Table of contents
TrueNorth vs Growth Method: The Short Answer
If you are comparing TrueNorth and Growth Method, there is something you should know before reading any feature table: TrueNorth no longer exists.
The product went dark in mid-2025. Its domain, truenorth.io, now redirects to Venture Harbour, the venture studio that built it, and Venture Harbour’s own company timeline records that TrueNorth “fails to reach product-market fit and is sunsetted.”
That makes this a different kind of comparison page. TrueNorth and Growth Method were the two platforms built on the same conviction: that marketing teams should plan and prioritise everything against a goal, not a to-do list. So this article covers what TrueNorth was, why it mattered, what happened to it, and where teams who believed in its approach can go now.
What Was TrueNorth?
TrueNorth was a “marketing OS” built by Marcus Taylor and the team at Venture Harbour, a bootstrapped UK venture studio. It started life in 2020 as SignOff, a Slack app for approving marketing ideas, and launched as a full platform on Product Hunt in June 2022.
Its positioning was admirably clear: “Hit your marketing goals.” The homepage promised the only growth marketing platform to plan and track marketing in one place, “with everything and everyone focused on the goal.”
Key TrueNorth features
- Growth projection: A goal-first growth model, broken into monthly milestones, with scenario modelling to stress-test your strategy
- Idea prioritisation: ICE scoring (impact, confidence, ease) plus async “ideation sessions” to generate campaign ideas against at-risk metrics
- Campaign timeline: Every campaign on one timeline with expected ROI, goal impact, and budget tracking
- Integrations: Google Analytics as the backbone (parsing campaign data from 100+ channels), plus HubSpot, Stripe, and LinkedIn
- Simple pricing: $99/month flat for all features and your whole team
Marcus Taylor summed up the philosophy behind the product in 2022:
The truth is that what wins in growth marketing is being data-driven. In fact, the most successful teams live and die by their growth marketing metrics.
Marcus Taylor, founder of TrueNorth and Venture Harbour
What Happened to TrueNorth?
The public record tells a clear story:
- June 2022: TrueNorth launches on Product Hunt. That same month, its changelog and blog go quiet. The final features it released were a Stripe integration and campaign task lists.
- 2022 to 2025: No new features, blog posts, or integrations. As late as 2025, the integrations page still advertised Google Optimize, which Google discontinued in 2023.
- Mid-2025: The website goes offline. Archive snapshots show the site live in mid-June 2025 and returning 404s by late July.
- Today: truenorth.io redirects to Venture Harbour, which has refocused as an AI automation venture studio. Its timeline states TrueNorth failed to reach product-market fit and was sunsetted.
None of this is a criticism of the idea. Venture Harbour bootstrapped ambitious products and made an honest call when this one did not find its market. But it does mean nobody evaluating tools today can choose TrueNorth, and any team still running on it has no path forward on the product.
What TrueNorth Got Right
TrueNorth’s core convictions were correct, and they are worth preserving:
Marketing should start from a goal, not a task list. TrueNorth put a growth projection at the centre of everything, so every campaign idea was judged by its contribution to the goal. Sean Ellis, who coined the term growth hacking, has made the same argument for years:
Without a single success metric for your company to focus on, functional teams will be in conflict about what’s important for driving growth.
Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth
Prioritisation needs a system. ICE scoring against a shared goal beats a backlog ordered by whoever spoke loudest in the last meeting.
Plans and results belong in one place. TrueNorth pulled Google Analytics data into the same tool where campaigns were planned, so the plan and the outcome sat side by side.
Where TrueNorth Fell Short
Beyond the dormancy, the product had structural gaps that its shutdown froze in place:
- No process for learnings: Results were captured, but there was no structured way to turn a finished campaign into knowledge the next campaign builds on
- Attribution assumptions: The revenue model worked best for products with clean, short-loop attribution, and struggled with SEO, brand, and long-cycle B2B work
- A thin integration surface: Google Analytics, HubSpot, Stripe, and LinkedIn, with no Amplitude or Mixpanel
- No AI capabilities: Development froze before the LLM era, so none of the categorisation, summarisation, or agent workflows that marketers now expect ever arrived
Growth Method: Where the Goal-First Approach Lives On
Growth Method is the only work management platform built specifically for marketing teams, consultants, and agencies, and it is built on the same conviction TrueNorth was: everything starts from your goal.
One goal, one prioritised backlog
Growth Method captures every campaign idea against your goal, categorises it with AI, and prioritises it in one shared backlog. Ranking only works when there is a single criterion to rank against, which is why the methodology centres on one focusing goal rather than a list of them.
A built-in campaign lifecycle
Campaigns move through clear stages, from planning through live to analysed and complete, with structured timeframes at each stage. That rhythm is how teams run more campaigns without anything stalling in limbo.
Integrated analytics and reporting
Growth Method connects to your analytics stack through MCP integrations: Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Console, PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel and more. Campaign results are measured automatically, and built-in reporting produces professional updates covering strategy, your goal, live campaigns, and impact, the “single source of truth” TrueNorth promised.
Compounding learnings
Every completed campaign is analysed and summarised, so what you learned is captured and searchable. This is the piece TrueNorth never built: the difference between recording results and compounding them.
Actively developed, with human support
Growth Method releases new features regularly, including the AI categorisation and summarisation modern teams expect. Support is always human, from the team that builds the product.
Migrating from TrueNorth
If your team ran on TrueNorth, or you shortlisted it before it disappeared, Growth Method is the closest philosophical successor: goal-first planning, systematic prioritisation, and integrated measurement, actively maintained.
Growth Method offers a free white glove migration service and expert onboarding, so your backlog, campaign plans, and goal model can be rebuilt without your team losing momentum.
Customer Success with Growth Method
We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results.
Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services
Conclusion
TrueNorth deserved better than the market gave it. It asked the right question: what if marketing was planned against a goal instead of a task list? But the product has been sunsetted, and its last feature arrived in 2022.
Growth Method asks the same question and is very much alive. We help companies implement a systematic approach to grow leads and revenue. For more background, read our in-depth TrueNorth review or our guide to TrueNorth alternatives, or get started today to see Growth Method for yourself.