What you don’t track you don’t care about.

That goes for your health, revenue, and especially your startup’s growth. To improve at anything, you need to start by tracking it!

Ben Horowitz explains here:

How do you track growth experiments?

Since January 2023, I’ve been working with startup Jam.dev on growth, and have helped them scale their users from 15K up to 100K+ WAU.

I’ve done everything from writing viral posts to doing funny stunts to hosting AI Demos. But waaay before I even joined the team, Jam’s founders Dani and Irtefa created a Notion template to track all their experiments: everything from newsletters ads to Product Hunt launches to going on podcasts and more. Some of it succeeded, some failed. That’s why you need a dashboard to track all the experiments, so you don’t repeat failed experiments—and most importantly, so you double down on what’s working.

Below is a free duplicatable Notion template inspired by Jam. I now use it for all my growth experiments for my newsletter, Twitter, Product Hunt, and more.

How to use this template:

Start by filling up your backlog with as many crazy marketing ideas as possible. No ideas are off the table. The only limit is your imagination. Think weird.

For example, during my weekly mastermind call one of the members (an engineer at Reddit working on a SaaS side project around psychedelics) duplicated the template and shared his screen. As a community, we then filled up the template with crazy marketing ideas like shroom parties, sponsorships in psychedelic newsletters, and partnering with SF hacker houses. He had no marketing ideas in the beginning of the call; by the end, he had too many.

So after you come up with your backlog of crazy ideas, drag ideas from left to right as you Experiment with the ideas, find Early Signals that the ideas are working, and Operationalize your ideas into a repeatable scalable process.

Let’s say you put “posting memes” as an idea in the Backlog. Once you start regularly posting memes, drag it to Experiments. If you’re seeing followers and dollars come in, drag it to Early Signals. From there, figure out how to Operationalize (Do you schedule 3 out/day using TweetHunter? Do you hire a memelord? Do you take my meme skillz course and do it yourself?)

If something fails completely, add it to the Failures tab and write about it. Think of it as a memo to your future self. The biggest most important thing here is to make sure you’re taking notes within each idea page around results, timeline, etc. Imagine if you were going to be hiring someone to run growth for you —what would they need to know to catch up on everything you’ve tried and how can you transfer your knowledge and trials and errors to them?

My advice from here is to set a reminder 1x/week to update it and make sure to Star the page in Notion so it’s at the top your toolbar. Remember: this template only works if you use it. If you wanna grow, you gotta spend the time tracking what works and what doesn’t.

Cyberpunk Hyperlinks:

🤑 After much request, I posted my memelord t-shirts for sale.

Memes of the Week:

I POSTED SOME BAAAAANGERS THIS WEEK

Let’s blow up the internet together.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions