6 Honest Reflections Before 2026 Begins
Year 2 of solopreneurship, best of Growthmates in 2025, and more.
Hello everyone 👋 I’m Kate Syuma, and welcome to Growthmates.news — the newsletter where we explore growth stories to inspire your professional and personal growth. Join the community of 7,300+ Product, Design, and Growth people from companies like Amplitude, Intercom, Miro, Atlassian, Grammarly, Framer, and more.
This year didn’t rush by — it unfolded. Quietly and unevenly, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. 2025 felt like a year of integration. Less about chasing the next milestone, and more about understanding what truly deserves my energy.
For me, it became a blend of building Growthmates more intentionally, deepening my solopreneurship practice, and learning how to create without living in constant “push mode”. There were seasons of focus, seasons of pause, and many moments of recalibration — both professionally and personally.
Before we step into 2026, I wanted to pause and reflect — on what this year taught me, what I’m taking forward, and what I’m consciously leaving behind. Here’s a very honest year-end reflection, wrapped up with the best of Growthmates in 2025 👇
🚀 Growthmates Recap: My 2025 year
If you’re reading this newsletter — thank you 💜 With everything moving so fast in our industry, I truly hope this space feels like a pause — a place where you can slow down, reflect, and get inspired, rather than overwhelmed.
Before we dive in… Meet Growthmates Partners 🚀
I curate the Growthmates Bundle to share not just ideas — but the tools I trust and use in my own work. Each one is a handpicked #1 tool for a key product area, and I’m proud to have them supporting this newsletter 🖤
Best way to support Growthmates? Explore these fantastic tools below 👇
Framer — the fastest way to design and publish stunning websites (Growthmates.club is built on it).
Mobbin — the largest UX & UI reference library for deep product inspiration.
Obi by Cor — AI-powered onboarding voice assistant, I truly recommend.
Magic Patterns — The fastest way to prototype and test new features with AI.
What we’ll cover today:
A very honest year-end reflection — what this season taught me, and what I’m taking into 2026.
The story behind my 2nd year of going solo — what quietly paused, what unexpectedly scaled, and what’s coming back next year.
The best of Growthmates in 2025 — most-read articles, top LinkedIn posts, and favorite resources you might’ve missed.
A few gifts for you toward the start of a New Year. 🎁
Now, let’s dive into today’s reflection 👇
⭐️ What this season taught me
1. What’s about to ship — and why it feels personal.
Not many people know this, but Growthmates started as a podcast.
Three years ago, it was a side project where I interviewed growth-minded people from companies I deeply admired: Notion, Canva, Dropbox, and others. I didn’t have a big plan back then. I just wanted conversations that felt real and inspiring.
Over time, that small side-gig quietly grew into an ecosystem:
An advisory practice where I support B2B companies that want to drive growth through user experience and the core product, not surface-level experiments.
A newsletter with 7,000+ readers from Amplitude, Intercom, Miro, Atlassian, Grammarly, Framer, and more.
An educational course on User-Centric PLG in the AI era.
Brand partnerships with products I genuinely use and love.
And yes — the podcast.
Last year, I didn’t have enough time (or energy) to give all five equal attention. Something had to pause. The podcast quietly moved to the background.
But next year, it’s coming back from 20th January 🚀 — with a new theme: “The Creator’s Path.”
This season feels especially close to my heart. I recorded conversations with people who create in very different ways, and who deeply inspire me:
Michael Riddering — from creating courses to building companies
Nad Chishtie (Lovable) — why self-made generalists will shape the future
Ioana Teleanu — how to become a creator and pivot your career
Felix Haas (Lovable) — about lifelong “creator mindset” over job titles
Catt Small (Dropbox) — creating courses, books, advising with FT job
I hope 2026 becomes a year of creative endeavors for many of us — whether that’s a business, a course, content, or a product you’ve been postponing for too long.
2. What it looked like from the outside vs. what was really happening.
From the outside, I heard a lot of things like:
“Kate, you grew so fast.”
“Wow, you built such a big business.”
“How do you even manage all of this?”
Inside, it felt very different.
I didn’t feel like I was growing fast. I also didn’t feel overwhelmed. I’m still a solopreneur — but I have systems that support both my client work and content.
At the beginning of the year, I defined three principles to guide my decisions: ease, intuition, scale. Looking back, I can see how clearly they shaped this season.
