Growth audit checklist: the 15 points
Fifteen questions, three per stage of the AARRR framework. They don't measure your results — they measure whether you can see them. And that changes everything: a team that isn't doing the work and a team doing it without being able to prove it have the same empty dashboard and two opposite action plans.
- Stage 1 of 5
Acquisition
Do you have a primary acquisition channel that's identified and measured?
Have you tested more than one acquisition channel?
Do you know your customer acquisition cost, even roughly?
- Stage 2 of 5
Activation
Have you defined a specific "aha" moment for new users?
Do you know what percentage of users reach that moment?
Has your onboarding been tested or iterated on at least once?
- Stage 3 of 5
Retention
Do you track a retention rate (D7/D30 or similar)?
Do you have a re-engagement mechanism (email, notification...)?
Do you know your main cause of churn?
- Stage 4 of 5
Referral
Does your product have a sharing or referral mechanism?
If it exists, is it actually used by customers?
Do you measure a viral coefficient or equivalent?
- Stage 5 of 5
Revenue
Has your pricing model been tested, not just chosen?
Do you know your LTV, even roughly?
Do you have an expansion playbook (upsell/cross-sell)?
How to use it
Answer all fifteen in one sitting, without going to look anything up. What you know off the top of your head is exactly what counts: a metric that takes half a day to reconstruct is not a metric your team steers by.
Three possible answers per question, and one rule: the top answer requires the thing to be both in place AND measured. "We have a main channel" with no number behind it is not the top answer — it's the middle one, and that gap is what the checklist measures.
Scoring it by hand
Twenty points for the top answer, seven for the middle, zero for the low one. Add up a stage's three points (sixty at most), scale to twenty, round to the nearest whole number — then add the five ALREADY-ROUNDED stage scores for the total out of a hundred. Rounding at the end would give a total that doesn't match the five numbers shown above it.
The middle seven is not half of twenty, and that's deliberate: something in place but unmeasured beats nothing, and is worth far less than the same thing under watch. The scale says that rather than leaving it to interpretation.
What the score does not tell you
It measures declared practices, not performance. A profitable company can score forty, and a heavily instrumented team with no customers can score eighty. What the number catches is the stage where you're flying blind — and that stage caps everything downstream of it.
Two comparability biases to know before quoting your score: the Referral stage mechanically scores very low for anything sold through a sales team, and the CAC question rewards a recited number more than an honest admission of uncertainty. Both are neutralised by reading the stage rather than the total.
Wondering how to run one from start to finish? The startup growth diagnostic method
The same checklist, in three minutes, with the score worked out and the stage that's holding you back named: