grow-business

# Grow a Business

You already have the hard part: a product people pay for. Revenue is real but lumpy — a good month came from a conference you happened to attend or a referral that happened to land, and none of it repeats on demand. This journey turns that traction into a repeatable growth engine across nine phases: a marketing map, an irresistible offer, an outbound motion, engineered word-of-mouth, persuasion on every surface, a mainstream go-to-market, a compounding network, one honest metric, and the discipline to hold price. It is interactive — the agent asks before every decision — and resumable, because every decision and asset is recorded in `docs/`. Install the whole stack at once with `npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global`, or let each phase pull its skill on demand.

## Core Principle

**Build a repeatable growth engine: each phase produces an asset the next phase consumes — offer feeds pipeline, pipeline feeds word-of-mouth, metrics keep it honest.** The order is load-bearing; a skipped Phase 1 leaves the later phases with no shared target. This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records the answers. The constituent skills carry the method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks.

The offer comes before every channel on purpose: sending traffic to a weak offer is the most expensive mistake in growth, so Phase 2 is fixed before outbound, virality, or repositioning turn on.

## Journey Map

| Phase | Skill | Question it answers | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | one-page-marketing | Which niche, and which square of the machine is empty? | Creates docs/MARKETING.md |
| 2 | hundred-million-offers | Why should they buy this instead of the alternative? | Extends docs/OFFER.md |
| 3 | predictable-revenue | How do we manufacture pipeline on demand? | Extends docs/MARKETING.md |
| 4 | contagious | Why would anyone share this? | Extends docs/MARKETING.md |
| 5 | influence-psychology | Why do they say yes on the page? | Extends docs/OFFER.md |
| 6 | crossing-the-chasm | How do we reach the mainstream buyer? | Extends docs/STRATEGY.md + docs/CUSTOMER.md |
| 7 | cold-start-problem | How does the network do the acquiring? | Extends docs/MARKETING.md |
| 8 | lean-analytics | Which one number tells us it is working? | Extends docs/METRICS.md |
| 9 | negotiation | How do we capture the value instead of discounting it? | Extends docs/OFFER.md |

Four of the nine phases write to MARKETING.md — the flagship this journey creates. OFFER.md, STRATEGY.md, METRICS.md, and CUSTOMER.md are extended, so files a prior create-business journey already owns are reused and augmented, never overwritten.

The tracker `docs/GROW-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` is private to this journey and never shared with another; it is the resume point that carries state across sessions.

## Operating Rules

1. **Resume first.** Before anything else, read `docs/GROW-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` and every artifact in the Journey Map. If the tracker exists, summarize the journey state in 3-5 lines and ask which phase to enter. Done when the user has confirmed an entry point. A journey with a tracker is resumed, never restarted.
2. **Intake on first run only.** No tracker: run the Intake below, then create `docs/GROW-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` with every phase statused `pending | in-progress | awaiting-evidence | done | deferred: reason | skipped: reason`. Done when the tracker exists and the user has confirmed the phase plan.
3. **Phase entry.** Announce: what the phase does, the decision it forces, the artifact it produces, rough effort. Offer proceed / skip / defer — phases marked GATE may be deferred, never skipped. Mark the phase `in-progress` on proceed. Done when the user chose.
4. **Skill invocation and fallback.** Load the phase's skill and use it: each phase's Invoke line names the skill by slug — use that skill to run the phase. If it is not available, offer: `npx skills add wondelai/skills/<slug> --global`. If the user declines, run the phase from its Brief — the minimum viable method. State which mode you are in.
5. **In-phase decisions.** Ask every question under "Decide with the user" — with concrete options and your recommendation. Record the choice in the tracker's Key Decisions. A decision made silently is a defect.
6. **Phase exit.** Present the draft artifact content for sign-off before writing. On approval: write or extend the docs/ files, update the tracker (status, Key Decisions, Next Actions). Done when the files are written and the phase row shows `done`.
7. **Artifact discipline.** Read before writing; create a file only if missing, otherwise extend — add or update your sections, preserve everyone else's. Files are UPPERCASE in `docs/`. Every recommendation lands as a checkbox or a table row with owner and priority. See [references/artifact-templates.md](references/artifact-templates.md) when creating a docs/ file for the first time — create it from the full skeleton (all section headings), then fill the sections your phase names.
8. **Every scarcity claim, testimonial, and guarantee must be true, and referral incentives must reward real value delivered.** When a tactic needs inventing evidence, replace it with a tactic that uses evidence you have.

## Intake

Ask these before creating the tracker:

1. Current revenue, customer count, and what "lumpy" looks like month to month (baselines feed Phase 8; volume sizes the Phase 3 pipeline math).
2. Where does new business come from today, and which single channel carries most of it (reveals the empty marketing square in Phase 1; over-reliance is your risk).
3. Which segments could you focus on (feeds the Phase 1 PVP Index and the Phase 6 beachhead).
4. Current offer and price — and was pricing ever tested against willingness to pay (gates Phase 2; if never tested, add the monetizing-innovation optional phase).
5. Does the product get better as more people or teams use it — shared workspaces, referrals, a directory (gates Phase 7; skip