growth-teardown

Generated source view for the actual executable productivity/growth-teardown skill. The durable routing article is Cloud, Data, and Service Skills. Source: skills/productivity/growth-teardown/SKILL.md

Runtime Source

Bundled Resources

No bundled resource files.

Description

Reverse-engineer how a company grows: a dated timeline of its growth plays (SEO, AEO, ads, social, community, launches, partnerships, product loops), each marked data-backed or a guess. Use for growth or competitor teardowns, REA-growth or treg.

Skill Source

---
name: growth-teardown
description: >-
  Reverse-engineer how a company grows: a dated timeline of its growth plays (SEO, AEO, ads,
  social, community, launches, partnerships, product loops), each marked data-backed or a guess.
  Use for growth or competitor teardowns, REA-growth or treg.
origin: personal
source_slug: growth-teardown
---

# Growth teardown

Source: /REA-growth by @jasonzhou1993 (2026-10-30), an open source skill on treg (github.com/superdesigndev/treg) that takes a company's distribution apart from first touch to sharing and returns a playbook of plays, each marked backed by data or an educated guess, with the prompt to run it. Their example: a full Lovable teardown for about $0.58. Kevin flagged it (2026-10-30).

## Output

A playbook in Markdown with:

1. **Timeline.** Dated moves from founding to now: launches, pricing changes, channels switched on, milestones the company announced (for example "0 to $17M ARR in 3 months"), viral moments, and traffic estimates over time.
2. **Plays.** Each play has a name, the channel, what they did, when, evidence links, and a confidence mark: **backed by data** (a source, a dataset, an ad library entry, a traffic estimate) or **educated guess** (an inference, said why).
3. **Loops.** The product mechanics that compound distribution (a badge on every user output that links back, referral credits, templates, public galleries, integrations).
4. **AI answer presence.** Whether answer engines name the company first for its category, and which pages they cite.
5. **Run it.** For each play worth copying, a short prompt or task list to run it for Kevin's product, adapted to its stage and budget.

## Sources to check

- Search traffic estimates and top pages; the company's blog, docs and changelog for SEO and AEO structure.
- Ad libraries: Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, LinkedIn ads, TikTok Creative Center, Reddit and X ads where visible.
- Social: X, LinkedIn, YouTube (creator videos and their view counts), Reddit threads, Hacker News launches, Product Hunt.
- Partnerships, affiliates, integrations and marketplace listings.
- Public statements of metrics from founders and press.

Record every source with a link and a date. Never invent a metric; a missing number is written as unknown.

## Rules

- Mark confidence on every play. A playbook of guesses presented as facts is worse than no playbook.
- Prefer primary sources (ad libraries, the company's own posts) over aggregators.
- Keep it dated: a growth move only means something with its date.
- treg can automate the data gathering when it is set up; the method works without it.

---

Timeline

• 2026-11-02 | Generated a browseable source page from the actual executable skill file. Source: skills/productivity/growth-teardown/SKILL.md