The four-question filter that kills 90% of growth advice

By the end of this post you'll know exactly which growth tactics deserve a slot on your roadmap and which deserve the close-tab. The four-question filter below is the one we run every candidate through before it earns a place in a MAXRadius issue, 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. MAXRadius exists because we wanted a single feed where every play has been shipped, watched, or proven with numbers. To keep that bar, every tactic faces four questions.

1. Can a small team ship it this week?

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

The plays worth your time are the kind you can sketch on a Monday and have in market by Friday. That doesn't mean small. It means tactical. A dedicated ad domain ships in an hour. A competitor keyword campaign ships in a day. A raffle ships in a week.

If it needs more than a week of clear time from someone who already has the keys to the ad accounts, it fails the filter.

2. Are there receipts?

We don't publish tactics without evidence attached, and every verdict is labeled by what backs it. That's a low bar, but it's higher than "I saw this trick on X."

Receipts can be:

• A campaign we ran ourselves, with the spend and conversion numbers. That's a Tested verdict, and client work we can show anonymized counts here too.
• A play live on our own products right now, with the numbers so far. That's a Running verdict; the final call lands in a later issue.
• Documented results from a named company, verified independently. That's a Sourced verdict, and we never imply we ran it.

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

3. Is it portable?

A tactic that worked for one company at one stage with one product is interesting. A tactic that works across ten companies and categories is worth your week.

Before a tactic passes, we ask: does it depend on a platform that's two updates away from killing it? Does it require a brand size most small teams don't have? Does it need a country, a regulation, or a calendar moment that doesn't repeat?

4. Does the downside fit in a petty-cash envelope?

Every tactic has a failure mode. The question is whether failing costs you $50 and a Tuesday, or your domain reputation and a quarter of trust.

We flag every play's worst realistic outcome. If the downside is capped (some wasted spend, a test that reads flat), it can pass. If the downside is uncapped (deliverability damage, platform bans, legal exposure), it either ships with explicit guardrails or doesn't ship at all.

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That's the filter. Steal it. Pin it next to your backlog and run every saved-for-later tactic through it. Most won't survive, and the ones that do are your next quarter of experiments.

Or let us run it for you: every issue of the free MAXRadius newsletter is one tactic that passed all four questions, with live numbers from our own work and a verdict labeled Tested, Running, or Sourced.