  35. The types of companies you can work for and what they do for your career
  36. Elena's Growth JOBS Scoop: 8 for January 2025
  37. When should you invest in paid marketing?
  38. My latest podcast with Lenny: 10 Growth Tactics and Strategies That Don’t Work.
  39. Your Career is a Startup: Building Sustainable Growth, One Stage at a Time
  40. The price of your product is wrong.
  41. Product/Growth/Marketing memes? Yes, please.

2024 47

  1. A message for Growth team naysayers.
  2. Elena's Growth JOBS Scoop: 7 for December 2024
  3. Don’t reinvent user profiling during onboarding. This is what it should look like.
  4. Your marketing website is a product too
  5. Elena's Growth JOBS Scoop: 9 for November 2024
  6. If you are looking to grow your career, have this conversation in your next 1-1 with your manager.
  7. Hey, Growth teams: Here's how to make friends with your designers.
  8. You don't need to build a personal brand.
  9. A Deadly Gravitational Pull in PLG B2B: Individual-Centric Experiences
  10. My 9 Favorite Growth Frameworks
  11. Growth Teams should stay in a Founder Mode.
  12. The DNA of a Great Pricing Page
  13. How to get started with User-Generated Content
  14. The Future of SEO is User-Generated Content
  15. Thoughts on Work-Life Balance
  16. Should your new feature be free or paid?
  17. Six Popular Growth Tactics … That Don’t Actually Work
  18. Growth Product Org Charts: From the First Growth Squad to a Scaled Team
  19. Growth teams must learn to play well with other teams... or else.
  20. You don’t have to be a manager.
  21. Elena’s 2024 B2B Product-Led Sales Guide
  22. Why More Companies Should Embrace Interim Leaders
  23. Improve Growth Mindset in your company with a weekly Experiment Review meeting.
  24. How I got into Growth
  25. How to boost team expansion: 9 tactics.
  26. 3 mistakes when setting up B2B referrals—and how to avoid them.
  27. Two ways to visualize the importance of churn & expansion.
  28. My favorite definitions of Growth
  29. My Favorite Meeting: The Weekly Metrics Review
  30. How to improve your voluntary churn
  31. Stop optimizing for a CAC:LTV ratio of 1:3
  32. Why I’m Unquitting Full-Time Roles
  33. Growth at Dropbox
  34. Create Growth Turbo Boosts: User Conferences
  35. Reverse Trials: Examples
  36. What’s Your Monetization Color?
  37. B2B Growth, IRL: How to do event marketing that actually makes a difference.
  38. A New Framework: The Four W’s of Product-Led Sales
  39. The Trap of Tying Your Identity to Your Job Title.
  40. Try this onboarding email series strategy… it actually works!
  41. The biggest mistake with product-led sales: hiring a sales team too soon.
  42. B2B Product-Led Growth Non-Negotiable: TEAM Network Effects
  43. You are too aggressive. You should smile more.
  44. There's a whole lot of ugly out there when it comes to growth teams.
  45. Profiling: The onboarding step that transforms your growth efforts
  46. Why, When, and How to add Sales to your Product-Led Growth motion.
  47. How to land an interim leadership role… if you’re not Elena.

2023 43

  1. Ten of the Funniest Growth Memes
  2. Unpacking what it means to be an interim leader.
  3. My favorite go-to growth tactics.
  4. The Power Shift: Mastering Reverse Interviews and Interim Roles
  5. Why I Quit Full-Time Roles
  6. How To Find Your Next Big Marketing Idea
  7. The dire state of B2B marketing attribution
  8. 6 red flags when interviewing for a growth role
  9. 3 excuses enterprise sales-led companies make when their self-serve motion fails...🙄
  10. Do you have career blues?
  11. Failing, FTW!: Why you should fail 50% of your experiments
  12. I bet you are doing product activation all wrong.
  13. Is your international growth strategy a hot mess?
  14. My substack journey: 0-$30K in ARR in six months
  15. Your path to a leadership role doesn’t start with you.
  16. Too Good to Be True?: Why B2B's Should Offer a Startup Discount Program
  17. To PLG or not PLG?
  18. What The Freemium!?
  19. Beyond creativity, the three required variables of a good B2B brand marketing campaign.
  20. Is B2C and B2B Growth... the same?
  21. The Seven Deadly Sins of MQL Stuffing.
  22. Analytics Team: Strategic Partner or Service Org?
  23. How to Build a Growth Engineering Team That WINS.
  24. The secret sauce behind Word of Mouth growth loop.
  25. The dark side of the leadership.
  26. The path to your first advising contract.
  27. What does an awesome pricing page look like?
  28. Cost of Acquisition (CAC) trap.
  29. Don't reinvent the wheel: 4 best growth design patterns.
  30. Five Mistakes to Avoid as an Advisor
  31. Is Solopreneurship Right For You?
  32. B2B Product-Led Sales Guide
  33. Five Important Yet Frequently Missed User Archetypes
  34. Dirty dozen of PLG B2B SaaS health metrics with benchmarks
  35. It’s all about trials
  36. Product-led growth is many things. But here is what it's NOT.
  37. A new way to visualize a career journey
  38. Growth Matrix
  39. I'd Segment That...
  40. My course: Monetization and Pricing
  41. My 1st Course: Experimentation and testing
  42. My New Course! Growth Leadership Course
  43. Five Laws of Growth