Curate
This week: why your retargeting audiences are lying to you, the acquisition channel nobody's talking about in 2026, and one framework that cut CAC 31% without touching ad spend.
"We don't forward what's trending. We forward what changes how you think on a Tuesday." — The Editors
No name. No segmentation. Just seven links, Monday 6 a.m.
We read 200 links so you open 7.
Growth marketing has a noise problem. Every newsletter aggregates. Every tool summarizes. Every pundit opines on the same three TechCrunch posts before the week is out.
Curate exists because the people who actually run pipelines — the ones who've stared at a busted funnel at 11 p.m. and fixed it before morning — have a different standard for what's worth reading.
We don't curate for engagement. We curate for the decision you'll make on Wednesday, the experiment you'll greenlight on Thursday, the assumption you'll finally stop making next quarter.
Seven is not arbitrary. It's the number of things a head of growth can meaningfully act on in a week without letting signal become backlog.
Curation is an editorial act, not an algorithmic one.
Every link is chosen by someone who has run the play, not someone who has read about it.
Annotations are the product.
The link is the address. The annotation is the map. Without context, a URL is noise with better formatting.
Fewer links create more action.
Forty links is a reading list. Seven links is a Tuesday. One changes your week; the other fills your bookmarks.
An annotation should change what you do with the link.
These are real excerpts from past issues. Not marketing copy. The writing is the product. Read it and decide.
"The Reforge piece on activation isn't saying what everyone thinks it's saying. Read past the headline framework. The real argument — buried in footnote three — is that most teams are optimizing the wrong activation event entirely. Worth 20 minutes of your Monday."
Why this annotation matters
This is what an annotation looks like. Not a summary. Not a pull quote. An argument for why this specific piece changes a specific decision.
"Rand Fishkin's data on zero-click search is three years old and still the most-cited thing in SEO. The 2025 update from SparkToro is more damning, more specific, and somehow less discussed. If your acquisition mix leans organic, this is the uncomfortable read of the quarter."
Why this annotation matters
Context makes curation. Without it, you have a link. With it, you have a reason to open it before your second coffee.
This Monday's seven.
Every annotation is written by someone who has run the play. Click any link to read the annotation in full.
Attribution windows are making your ROAS look clean while your incrementality is hemorrhaging. Rai shows the delta between reported and true lift across three ad platforms. The methodology is replicable in-house. Read this before your next budget review.
Community-qualified leads are converting at 3× the rate of MQL in Voss's cohort data. This isn't the usual "build a community" hand-wave — it's a specific playbook for Series B teams with limited community bandwidth. Saves you from building the wrong thing.
Onboarding-to-activation time was the hidden CAC driver. Obi's framework isolates the three friction points that kill trial-to-paid conversion before the paid channel ever gets credit. This is the unsexy lever nobody optimizes.
Every Series B company hits a moment when their early-adopter positioning stops converting the mainstream buyer. Okafor wrote the diagnosis. The checklist at the end is worth the read alone.
North star metrics create local optima. Malhotra documents five case studies where teams hit their north star and watched revenue stall. The counterintuitive fix is simple and survives a board presentation.
Not a thinkpiece. Actual traffic data across 40,000 domains showing which content formats are holding rank while clicks decline. The format shift required is counterintuitive and three months ahead of where most SEO teams are.
Freemium is a pricing decision masquerading as a growth strategy. Calloway's post-mortem on six PLG companies that over-invested in free tiers is the most honest thing written about product-led growth this year. Required reading if your free tier is growing faster than paid.
This is what lands in your inbox every Monday at 6 a.m.
Get Monday's SevenRead by the people who run the numbers,
not the ones who write about them.
4,200+
Growth operators
67%
Open rate (industry avg: 21%)
3.1×
Avg. links opened per issue
Vol. 3
Running since 2023
I've unsubscribed from eleven growth newsletters in the past year. Curate is the only one I've re-subscribed to. The annotations alone are worth the inbox space.
Samantha Osei
Head of Growth · Fieldwork (Series B)
As a solo marketer, I don't have a team to sanity-check what I'm reading. Curate is the closest thing to having a sharp operator in the room on Monday morning.
Rafael Monteiro
Growth & Acquisition Lead · Archivum (Bootstrapped SaaS)
We forward at least two Curate links in our agency Slack every week. It's the signal-to-noise ratio that gets us — nothing else comes close.
Priya Anand
Strategy Director · Clearline Growth Agency
The retargeting issue alone saved us from a six-figure mistake. I sent it to our CFO with a one-line note. We restructured our attribution model the next week.
James Kowalski
VP Growth · Strata (Series B)
Your Monday morning, sharper.
Seven annotated links. Every Monday at 6 a.m. Written by operators for operators. No filler, no sponsored content, no aggregation. Just signal.
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