How we pick which growth hacks make the vault

By the end of this post you'll know exactly which growth hacks deserve a slot on your roadmap and which deserve the close-tab. The four-question filter below is the one we use before any tactic earns a place in the vault, and it works just as well on the screenshot you saved from someone else's Tuesday post.

There are too many growth marketing newsletters. We know. We read them — the good ones, the great ones, and the ones that recycle the same five Substack screenshots into a Tuesday post.

MaxRadius exists because we wanted a single place where every play is one our team has actually shipped, watched a peer ship, or proven out in numbers. To keep that bar, every hack faces four questions before it gets a slot in the vault.

1. Can an operator ship it this week?

If a play needs a quarter of headcount, three vendors, and a steering committee, it's not a growth hack. It's a project.

Vault hacks are the kind you can sketch on a Monday and have in market by Friday. That doesn't mean small — it means tactical. The dedicated ad domain hack ships in an hour. A competitor keyword campaign ships in a day. A raffle ships in a week.

If a play needs more than a week of clear time from someone who already has the keys to the ad accounts, it doesn't go in.

2. Are there receipts?

We don't publish hacks we haven't seen perform. That's a low bar — but it's higher than "I saw this trick on Twitter."

Receipts can be:

• A campaign we ran ourselves, with the spend and conversion numbers.
• A play a peer ran, with results they let us share (anonymized if needed).
• A documented case study from an operator whose work we've verified independently.

If none of those exist, the play doesn't go in. We'd rather publish ten plays a quarter with numbers than fifty without.

3. Is it portable?

A hack that worked for one company at one stage with one product is interesting. A hack that works for ten different companies across categories is a vault play.

Before a hack goes in, we ask: does this depend on a specific platform that's two updates away from killing it? Does this require a brand size that 80% of our readers don't have? Does this need a country, a regulation, or a calendar moment that doesn't repeat?

If yes, we either rework the play to abstract the dependency, or it gets dropped. We're optimizing for the operator on day one, day three hundred, and at $10k MRR or $10M.

4. Would we still publish it after the inbox closes?

The cheapest growth posts are the ones written for the algorithm. They get clicks, they get reshared, and three months later they're useless because nothing in the post was actually true.

The four-question filter is the same one we'd use if we were briefing a colleague over coffee instead of publishing a newsletter. If the play wouldn't survive that conversation, it doesn't survive the vault.

What this means for you

You get fewer hacks than you would from a daily-digest newsletter. The ones you get are the ones we'd actually run.

That's the trade. We pick fewer, harder. You ship more, faster.

Unlock the Vault — every hack in the library was filtered by these four questions.