The Three-Block Framework for Solo SaaS Growth

Most solo founders don't have a growth problem. They have a consistency problem. They'll spend a week obsessing over a new feature, then realise they haven't thought about acquisition in two weeks. Or they'll run a marketing push, get some signups, and then lose half of them because onboarding is broken and nobody was paying attention.

The issue isn't effort. It's allocation. When you're the only person, everything competes for the same limited hours. Without a system, whatever feels most urgent wins — and urgency is a terrible way to grow a product.

I've been running a framework that fixes this. It's simple enough to stick with and structured enough to compound over time. I call it the Three-Block Framework.

The Three Pillars

Every week gets divided into three blocks, each tied to a pillar:

Acquisition — How do we get new users? This is anything that puts your product in front of people who don't know about it yet. Content, outreach, landing page experiments, SEO, partnerships, cold emails. The work that fills the top of the funnel.

Retention — How do we keep the ones we have? This is the product work that makes existing users stay. Bug fixes, onboarding improvements, feature requests from active users, support, and anything that reduces churn. The work that stops the bucket leaking.

Focus — What's the one thing that moves the needle most this week? This is your strategic bet. It might be a new feature launch, a pricing experiment, an integration, or a complete redesign of a core flow. It's the block where you do the deep work that doesn't fit neatly into acquisition or retention but matters the most right now.

Each week, you commit to one concrete action per block. Not a vague goal. A specific, shippable thing.

A Week Might Look Like This

Here's a real example from my Ship Log — the public log where I track what I ship every week on Surehand:

That's it. Three things. Not a backlog of fifty items with priority labels. Three commitments that cover the full surface area of your business.

The ship log is how I keep myself accountable. Every week, the three blocks get filled in publicly. It's hard to skip a pillar when it's staring back at you with a blank space next to it.

Breaking It Down to Days

The weekly view gives you direction. But you can take it further and map blocks to days. This is how I structure mine:

• Monday/Tuesday — Focus block. Start the week with deep work while energy is high. This is where the strategic bet gets built.
• Wednesday/Thursday — Retention block. Mid-week is good for product work, bug fixes, user feedback loops, and support.
• Friday — Acquisition block. End the week by shipping something visible. Publish the post, send the email, launch the experiment.

This isn't rigid. Some weeks the Focus block needs three days. Some weeks retention is on fire and needs immediate attention. The structure is a default, not a cage. But having a default matters — it means you don't waste Monday morning deciding what to work on.

Why It Compounds

Here's the part most people miss. The value of this framework isn't in any single week. It's in what happens over months.

If you ship one acquisition action every week for 12 weeks, you've got 12 pieces of content, or 12 outreach campaigns, or 12 landing page experiments. Some of them won't work. But the ones that do keep working after you ship them. A blog post that ranks keeps bringing traffic. An onboarding flow you fixed keeps converting. A feature you built keeps retaining users.

Week 1 feels like nothing. Week 12 feels like momentum. Week 24 feels like a machine.

The compounding only works if you're consistent across all three pillars. If you only do acquisition, you're pouring water into a leaking bucket. If you only do retention, you're polishing a product nobody finds. If you only do focus work, you're building in a vacuum. The framework forces balance, and balance is what compounds.

The Anti-Pattern

The opposite of this framework is what I call "fire mode" — where you wake up, look at what's broken or what feels urgent, and spend the whole day reacting. It feels productive. You're busy. You're fixing things. But zoom out to a month and nothing has moved forward. You've just been running in place.

Fire mode is the default state of a solo founder. The Three-Block Framework is how you override it.

Keeping It Honest

The framework only works if you track it. I do this publicly through my Ship Log — a weekly record of what I committed to and what I actually shipped across all three blocks. It's a one-minute exercise that creates accountability, even if you're only accountable to yourself.

Go look at it. Every single week follows the same structure: Retention, Growth, The Focus Block. That's not a coincidence. It's the framework in action.

Over time, the log becomes a record of compounding effort. You can scroll back through months and see exactly how the product grew — not through some grand strategy, but through consistent, balanced execution week after week.

Final Thoughts

The Three-Block Framework isn't clever. It's not a growth hack. It's a boring system that works because it removes the daily decision of "what should I work on?" and replaces it with a structure that guarantees you're covering the three things that actually grow a SaaS product.

Acquisition. Retention. Focus. Every week. That's it.

The founders who win aren't the ones with the best ideas. They're the ones who show up consistently across the full surface area of their business. A simple framework makes that possible.