🧞♂️ New to Exponential Scale? Each week, I provide tools, tips, and tricks for tiny teams with big ambitions that want to scale big. For more: Exponential Scale Podcast | Scalebrate | Scalebrate Hub
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In this Week's Newsletter
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) – Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
The Week in Exponential Scale (In Case You Missed It)
Miss a few Daily issues while actually running your business? We’ve got you.
Here’s a quick skim of everything we shipped in the Daily newsletter last week.
Free Daily Drops
Prioritization Logic: Goal Alignment vs. Consequence Prevention Stop firefighting and start winning by building a prioritization framework that distinguishes between tasks that move you toward goals and tasks that merely prevent disasters—so you can focus on growth instead of just survival.
Prompt Better: A Free Tool for You Transform mediocre AI outputs into game-changing results by learning how to craft better prompts—because the quality of your AI results is 100% determined by the quality of your inputs.
Make "No" Your Default: As You Grow, Opportunities Are Distractions in Disguise Protect your focus by treating every new opportunity as a distraction until proven otherwise—because as you scale, saying yes to everything is the fastest way to dilute your impact and stall your growth.
Real-Time Financial Dashboards: Replace Guesswork with Data - Build a real-time financial dashboard that shows your cash position, runway, burn rate, and key metrics at a glance—so you always know your numbers before they know you.
Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe): Solo IP to Half-Billion Sales - Learn how one developer turned a passion project into a half-billion-dollar IP by obsessing over player experience, ignoring industry trends, and proving that small teams with focus can outcompete entire studios.
Bookkeeping & Receipt Management Tools for Microteams: 30 Resources - A curated list of 30 bookkeeping and receipt management tools that help microteams stay organized, tax-ready, and financially compliant without hiring an accountant or drowning in shoebox receipts.
The Prioritization Logic Toolkit A decision framework with templates to systematically evaluate every task, project, and opportunity against your goals—includes priority matrices, scoring rubrics, and the exact system to say no without guilt.
Prompt Optimizer Swipe File: 20 Before/After Examples + Master Templates 20 real before/after prompt examples showing how small changes create massive improvements in AI output quality—plus master prompt templates for common microteam tasks like content creation, research, and analysis.
Opportunity Filter: The "Hell Yes or No" Decision Framework A step-by-step filtering system to evaluate partnerships, features, and opportunities against your strategic goals—includes decision trees, scoring criteria, and scripts to politely decline without burning bridges.
Micro-Business Finance Dashboard Kit: Know Your Numbers in Real-Time Ready-to-use financial dashboard templates for Google Sheets and Airtable that automatically calculate cash runway, burn rate, MRR growth, and key financial metrics—set up in under 2 hours.
The Solo Creator Playbook: Building a Half-Billion Dollar IP Alone The strategic framework Eric Barone used to build Stardew Valley solo—includes focus principles, player feedback systems, and the exact approach to building beloved products without a team.
Growth Loops vs. One-Off Marketing
You run an ad campaign. It drives 50 new signups. Great!
Then the campaign ends. The signups stop. You're back to zero.
So you run another campaign. Fifty more signups. Then it stops again.
You're stuck on a treadmill—constantly spending time and money to keep the growth machine running. The moment you stop, growth stops.
Meanwhile, your competitor isn't running ads. They're not posting constantly on social media. But somehow, they're growing faster than you.
How?
They built a growth loop. And growth loops compound while one-off campaigns don't.
Let me show you the difference—and how to build your own.
The Founder Who Stopped Marketing (And Kept Growing)
Let me tell you about Daniel, founder of a productivity app for remote teams.
For the first year, Daniel was a marketing machine:
Posting on LinkedIn daily
Running Facebook ads
Guest blogging
Cold outreach
Every month, he'd drive 200-300 new signups. But the moment he slowed down or was sick for a week, focused on product, or took a vacation, signups dropped to nearly zero.
"I felt like a hamster on a wheel. The only way to grow was to keep running."
Then Daniel stumbled onto something interesting.
He added a small feature to his app: "Invite your team" with a simple referral incentive (both sides got a free month when a teammate signed up).
Within 90 days:
30% of new users invited at least one teammate
Those teammates invited their teammates
Growth accelerated—without Daniel doing anything
Daniel's signups went from 250/month (while actively marketing) to 400/month (while barely marketing).
The difference? He'd built a growth loop.
One-off marketing is linear. You put in effort, you get results. You stop effort, results stop.
Growth loops are exponential. You build the system once, and it compounds on itself.
One-Off Marketing vs. Growth Loops
Here's the fundamental difference:
One-Off Marketing (Linear Growth)
What it is: Campaigns, ads, content that drive a spike in traffic/signups, then stop when you stop.
Examples:
Running a Facebook ad campaign
Publishing a blog post
Posting on social media
Attending a conference
Sending a cold email blast
Effort → Results: Direct, but temporary.
Think of it like pushing a boulder uphill. The moment you stop pushing, it rolls back down.
Growth Loops (Compounding Growth)
What it is: Self-reinforcing systems where each new user/customer helps bring in the next one, automatically.
Examples:
Referral programs (Dropbox: "Refer a friend, both get storage")
User-generated content loops (Yelp: users write reviews → attract searchers → new users write more reviews)
Network effects (Slack: one team invites another team → more teams join)
Viral content creation tools (Canva: users create content → share it → branded watermark drives new users)
Effort → System → Compounding Results: You build it once, it runs forever.
Think of it like building a flywheel. The first push is hard. But once it's spinning, it keeps going with minimal effort.
Why This Matters for Microteams
Big companies can afford to staff entire growth teams. They run constant campaigns because they have the budget and the people.
Microteams can't.
For microteams, growth loops are the only sustainable way to grow because:
Leverage: One-time effort creates ongoing results
Compounding: Growth accelerates over time instead of plateauing
Low maintenance: Once built, loops run themselves
Capital efficient: You're not burning cash on ads month after month
One-off marketing is renting growth. Growth loops are owning it.
The 5 Types of Growth Loops You Can Build
Not all growth loops are created equal. Here are five proven models microteams can implement: