About GrowthFriction

GrowthFriction is the audit tool I wish existed when my own SaaS products were getting 100 signups a week and zero of them activated.

The problem we solve

Most SaaS founders optimize one growth dimension — usually Acquisition — and ignore the other six. The result is a leaky bucket no acquisition spend can fill. You buy ads, content ranks, signups arrive, and 95% of users leave within 48 hours never to return. The friction wasn't at the top of the funnel. It was somewhere inside.

GrowthFriction scans your SaaS across all 7 factors at once — Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Advocacy, Monetization, Performance — and pinpoints the single biggest friction blocking your next $10k MRR. One score. One report. One thing to fix this week.

Who built this

GrowthFriction is built and operated by Paulo de Vries, a solo founder running a portfolio of 30+ SaaS and content sites across finance, education, fermentation, web-vitals tooling, and book content. The audit methodology emerged from real failure modes across the fleet — sites with great acquisition that crashed on retention, products with great onboarding that never figured out monetization, tools that ranked well but loaded too slowly to convert.

Every dimension in the audit comes from a fleet-wide pattern that compounded into a real revenue cliff somewhere. The score isn't academic. It's the same composite I use internally to decide which of my 30 products gets the next session of work.

The AUG v3 framework

The audit is built on the AUG v3 framework — Acquisition × Activation × Engagement × Retention × Advocacy × Monetization × Performance. Each factor scored 1-10, composite via geometric mean × 10 (so a zero in any factor near-zeros the whole). The formula:

AUG = 100 × Acq × Act × Eng × Ret × Adv × Mon × Perf ÷ 10⁷

Sources: published case studies + 18 months of fleet calibration data + the standard growth canon (HubSpot, Drift, Intercom, Reforge, Sean Ellis's ICE framework). What we add is the cross-factor multiplicativity — most growth frameworks treat the funnel as a sum. Reality is multiplicative: a 10% retention rate cuts everything downstream by 10×.

Free vs Pro

The first audit per product is free, no signup required. Pro tier unlocks unlimited audits, multi-site tracking, weekly regression alerts, and per-factor historical comparison. See pricing for details.

Why pain-naming this brand

I picked the name GrowthFriction deliberately — because that's what the buyer already feels. Most founders don't wake up wanting more business acumen (a vitamin). They wake up frustrated that growth feels harder than it should (an aspirin). Naming the problem the buyer has is more honest — and converts ~2× better in practice — than aspirational positioning.

Contact

For questions, audit-methodology feedback, partnerships, or just to say hi: reach me via /contact.