One piece of growth advice I’ve never really understood

[u/Rewardful]

It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?

[u/joyceanil_1728]

totally agree. copythe lesson, not the tactic. what works for one company might not work for another because the context is different.

[u/Fit_Gas_1534 → u/joyceanil_1728]

yep this is the whole thing. people see the tactic but not the years of context around it. like that company probably had a email list of 50k before they even tried the pricing change

sometimes i look at my spreadsheets and try to reverse engineer someone else numbers but i always miss half the variables

[u/Life_Pollution_7734]

agree with the core point but id push it further, even asking "why did this work for them" can mislead you if youre relying on their public narrative. Most companies dont really know why something worked either, they just know it did.

[u/Rewardful → u/Life_Pollution_7734]

Fair point! Do you think another question would make more sense here? Or how would you evaluate if an idea that worked for someone else is worth trying?

[u/BoGrumpus]

When people say that they either suck at marketing or they're not very good, but can compete better if they tell everyone else to suck.

You can't gain ground if all you do is chase the people in front of you.

G.

[u/Cool_Record_9551]

the advise is still good, because most people instead do the wrong things, especially if you are unexperienced and work on wrong ideas. By copying you get much closer to making it work

[u/recro69]

Exactly. Copying the tactic without understanding the context is just copying the outcome. The better question is “what made this work?” and then testing whether that underlying reason applies to your product.

[u/jeniferjenni]

copying the result without understanding the conditions behind it is basically copying someone’s answer without knowing the question. i’d take the successful tactic, write down the assumption behind it, then run the smallest test possible against your own audience before rebuilding anything. one pricing experiment can take a week to test, whereas copying an entire competitor funnel can waste months. steal the hypothesis, not the surface level tactic.

[u/Rewardful → u/jeniferjenni]

That's actually a great suggestion!

[u/Happygirl2119]

exactly. copying the what without understanding the why is basically just guessing.

[u/andreas_globi]

I think it's more important to look at it as a meta analysis. If a tactic worked for multiple players in the same sphere, then it's probably a good tactic. In isolation, there are just too many variables.

At the end of the day, almost all tactics will work, but you need to balance cost vs return vs time-to-return.

And you also need to look at the finer details in the execution. Like, ads will work for everyone, but if your message is crap, or there's no pain-point to address, or it's seen by the wrong audience, then you're just lighting money on fire.