Books

Growth 365

Tomas Laurinavicius

ChaptersGive The Course A Pulse

Give The Course A Pulse

A short cohort challenge delivered where people already check messages beats a 12-part email drip nobody opens past lesson two.

Every SaaS with a lead magnet runs the same drip. Sign up for the free email course and a twelve-part sequence starts landing over the next two weeks, one lesson per email, spaced out to stretch the list as long as possible. Almost nobody finishes it. Open rates fall off a cliff by lesson three, because the inbox is the one screen people spend all day defending, not opening on purpose, and a drip sequence reads as exactly the kind of thing that gets archived unread. The fix isn't a sharper subject line. It's moving the whole course off email and onto the screen people already open on reflex.

What to do: Cut the twelve-lesson drip down to a five-day challenge and deliver it over WhatsApp, SMS, or an in-app inbox instead of email. Capture the opt-in as a phone number or a channel follow at signup, not a checkbox buried under an email-preference form, and write every message as "day 3 of 5, here's today's task" instead of "lesson 3 of 12, click to read."

Why it works: People open a messaging app on reflex several times a day out of habit, and only open a promotional inbox when they remember to, which for most free courses stops happening after day two.

Example: Duolingo runs an official WhatsApp channel for its Brazilian audience, Duolingo Brasil, carrying WhatsApp's verified badge and 1.8 million followers when I checked it in July 2026. It posts straight into the Updates tab people already open inside WhatsApp, not into an inbox they have to remember to reopen, the same surface any founder can register a channel on for free.

Walk it through

I tried to pull a screenshot of that channel in July 2026. Here is what actually happened.

1. Headless Chrome hangs on it. curl doesn't.

timeout 60 google-chrome --headless=new --screenshot=out.png \
  "https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaQHyJu8qIzlUVZRel0J"

That command timed out twice, at 40 seconds and again at 60, never writing a file. Meta's channel pages stall under headless automation even with a fresh profile. curl doesn't have that problem, because the follower count and channel name are already sitting in the page's server-rendered meta tags, no rendering required.

curl -s -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
  "https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaQHyJu8qIzlUVZRel0J" \
  | grep -o -E '<title[^>]*>[^<]*</title>|Channel • [0-9.]+M followers'

<title id="pageTitle">Duolingo Brasil - WhatsApp channel</title>
Channel • 1.8M followers

No app, no login, no scraper. WhatsApp serves a public preview page for every channel at a stable URL, and the follower count is right there in the markup. A brand of Duolingo's size runs its daily content through the exact same channel type a two-person startup can register, at zero platform fee beyond WhatsApp's own messaging costs.

2. Cut the syllabus before you touch a channel.

Take whatever twelve-lesson course exists today and force it down to five days. Each day gets exactly one task, one line on why it matters, and one link. A lesson that can't survive being compressed to three sentences was filler, not content. Cut it.

3. Pick the rail that matches where your list already lives.

  • WhatsApp Business Platform, direct through Meta or a provider like Twilio, wherever WhatsApp is the default messaging app.
  • SMS through a provider like Twilio or Postscript, in markets where WhatsApp adoption is thin.
  • An in-app inbox or push channel, Intercom, OneSignal, Customer.io, if the highest-open-rate surface you actually control is your own product.

4. Give day one and day five a different job than the three days between them.

Day one has to earn the second open, so keep its task small enough to finish in under two minutes. Day five is the only day that pitches, closing the challenge with the paid product as the obvious next step instead of a hidden upsell smuggled into day three.

The read

  • The channel matters more than the content. A five-day challenge and a twelve-part drip can share nearly identical lesson material. What actually changes the completion rate is which screen the message lands on.
  • A visible finish line beats an open-ended one. "Day 3 of 5" gives someone a countdown they can picture finishing. "Lesson 3 of 12" gives them a reason to defer until later, which is where most drip sequences quietly die.
  • A brand's own verified badge is a proof point. A company willing to put its checkmark on a channel, in public, at 1.8 million followers, has already answered whether this works at scale before you spend a day building it.

Steal it

Run the same forcing function on your own onboarding sequence, not only a lead-gen course. Take the email nurture currently living in your ESP, cut it to the shortest number of days that still proves value, and route it through whichever surface your own signup data says people actually open. Test the switch on a slice of new signups first, compare completion through day five against completion through week two of the old drip, and only retire the email version once the numbers back it up.

Defend the channel you're borrowing while you run it. WhatsApp Business Platform pricing, template rules, and Meta's own policies can all change without your input. That's the same exposure as any rented channel, and it's the exact tension this book's email section opens with, email is the one channel you actually own, everything else rents you attention on someone else's terms. Collect an email address at signup even when every day's real message rides over WhatsApp or SMS, so the challenge still has somewhere to land if the rented rail changes shape under you.

Gotchas

  • WhatsApp isn't the default messaging surface everywhere. Duolingo's verified channel at this scale runs on Duolingo Brasil, not a global account, because Brazil is a WhatsApp-first market. In plenty of other markets, SMS or in-app push is the channel people actually check daily. Match the rail to where your users live, not the one that's easiest to demo.
  • Business messaging carries real compliance overhead. WhatsApp Business Platform requires opt-in and pre-approved templates outside an active conversation window, and US SMS needs A2P 10DLC registration before most providers will carry real volume. Budget the setup week before you promise day one to a new signup.
  • Five days is a ceiling, not a suggestion. Honest caution: stretch the challenge to twelve days on a channel this intimate and it stops feeling like a habit and starts feeling like an intrusion. An opt-out on WhatsApp or SMS is a harder bounce to win back than an unsubscribed email address.