1️⃣ Ease: I worked around five focused hours a day. Fridays were usually off, or reserved only for creative work.
2️⃣ Scale: whenever I had a choice, I tried to optimise
I collaborated with 15 companies, including Autodesk, Monday, Framer, Amplitude, and others — many of them five-figure engagements.
Last year, I had no brand partners. This year, I worked with five partners in parallel, each on long-term commitments.
I launched my Maven course in March, and more than 80 people joined it by the end of the year.
My LinkedIn grew from 10k to 23k followers — about 2.3× growth in 12 months.
3️⃣ Intuition. I followed curiosity instead of pushing sales calls. I focused on creating content I personally cared about. Most companies that reached out mentioned the newsletter or LinkedIn as how they found me.
3. What took far longer than planned — even when everything was “right”.
My three-week course, User-Centric PLG in the AI era, took almost three months of near full-time preparation for the first cohort.
I still remember starting it during a workation in Madeira. That period feels warm and very alive in my memory.
I’m a learning geek. And I struggle to ship things that don’t feel good enough. So I’m glad it took that long. Today, the course has an average rating of 4.8, and that matters to me.
As someone who talks a lot about quality, I can’t afford to deliver mediocre work. That’s why I’m now reinvesting thousands of euros into improving it even further — recording 15 async lessons and refreshing the program with stronger AI perspectives.
4. What quietly paused while I was in an in-between phase.
The podcast (as mentioned earlier) was one of those things. I also didn’t spend enough time thinking strategically about newsletter growth: bigger collaborations, more intentional distribution. That’s something I’m actively planning for next year.
5. What I hope you feel if you’re in a similar phase.
You can’t do everything at once — and that’s okay.
Some priorities are seasonal. Curiosity is often a better guide than a packed to-do list. New things, especially high-quality ones, need space. Pressure rarely helps them become real.
During my first solo year (2024), I lived in constant control and tension mode. In 2025, I felt much more at ease — and that brought better clients, stronger partnerships, and roughly 2× more revenue.
How we feel day to day shapes the quality of what we create. Feeling at ease isn’t laziness. It’s often the foundation for better work.
6. What this next era represents for me.
I want to keep following my intuition and see where it leads. So far, I love this journey. I feel confident in the decisions I’ve made — leaving a full-time job, building a content business alongside advisory work, and refusing to limit myself to “just one thing.”
Next year will likely be one of the most transformative chapters of my life. I have energy, plans, and curiosity for what’s ahead — and I’ll share more as it unfolds.
🤓 Want to invest in your learning next year? Get the Self-serve Onboarding course for 199€ before 31 December.
Creating valuable educational resources was a big focus for me last year, and this one became really special. We started working on this with Viktoria Kharlamova two years ago, and now we have turned it into a self-paced format.
We combined 16 lessons, 4 hours of video content, real-world cases from 80+ products, and hands-on practice to help you understand what truly creates best self-service onboarding. By the end, you’ll have clear onboarding solutions and the confidence to improve your first user experience in a way that actually moves metrics.
Now, let’s look back at the most-read articles, top LinkedIn posts, and favorite resources you might’ve missed 👇
📬 Best Growthmates issues in 2025:
Making AI Feel Like a Human Partner: 5 Behavioral Principles — with inspiring examples from Lovable, Claude, Riverside, ImagineArt, and more.
How an AI-Powered “User Onboarding Agent” More Than Doubled our Activation Rate — A behind-the-scenes look at how TheyDo replaced manual onboarding with a “CEO AI avatar” — and turned their onboarding into a true growth engine.
3 Behavioural Methods for better Habit-forming experience — Annoyed by popups? Let’s explore BJ Fogg, CREATE, and The Hook models applied to B2B and B2C products.
6 Behavioral Principles to Design Habit-Forming Onboarding Experiences — From Miller’s law to IKEA effect — dive into examples from Figma, Canva, Appcues and more. Thanks Ramli John for this collaboration!
How I Got Started as a Solopreneur? 10 Harsh Truths You Don’t See — New edition of “The Creator Path”: unfiltered lessons from my first years of running a one-person business.
📕 Featured resources and collections:
25 best growth flows to inspire your 2025 roadmap — A curated collection of interactive GIFs showing best-in-class onboarding, upgrade, and sharing flows from top PLG products.
