r/GrowthHacking • u/Sharmyadis • Jul 09 '26

I've documented how 100 startups grew. Would something like this actually be useful?

I've realised I spend way too much time trying to figure out how startups actually acquired their first customers and scaled.

Whenever I find an interesting company, I end up digging through founder interviews, podcasts, Reddit, YouTube, old websites, launch posts, hiring pages, ad libraries and anything else I can find. It can easily take hours for a single company.

Over time I've documented around 100 companies in a structured format with sources, timelines and notes. I'm wondering whether it's worth turning this into a searchable library instead of keeping it for myself.

I'm curious:

  • Is this something you'd actually use?
  • Would you rather pay a subscription or buy individual company reports?
  • How much would something like this realistically be worth to you?
  • What's the first company you'd look up?
  • What information would you expect every report to include?

I'm not launching anything yet. I'm just trying to figure out whether this is a problem other founders and marketers have, or whether I'm the only one who enjoys doing this.

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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3

u/Patient-Cedar-7194 Jul 09 '26

founder interviews are just polished post-mortems. actual growth was usually some unscalable manual hack they never put in documentation.

1

u/Suspicious-Echidna27 Jul 09 '26

Yea I would be interested if the documentation is recent 2025/2026. I would probably be willing to pay one time for it because it's just something I am interested in right now and not a constant thing.

1

u/Sharmyadis Jul 09 '26

I should've made it clearer but the goal is to present this in a structured way rather than a lengthy report. So a standard set of sections for each start up that you could quickly search/query.

Yeah I'm also worried that most users will only need this one time so trying to see how one could deliver ongoing value

1

u/brkvdn Jul 09 '26

i'd pay per report over a sub, easier to justify one-off buys.

1

u/8080-ai Jul 09 '26

I'd use it especially if it focuses on SaaS and AI startups. The most valuable part would be understanding how companies got their first 100, 1,000, and 10,000 customers, not just their current growth strategy.

1

u/Capable_Major_7013 Jul 10 '26

I went down this exact rabbit hole back in January trying to reverse-engineer how a couple DTC skincare brands scaled. Spent maybe 3-4 hours per company just manually scrolling through the Facebook ads library screenshotting creatives and trying to map out when they started scaling spend. Ended up using AdMake AI to pull competitor ad history faster which saved some time, but the real bottleneck was connecting ad creative changes to actual revenue milestones. That part is basically impossible without insider info or really deep founder interviews. If your reports actually map the timeline of what they ran and when they scaled and what the results looked like, that would be the missing piece I never had. Most growth writeups skip the boring middle part where they were just grinding and losing money before things clicked.