How I think about Growth
Growth is an incredibly interesting concept to me.
As someone who has been helping startups with growth for about 12–13 years, I can confidently say: most founders do not understand it well enough.
The first company I ever helped with growth was Uber. The second was Airbnb. The third, Electronic Arts. Since then, I’ve worked with about 200 companies — mostly venture-backed.
And when I talk with founders, it quickly becomes obvious who actually understands what growth is… and who is just making assumptions.
And let me be clear: I believe assumptions are one of the dumbest things human beings do all day long. Every. Single. One. Including me.
So, with that all said, let’s dive in.
Business Chess vs. Growth
Few founders I meet are clearly thinking deeply about growth in what I consider to be, the correct way.
They’re playing a different game. I’ll call it “business chess” to simplify things.
They treat growth folks — agencies, employees, contractors, software providers, etc. — like pawns on a board. Disposable. Interchangeable. Tools, if you will.
However, some founders do respect the growth practice. And you can tell when you meet them.
And trust me, I’ve spoken to nearly 2,000 venture backed founders, you can easily tell when someone hasn’t bothered to carefully think about the concept.
A Quick Example
Imagine a startup selling pillows for $100 each.
- Customer acquisition cost: $40
- Average order value: $120
- Net profit per order (after everything — salaries, insurance costs, the office costs, marketing, etc.): 12%
Now, if that company can reduce CAC from $40 to $30, or can scale ad spend without CAC increasing too much, it can be life-changing for the founders, employees, investors, etc.
It could be the difference between raising the next round, becoming what’s sometimes referred to in Silicon Valley as a “zombie” company, or complete and utter failure.
And if you look carefully at the sleep space — Casper, Nectar, Purple, Helix, Eight Sleep — you can see the difference between companies that respected growth and those that didn’t.
The Power of a Single Ad
Around 10 years ago, Purple launched an ad campaign you’ll probably remember if you’re above 30 years old.
It featured a woman dressed like a bartender at Oktoberfest, a contraption that included a large glass pane with eggs appended to it suspended in the air, and a large Purple mattress underneath it.
It was strange, captivating, as we like to say in the digital marketing space, had thumb-stopping power.
That video helped Purple scale at an incredible pace, while keeping CAC low enough to stay profitable at scale most founders only dream of.
Years later, Purple paid two comedians, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim — who I consider to be two of the funniest people alive — to make a video series called The Sunday Scaries.
It featured eye-catching visuals, hilarious comedy, and brilliant storytelling.
This wasn’t funny business — it was part of their remarkably simple “growth chess”.
Agencies like Sandwich Video and Chamber Media helped pioneer this kind of creative work. Purple, too.
The ad creative was produced by Harmon Brothers, a creative agency founded by three brothers, who share the same last name, from Idaho.
And they completely changed the digital marketing game with their big for ad for Squatty Potty, which is why Purple hired them.
Why You Can’t Learn This Stuff Online
You won’t find these lessons in a YouTube series like Y Combinator’s How to Start a Startup collection of videos recorded at Stanford.
They’re buried in the minds of great founders, incredible growth operators, a few creative geniuses, and some very sharp venture capitalists.
And that’s part of what makes growth so difficult.
When one company in a space hits escape velocity fast enough, something strange can happen: other VCs sometimes back off, afraid the category is already “spoken for.”
I saw this up close with Popshop Live vs. Whatnot.
Whatnot raised a large Series A as a result of what looked like explosive growth, even though the truth is they were almost effectively double- or even potentially almost triple-counting GMV. Meanwhile, in my opinion Popshop had stronger fundamentals figured out.
But that didn’t matter to investors, they seemed to think the race was over, even though as we can see today by the lack of live-shopping penetration in the US, the “race” seems far from over.
Growth-Minded Founders
The best founders I’ve met — the ones who truly respect growth — also tend to be profoundly kind, empathetic, long-term thinkers.
One of my favorite examples: my friend Brian, who is the founder and CEO of Oats Overnight.
Back in 2020, I ran an influencer campaign for him that was was of the last I ever ran before moving into creator/influencer outreach for (mostly) software companies. About sixty days in, it was clear the campaign wasn’t working.
So, I let Brian out of the contract. I told him not to worry about our agreement, because I felt it was the right thing to do, and let him off the hook for the second half of the agreed upon amount we originally agreed to.
You see, before we even started the campaign, Brian told me he respected that I had even told him in plain English that I didn’t think influencer marketing, the way I would do it at least, likely wouldn’t work for him. And he had told me before we started that was largely why he wanted to work with me in the first place.
And because of how we each handled things, we stayed close friends, despite the failed campaign.
And years later, I connected him with my friend Aakash — an incredible paid social “ninja” for lack of a better descriptor — who remains in one of my opinions one of the best media buyers and paid social ad creative producers in the world who’s worked with the likes of Coinbase, Credit Karma, Machine Zone (the company behind Game of War), and more.
And that intro turned into a win for all parties, including myself. Aakash got paid & got to enjoy Brian working with Oats Overnight, Brian got some great creatives, and I got to help my friends & Aakash eventually paid me a significant referral fee.
Agencies, In-House, and the Hybrid Model
The founder of Hubble once described three approaches to growth:
- 100% agency — outsource everything
- 100% in-house — do it all yourself
- Hybrid — a mix of both
But, as you can imagine, “hybrid” isn’t so simple. It’s a spectrum.
You see, you can leave it all to agencies, you do it all in-house, or you go with a mix. The most popular way of approaching the hybrid model is to learn from agencies, build in-house things you think you can fine, and keep a few of the outside sources of growth around.
There are no rules, only best practices.
Growth Is Wide
Growth is complex.
It can mean demand generation, conversion rate optimization, product-led growth, international retail distribution, or really anything that drives faster revenue growth and more profitably.
I’d say the trick is to find the best operators and advisors — and striking fair deals with them, whether in-house or not.
The amount of times I’ve crushed it for a company, only to have the founder try to get me to try to join their company for much less then half of what the agency fees would have been at scale, plus a small piece of equity, is hilarious.
Because here’s the truth: the very best growth people usually end up scaling their own offers.
They’re almost impossible to hire.
I’ll never forget one example of this that’s probably worth sharing that ensued immediately after scaling a DTC brand from ~$2.2k/day to ~$15k/day in revenue.
The founder’s boyfriend, at the time a relatively prominent name in Silicon Valley, asked me on a call about a month after they started to ignore me, if there was any chance I would consider working for all cash, no equity, despite the fact we had agreed on 30% of the company prior to the campaign and I had given them a 50% discount on this initial test as part of that agreement.
About a year later, I got a call that their revenue was back down to about $100K/month, around it where it was before I start my first “push” for them..
A Lesson From the Masters
One night in the early days of Clubhouse, I was talking with Gabe Leydon from Machine Zone.
This is a man who spent $50 million per month on paid social… and another $50 million per month on affiliate marketing.
He told me something that stuck forever:
“The diet pill guys? Impossible to hire.”
Let in sink in.
The best marketers, the ones who truly master growth, eventually just find the best offer… and run it themselves.
Which makes your job simple:
- Try your best
- Respect the practice
- Find great people, agencies, software, whatever
- When you do — treat them really, really well