Pillar
Teardowns
How Slack, Figma, and Calendly actually grew. The mechanism, the real numbers, and what you can steal.
Teardown
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.
2026-07-059 min read
Teardown
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.
2026-07-0510 min read
Teardown
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.
2026-07-058 min read
Teardown
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.
2026-07-0512 min read