Welcome to my growth notes!

Hey there! Welcome to my essays on building and growing 200M+ user products. I’m Sandy Diao, and over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of being part of some of the fastest-growing tech companies as an operator and advisor.

Through my experience, I’ve observed that some companies seem to just get growth – it comes naturally and seems like it’s on a rocket ship up-and-to-the-right trajectory. On the outside, it looks like the team knows exactly what they’re doing. When you look inside, operations are actually experimental or random, yet there are patterns across organizations of how the input systems drive the outputs. That’s why I’m writing these notes and essays. I want to turn the patterns I’ve observed into systems that founders and teams can use to organize overloads of information into real-life execution.

Here, you won’t find hacks claiming to get you to millions of users or dollars overnight. Instead, I focus on foundations and systems, which can help guide you to a path of sustainable and scalable growth. Don’t get me wrong – there are no easy answers to hard growth problems. At the end of the day, the only way to make progress is to test well-informed hypotheses and build data feedback loops that can help us evaluate our work, our business, and ourselves.