Pillar
Teardowns
How real products actually grew. The mechanism, the real numbers, and what you can steal.
Dropbox's growth teardown: the referral program everyone misquotes
How Dropbox went from 100k to 4M users in 15 months with broken ad economics, what the two-sided referral program actually paid, and which parts of the loop you can copy.
ProjectionLab's growth teardown: the continuity gate and the vouch you can't buy
How a solo developer reached $1M ARR with no funding, no ads and no SEO team by giving away the whole engine and charging only to save your work, and which of those mechanics survive the move to B2B.
Calendly's growth teardown: the link is the ad
How Calendly turned a single scheduling link into a viral loop, bootstrapped to a $3B valuation on $550k, and reached 86% of the Fortune 500.
Figma's growth teardown: multiplayer as distribution
How Figma turned real-time collaboration into a growth engine: 87% of first users invited by a colleague, two-thirds of users who aren't designers, and a $20B offer on the way to IPO.
HubSpot Website Grader teardown: a free tool as a growth engine
How one free tool graded 4M+ websites, earned tens of thousands of backlinks, and fed HubSpot a stream of pre-qualified leads. The linkable-asset playbook, sourced.
Slack's growth teardown: bottom-up adoption and the 2,000-message rule
How Slack went from an invite-only preview to 10M+ daily users, the activation number that shaped the product, and what you can (and can't) copy.