Morgan Brown · Instrumented

Rendered — ms DOM — nodes HTML — kB Words — Viewport — All readings real — nothing estimated

Fig. 01.0 — The subject, measured Units — px · ms · count · nothing estimated

Morgan Brown

Growth & product executive. Co-author of Hacking Growth. Everything I know about product growth, to inspire and drive your business.

§ 02 Operator’s record Baseline readings

Every business leader, product owner, or entrepreneur has the same challenge: unlocking growth.

I’ve spent twenty years operating at the intersection of product and growth. Today, I’m the chief growth officer at Opendoor, and before that a product and growth leader at Instagram, Dropbox, Shopify, and Meta. The constant across all of them: treating growth as a property of the product, not a department beside it.

I write and speak about how to grow — from acquisition to retention, revenue to referrals — for audiences and teams around the world. Not stunts or spend: instrumented loops, disciplined experimentation, and the patience to let retention do the arithmetic.

§ 03 The arithmetic of growth Fig. 03.0 — 03.4

The first instruction in Hacking Growth: know your growth equation. Sounds simple, but surprisingly very few companies can clearly articulate this formula. Simple, discrete levers, that when moved move the business. Below is the one I wrote for Inman in 2014.

Fig. 03.0 — Subscriber revenue, Inman News · the operator’s own equation
G  =  ( V · ce · a · cp )  +  Sr  +  Sv (1) where G subscriber-revenue growth V visits to the site ce email-capture rate a active-reader rate cp free-to-paid conversion Sr subscribers retained Sv subscribers resurrected

Every term sat on a dashboard. Move one and G moves — the funnel product multiplies, retention and resurrection add on top.

Fig. 03.1 — Daily compounding, worked through logs
WORKED · DAILY COMPOUNDING (2) x  =  1.01365 ln x  =  365 · ln 1.01 =  365 × 0.0099503  =  3.6319 x  =  e3.6319  =   37.78… 0.99365 :  ln  =  365 × (−0.0100503)  =  −3.6684 =  e−3.6684  ≈  0.026 same effort · different slope
Fig. 03.2 — Growth accounting, three periods
GROWTH ACCOUNTING · THREE PERIODS (3) MAU(t+1)  =  MAU(t) + new + resurrected − churned start + new + resurrected − churned net end APR 10,200 1,480 310 1,210 +580 10,780 MAY 10,780 1,520 340 1,260 +600 11,380 JUN 11,380 1,490 360 1,300 +550 11,930 retention is the integral
Fig. 03.3 — Unit economics · LTV / CAC
UNIT ECONOMICS · LTV / CAC (4) LTV  =   ARPU × margin churn = $42 × 0.78 0.024 =  $1,365 2.4% / mo per customer CAC  =  $410  blended LTV CAC = 1,365 410 = 3.3 threshold ≥ 3 below this line, growth is rented
Fig. 03.4 — The viral factor, summed
VIRALITY · WORKED (5) K  =  i × c  =  3.5 × 0.20  =  0.70 invites × conversion reach  =  1 + K + K2 + K3 + … = 1 1 − K =  1 1.00 + 0.70 1.70 + 0.49 2.19 + 0.34 2.53 + … → 3.33 Σ =  1 / 0.30  =   3.3× K = 0.7 → paid spend × 3.3 K must be > 1 K amplifies paid too

§ 04 Readings Fig. 04.0 — 04.2

800K 600K 400K 200K 0 0 12 24 36 48 60 WEEKS SINCE LAUNCH → ACTIVE USERS LOOP CLOSES — COMPOUNDING BEGINS PROJECTED

Fig. 04.0 — Retention-driven compounding (illustrative). Solid: observed. Dashed: projection. The flat part is where most teams quit.

2014 2015 MAU TESTS / WK 3 / wk TEMPO COMPOUNDS
Fig. 04.1 — Test tempo vs. monthly actives, GrowthHackers.com, 2014–15 (after Hacking Growth). Past three tests a week, the plateau breaks.
RETAIN MONTHLY COHORTS · ACTIVE USERS m01 m04 m08 m12
Fig. 04.2 — The layer cake. Each cohort stands on the retained floor of the ones before.

§ 05 The book, on record Exhibit 05.0

TitleHacking Growth
SubtitleHow Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
Co-authorSean Ellis
Publisher / YearCrown Business, 2017
Copies in print750,000+
Languages16+
“Doing for market-share growth what The Lean Startup did for product development.”

Publisher’s jacket copy — Crown, 2017

Fig. 05.1 — Recorded praise, three entries on file
  1. “Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to this urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology for finding and optimizing new strategies to increase their market share and quickly.”

    Eric Ries / Bestselling author, The Lean Startup

  2. “…growth-hacking pioneers Ellis and Brown show how to break down those traditional barriers and marry powerful data analysis, technical know-how, and marketing savvy to quickly devise and test ways to fuel breakout growth.”

    Nir Eyal / Bestselling author, Hooked

  3. “Hacking Growth will teach you how to think like a marketer of tomorrow.”

    Josh Elman / Partner, Greylock Partners

§ 06 Record of appointments Table 06.0

  1. Chief Growth Officer — Opendoor
    Oct 2025 — present
  2. VP Product & Growth, AI Products — Dropbox
    Jul 2024 — Oct 2025
  3. Sr. Director of Product — Instagram
    Sep 2022 — Jun 2024
  4. VP of Growth — Shopify
    Aug 2020 — Sep 2022
  5. Product Manager — Facebook
    Jul 2017 — Jul 2020

§ 07 Talks, delivered Three titles on record

  • T.01

    Building a Growth Engine

    How growth teams are organized, how they work week to week, and why the process scales when heroics don’t.

  • T.02

    Creating Compounding Growth

    Small wins, retained and stacked. Why compounding beats spikes, and how to build for it.

  • T.03

    High Tempo Testing

    The teams that learn fastest grow fastest. What a weekly testing cadence actually looks like in practice.

§ 08 Writing, filed 3 forthcoming · 0 published

  1. June 2026 · forthcoming

    AI-native growth loops

    What does a growth model look like when the product can improve itself between sessions?

  2. May 2026 · forthcoming

    The death of the funnel

    Funnels assume a line of strangers. Loops assume relationships that compound.

  3. April 2026 · forthcoming

    Agents as the new channel

    When software shops for software, distribution gets rewritten. Who is the customer then?

All writing →

§ 09 Correspondence Two fields, no noise

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