Understanding the infrastructure behing growth.
How Growth Works is an independent research and media platform exploring the systems, technology and infrastructure behind growing digital businesses.
We focus particularly on what happens when a business begins to outgrow the tools and processes that helped it get started — and needs to transition from founder-built systems to professional growth infrastructure.
Some of our research may contain affiliate links. If a reader purchases software through one of those links, HGW may receive a commission at no additional cost to the reader.
Commercial relationships do not determine our conclusions or which products we recommend.
Where an affiliate or other commercial relationship exists, we disclose it.
Why How Growth Works Exists
Digital businesses rarely design their growth infrastructure from the beginning.
They accumulate it.
A landing-page builder solves one problem. An email platform solves another. Then comes a CRM, analytics, payments, automation, customer support, AI and an expanding collection of integrations.
Each decision may be perfectly rational. Over time, however, the result can become difficult to understand, maintain and change.
How Growth Works investigates that transition.
We look beyond individual software products to understand how customer data, CRM, lifecycle marketing, analytics, experimentation, automation, AI and operational workflows fit together as a system.
Our Editorial Approach
Evidence matters.
How Growth Works distinguishes between:
What we’ve tested — software, systems or approaches we’ve used or examined directly.
What the evidence shows — conclusions supported by credible documentation, research and other primary sources.
What operators tell us — experience and observations from people building and running growth systems.
What we think — our own analysis and editorial judgement.
We aim to make those distinctions clear rather than presenting every conclusion with the same level of certainty.
Who’s Behind How Growth Works?
This section highlights the experienced professionals driving our independent research and media platform forward.
Stephen James Burford
Founder & Research Lead
Stephen has been building and operating digital businesses since 2007, working across growth, customer journeys, CRM, automation and digital operations.
His projects have generated more than 3 million app downloads, and he was named Men’s Health Entrepreneur of the Year. More recently, he built and operated the growth and customer infrastructure supporting a digital education business as it grew from approximately $0 to $1.5M+ in 18 months.
He founded How Growth Works to investigate a problem encountered repeatedly over nearly two decades: how do you build the systems underneath growth without creating unnecessary complexity?