Why we're starting
Growthmind.

We've started companies before — Airslip, then Dexla, and most recently Lurio. Twice we reached the same strange place: users were signing up, a few were even paying — and we could not tell you why.

We hadn't done any real marketing. Most of them found us through search. They were clearly getting value, but not the same value — everyone was building toward something different, and no pattern held. When an investor asks "how did you get these users?", the honest answer was luck. Luck isn't a growth strategy. It isn't even a diagnosis.

We did everything you're supposed to do

We installed the analytics stack. We instrumented the funnels. We watched session replays — hours and hours of them, one at a time, taking notes like Victorian naturalists.

The funnel chart told us users dropped at step three of onboarding. Fine. Why? Silence. We emailed users, including the paying ones. People are busy; most never answered. The tools could tell us that something went wrong, weeks after it went wrong, and only if we had enough traffic to see it. They could never tell us why, and they certainly couldn't tell us what to do about it.

So at Lurio we did what the playbook says: we went looking for a proper product-growth person to make sense of the data. That's how we met Abhijeet Patil — Abhi — a growth specialist who'd spent years living inside exactly this problem for other companies' products.

The session replay that started it

Before we ever spoke properly, Abhi tried Lurio. We watched his session replay afterwards, the way we watched everyone's. He clicked through the whole product — page after page — and left without doing the one thing the product was for.

The recording showed everything except the reason.

We only found out because we could ask him directly: the navigation had overwhelmed him, he switched tabs, and he simply forgot we existed. Thirty seconds of conversation gave us more than a month of dashboards.

That was the moment. No analytics tool on earth would have surfaced that — and we only got the answer because we happened to be interviewing the user. Most founders never get to ask. Even a seasoned growth expert's honest answer to "how do you find out why users drop?" was: mostly, you assume.

Every tool waits behind the launch

That's the pattern we couldn't stop seeing once we saw it. The entire product-analytics stack is reactive: it needs real users to fail before it can say anything at all. You pay — in money, in reputation, in weeks — for every user who falls through the leak before the chart even renders.

Meanwhile, the way products get built has completely changed. A founder with a coding assistant ships in a weekend. The distance from idea to production has collapsed to days. But the growth tooling still starts where it started a decade ago: after launch, staring backwards at a funnel.

Nobody's growth stack starts where the product now starts — at the brief.

So we're building the growth product owner that's there from line zero

Growthmind plugs into your repo, your coding assistant, and your analytics, and joins the team before any code exists:

• It interrogates the brief the way a good growth product owner would — is this the right flow for your users, not users in general?
• It arms your coding assistant with what's known about your audience before it builds, instead of reviewing the damage after.
• It simulates your ICP through the build and finds where they stall — before anyone real ever sees it.
• Then, after launch, it compares real behaviour against what it predicted, says plainly what's working and what isn't, and writes every miss back into its model. Each loop starts smarter than the last.

Not another dashboard to decode. A memo, in the places you already work, from something that's accountable for the number.

The honest part

We'll say the quiet bit out loud, because we intend to run this company transparently: Lurio sat directly in the path of the model labs, and we watched them close the gap at an alarming rate. Sad as it was to let it go, it taught us the second lesson behind Growthmind: build the thing the labs won't. A living, compounding model of one specific product and its audience — earned loop by loop, from your data and your users — is exactly that kind of thing. Every week it works for you is a week nobody can copy.

That's also why Growthmind is open source. Growth advice you can't inspect is astrology. Ours ships with the reasoning attached.

And the growth expert we hired to fix Lurio's activation problem? We're building Growthmind with him instead. Sometimes the best outcome of an interview is a different company.

The one-sentence version

Anyone can build a product now. Almost nobody can build a product people use, and then use again. Activation and retention are where good products quietly die — not for lack of a dashboard, but for lack of someone whose job it is to ask why before it's too late.

We're building that someone.

Growthmind is open source at github.com/growthmind-ai/growthmind. If this is the wall you're hitting right now, we'd genuinely like to hear about it — talk to the founders.