Simulators

Bootstrap a product on agency cashflow: every hour you move to product starves the revenue that funds it. Learn to pace the transition so recurring revenue arrives before the client work — and the cash — runs out. (15 months)

Monetize a viral free product whose marginal costs are real: every free user burns compute. Learn how paywall strictness trades conversion against the virality and goodwill that fuel growth. (12 months)

Run a product-led devtool: developer experience (docs, onboarding) is the acquisition engine, free developers are the pipeline, and pricing decides how much of that pipeline ever converts to paying teams. (15 months)

Break a churn spiral: when account health slips, churn compounds quietly until sales can't outrun it. Learn to balance customer success, product, and sales spend — and to price without pushing accounts out the door. (14 months)

Manage a go-to-market pivot under a cash constraint: milk a declining channel while building a new one, and time the hard call of cutting legacy costs before they sink the transition. (14 months)

Drive compounding growth with a viral loop: the k-factor, not the ad budget, decides your trajectory. Learn why monetizing too hard too early strangles the loop — and why monetizing too late strangles the company. (14 months)

Performance ads rent customers; brand builds them. Learn why rising CAC punishes pure performance spend, and how repeat purchase economics — not first-order profit — decide whether a D2C brand survives. (12 months)

Diagnose a conversion problem: traffic isn't the bottleneck — trust and pricing are. Understand how ad spend, conversion rate, and margin interact to make or lose money. (12 months)

Engagement is the upstream metric that moves everything else in a learning product: retention, referrals, willingness to pay. Learn to grow it honestly — and what happens when you lean too hard on streaks and badges. (12 months)

Understand sales velocity as pipeline × win rate ÷ cycle length, and how deal size trades off against both. Feel the cash gap between hiring salespeople and the revenue they eventually book. (15 months)

In regulated markets, compliance spend looks like pure overhead — until the audit. Learn to treat trust and compliance as growth infrastructure that gates how fast you're allowed to move. (12 months)

Operate a freemium engine: the free pool is your top of funnel AND your biggest cost line. Learn how gating, price, and acquisition spend interact to turn free users into MRR before hosting bills win. (12 months)

Marketplaces die from the supply side first: worker earnings drive worker retention, worker retention drives fill rate, and fill rate decides whether demand ever comes back. Learn to balance take rate against the health of your supply. (12 months)

Feel the hardware cash conversion cycle: you pay the factory today for units you sell next month. Learn why a profitable hardware company can die of a stockout on one side and a cash crunch on the other. (12 months)

Solve the chicken-and-egg problem: buyers churn when supply is thin, and suppliers churn when they don't earn. Learn to sequence subsidies across sides and to see fill rate — not GMV — as the leading indicator. (14 months)

Diagnose a growth plateau as a retention problem, not an acquisition problem. See how activation quality drives churn, and how churn caps growth no matter how much you spend on ads. (15 months)

Balance the three levers of a media business — paid acquisition, sponsorship load, and editorial quality — and learn why stuffing the issue with ads quietly kills the growth loop that makes the ads worth anything. (12 months)

Monetize an open-source project without killing what made it valuable: community goodwill drives adoption, paid features drive conversion, and every feature you gate spends goodwill you may need later. (15 months)

Seasonal businesses don't die in December — they die in September, buying the inventory December needs. Learn to manage a demand cycle where cash goes out months before it comes back. (14 months)

Grow a subscription box without letting growth break fulfillment: churn is driven by what's in the box AND whether it arrives, and marketing money is wasted the moment operations can't keep up. (12 months)