The growth playbook

How to run a marketing experiment and where to read its result, how codes and prices are minted, the giveaway recipe, and the once-a-week posting rule.

Checked against the sources on 2026-08-30

Growth is a weekly practice, not a launch event

Everything in this chapter compounds weekly and none of it works as a one-off. One experiment per week, one post per week, one look at the numbers - that cadence beats a launch spike every time, because the spike teaches you nothing you can repeat.

The other rule this chapter keeps repeating: never ship a growth mechanic you cannot measure. A code nobody can trace, a post on a channel without a tag, a price changed on a feeling - each is effort spent buying no information.

Set up an experiment

An experiment is one question, one channel, one week, one number. In kxb the machinery is the ?src tag and the Sources report - every link you put anywhere carries ?src=<channel>, and the backoffice counts who walked in and who clicked join, per tag.

Write the question down first
"Does the Discord communities angle beat the game-jam angle?" is an experiment. "Let’s post more" is not. If you cannot say which number answers the question, the experiment is not ready to run.
Tag every link with ?src
One tag per channel or per angle - ?src=discord-post, ?src=jam-thread. The tag is the whole tracking system: no pixel, no cookie banner, nothing to consent to. A link without a tag is a visitor you will wrongly credit to "direct".
Watch out: Decide the tag names once and keep a list. Three spellings of the same channel read as three channels forever.
Read the result where it lands
Where: The backoffice: the Sources report, next to Analytics
The number that matters pre-launch is walk-ins versus join-clicks per source - the demo visits against the moment somebody wanted an account. Read it after a week, not after an hour; small channels need the days.
Keep or kill, then write it down
A channel that brought walk-ins gets next week too. One that brought nothing twice is dead - stop, and note why in a running log. The log is the actual asset: six months of kept-or-killed is a marketing strategy nobody can argue with.

Create codes

A promo code in kxb grants a new account one month free - no card, nothing charged when it ends, the space simply goes read-only until they subscribe. One redemption per account, ever.

Mint the code
Where: Backoffice → Promos
One code per campaign, never one code for everything - the code name is the ?src tag of the offline world. KXB50 on a conference slide and JAMFREE in a jam Discord tell you, in the redemption log, which room was listening.
Watch the redemption log on the same page
Codes and redemptions live on one page on purpose: minting the next code, you see whether the last one worked. A code with zero redemptions after two weeks is a channel that did not care - that is a result, not a failure.

Create prices

Tiers and their prices live in the database, not in the code - the backoffice edits them and the landing page quotes them, so a price change is an edit, not a deploy.

Edit the tier and its price
Where: Backoffice → Pricing
Two things live there and they are not the same thing: the quoted price the landing page prints, and the charged price behind the checkout. Change both together or the page advertises a number the card is not charged.
Watch out: The quote is cosmetic until the charge matches it. Always verify the pair.
Change prices like experiments
One change, one reason, one date in the log, and then leave it alone long enough to read. A price that moves monthly teaches customers to wait and you nothing.

The Gewinnspiel recipe

A giveaway is five ingredients, and skipping any one of them is what turns a nice gesture into an Abmahnung or a dud. The legal half lives in the promotion chapter; this is the operational half.

A prize people in your audience actually want
Months of the product beat merchandise: they cost you margin, not cash, and every winner becomes a user. A prize unrelated to the product recruits people who wanted the prize, not the product.
A page of its own, with the conditions on it
Who may enter, when it ends, how the winner is drawn and told, and the odds logic if entries are unlimited. Published before the first announcement - the conditions page is what makes it a Gewinnspiel rather than a vague promise.
A code, so the campaign is traceable
The giveaway gets its own promo code and its own ?src tag. When it is over, the redemption log and the Sources report tell you what it was worth - which is the difference between "that was fun" and "we do that again every quarter".
A hard deadline and a drawn winner
Draw on the announced date, tell the winner in private first, announce with their consent. A giveaway that quietly never concludes is remembered, and not fondly.
The announcement thread, once, on the channel that fits
One thread, pinned for the duration, entry tied to something that costs the entrant nothing. Purchase-tied entry changes the legal nature - the promotion chapter says why.

Posting: once a week, original

Once a week, on a fixed day
Weekly is the honest cadence a small team sustains for a year. Daily burns out in three weeks and the silence afterwards reads worse than a steady weekly ever did. Pick the day, put it in the calendar, treat it as shipped software.
Original beats reposted, every time
One real thing from the week: a feature that shipped, a number that surprised you, a thing a user did, a mistake and its fix. Screenshots and clips of the actual product outperform any stock graphic - and in kxb every marketing image can be a real frame of the real product, which is a advantage most products do not have. Use the studio; never post an illustration of a thing the product cannot do.
Every post carries its tag
The link in the post gets its ?src like every other link, so twelve months later the Sources report can rank your own channels. Posts without links are brand work; that is fine too, but know which one you are writing.
Watch out: Write posts in batches when the energy is there, schedule them weekly. The rule is the cadence, not the writing day.

The traps

Untagged links - the experiment that cannot be read afterwards.
One code for every campaign, and a redemption log that answers no question.
Changing the quoted price and forgetting the charged one, or the reverse.
A giveaway announced before its conditions page exists.
Posting daily for three weeks and then nothing for two months.
Reposting other people’s content into a feed that is supposed to prove yours is alive.
Running three experiments in one week and being unable to say which one moved the number.

Where the pieces live

Before you promote - the legal halfGiveaway law, price display, consent - read it before the first campaign.
The backofficePromos, Pricing, Analytics and Sources - operator sign-in required.
Run kxb yourselfIf you are reading this as a community-edition operator, start here.

This is a map, not legal or tax advice - and an honest one about how it was drawn: the Germany guide was written by a person who walked the route; most other countries were drafted with AI against the official sources and have not yet been walked by someone who did it. Laws change. Every guide carries the date it was last checked and the sources to check it yourself - and if you have been through one of these routes, your corrections are exactly what this handbook wants.