10 AI adoption flows from top products — A free Miro board breaking down how products like Notion, Canva, and Grammarly introduce AI features in ways users actually discover and adopt.
10 onboarding teardowns from leading PLG companies — A deep, visual teardown of onboarding journeys from Notion, Figma, Intercom, and others highlighting what drives activation and where users drop.
30+ ethical SaaS & AI upgrade triggers — A Mobbin collection revealing how the best products nudge upgrades at the moment of highest value without pressure or dark patterns.
How Notion’s landing pages evolved into a $10B brand — A year-by-year teardown of Notion’s landing pages, showing how positioning, proof, emotion, and clarity evolved from indie to AI era.
Canva’s reverse trial: a masterclass in earned upgrades — A complete teardown of Canva’s upgrade flow, explaining how momentum, emotion, and behavior-based nudges make users say “yes” naturally.
Why sign-up is the most expensive assumption in B2B SaaS — A step-by-step breakdown of a high-impact sign-up flow experiment, including prompts and prototypes you can test in under 10 minutes.
🚀 Featured LinkedIn posts from 2025:
Landing your first clients as a solopreneur without a Plan B — How I left a 6-figure role, built credibility through a free lead magnet and smart LinkedIn announcements, and turned warm relationships into long-term clients in 60 days. Still shocked that 1000+ people reacted to this.
Why I stopped chasing titles - and bought back my time instead — A personal reflection on letting go of corporate titles and designing life around energy, freedom, and what actually fulfills you.
The acquisition pattern behind today’s most lovable products — Why small, beautifully executed products like Superhuman and MagicBrief get acquired and what it reveals about scale, AI, and product focus.
Why users ghost your onboarding (through the lens of behavioral science) — A practical look at the behavioral principles that explain onboarding drop-offs and how top products design around them.
In the company of women: stories that deserve to be louder — A celebration of women leaders and creators whose stories of resilience, creativity, and growth deserve more visibility.
🤝 Would like to work together on PLG in 2026?
As I step into 2026, I’m choosing depth over volume — working closely with a small number of teams where there’s space to think, care, and build things properly.
Q1 will be the main window to work with me in a hands-on format for a while. If improving onboarding, activation, or your PLG foundation is on your roadmap for next year, this is the right moment.
Here’s what I’m opening for Q1 👇
Onboarding Design Sprint 🏃♀️
I will work closely with your team to help you fix your product growth challenges and improve the first user experience that can drive x2 uplift on your Activation.
👉 Work with me → (only 1 slot for Q1 🔥)
PLG Advising for your team 🧠
Hands-on, in-depth advising across product, UX, and growth to build a scalable, sustainable PLG system that will last for years.
👉 Work with me → (only 1 slot for Q1🔥)
PLG Training for your team 🎓
A structured PLG training using the same frameworks I’ve taught teams at Grammarly, Autodesk, Monday.com, Intercom, Atlassian, and more.
👉 Work with me → (2 spots left for Q1🔥)
Brand Partnerships 📩
Let’s tell your product story to a trusted audience of 30,000+ product, design, and growth leaders — and co-create meaningful content that inspires the wider product and design community.
👉 Send an inquiry to hello@growthmates.club (2 spots left for Q1 🔥)
User-centric Growth Course 🎓
If these frameworks sparked new ideas — imagine working through your actual product challenge with my feedback, templates, and a dedicated community (AI will be there as well). This week, you can save 150$ for the enhanced program.
👉 Join with 150$ off → (only 2 discounted spots left for January ❄️.)
Premium Edition 💎
If you’re getting value from this newsletter, get access to full archive with more frameworks, teardowns, and exclusive content on PLG, Activation, AI, and how to build meaningful products that delight users.
👉 Upgrade to Premium and get full access.
That’s all for today, dear readers. As the year comes to a close, I want to say thank you — for reading, for reflecting with me, and for being part of this thoughtful, curious community 💜
If this newsletter resonated, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or see your reaction — it genuinely helps me shape what I create next. Feel free to share this edition with a friend who’s heading into 2026 thinking about growth, creativity, or building more intentionally.
Wishing you a calm end of the year, a bit of well-earned rest, and an inspiring start to the new chapter ahead ✨
Connect with me on LinkedIn and learn more about my work on Growthmates.club.
With best regards,
Kate Syuma