The growth playbook is dead. So what should you do instead?
Here’s why your next breakout channel won’t look like the last one.
"Sandy, what is the ideal growth strategy for my company?"
I've heard this question at least three times in the past two weeks alone. Founders think all growth best practices have changed because of AI: everything is broken, channels don't work anymore, and they need a new perfect playbook to follow.
But there is no one-size-fits-all growth playbook anymore. Not because AI has broken it, but because growth playbooks were always built to break. Every channel that has ever delivered outsized results followed the same cycle:
Early mover advantage creates massive returns > everyone notices and copies it > saturation happens > performance drops > costs rise > the playbook dies.
In the early 2010s, tiny keyword tweaks would shoot you to the top of search results on the App Store. Then tools like Sensor Tower made this playbook visible to everyone, turning it from a growth hack into table stakes.
Between 2014 and 2020, the average CPM for Facebook ads rose from $2.50 to over $14. What started as a goldmine became another overpriced channel.
The same goes for influencer marketing, onboarding flows, email drips, push notifications… you name it.
From 2010 to 2020, growth was about finding the next hidden gem and going all in on it. Now, that cycle moves faster than ever. Here’s what has changed, and how companies can still win today.
What has changed
Growth feels harder now because of several shifts happening at once:
1. More noise, more fragmentation, higher costs
Marketers now spread their time, attention, and budget across 10+ paid channels, compared to just 3-5 in the early 2010s.
This has two inevitable consequences:
Diminishing returns: at first, the most effective channels yield substantial results, but as you add more, each requires more investment for incrementally smaller gains.
Power law distribution: a small number of channels drive the majority of results, and the rest contribute marginally. I explored this concept in detail in another article, if you’re interested.
Marketing budgets are stretched thinner across more touchpoints, and it’s harder to achieve meaningful scale in any single channel.
2. Platforms are changing faster than before
Not only are there more channels, but platforms are also changing at a much faster pace.
TikTok alone launched more than 15 new features in 2023.
Now think about that pace across all major platforms, and the information overload becomes real. It’s a large investment of time and money, but the risk of not keeping up is much higher, as all these changes impact user behavior: how they discover, how they engage, and how they shop.
3. Algorithms change constantly
Features change, but so do algorithms, as platform owners look to increase engagement and revenue.
It’s now easier than ever to rank and get traffic (even for startups) thanks to algorithmic shifts.
The most incredible example is Level Health, that launched a new domain and reached over 100k visits from Google search in just one month (and many more since). A feat like this used to take months or years of link-building and growing domain authority. Now, it can be achieved quickly by understanding the algorithms and creating the type of content they prioritize.
Here's how some of the main platforms have changed their algorithms in the past few months:
YouTube: Made Shorts a priority in feeds for the Home tab, shifting from their historical focus on long-form content.
TikTok: Updates their core feed algorithm every two to three weeks - extremely fast compared to other social platforms.
Instagram Reels: Shifted from square image content to prioritizing almost exclusively short-form video content, especially for discovery tab and recommendations features.
Google rolled out multiple changes within just a few months in 2022:
Helpful Content updates prioritizing content written by real people with topical authority.
AI Overviews: summarizing answers directly on the results page, so users never need to click through to the original sites.
Double snippet indexing: surfacing multiple summaries for a single query.
This is an unusually high volume of changes in a short time as Google used to release only a few core updates per year. Naturally, the impact has been massive: sites like HubSpot lost significant traffic from organic Google search while Wikipedia, that initially saw a dip, later regained visibility as AI Overviews began relying heavily on its content.
4. AI commoditized content creation
Just five years ago, working in growth was a game of betting and waiting.
You’d align with the marketing team, pick one main positioning, wait three months while the team created the assets, and eventually you’d release them. Often, you’d find out that they didn’t work... After wasting time and money, you had to start all over again.
AI turned that process on its head.
Now, you can create dozens of variations of copy, each targeting a specific segment or intent, virtually for free. You can A/B test endlessly and create personalized marketing funnels without having to pick one positioning up front.
But it comes at a cost: AI has commoditized informational content, making it less useful for SEO. Differentiation is now the real challenge.
How top teams win in this environment
But some companies are finding massive growth, often in unexpected places. They do it not by following playbooks, but by writing their own.
Here's my framework for any growth team navigating these dynamics:
1. Find underpriced attention
Traditional channels are too crowded and expensive to compete in, so your best bet is to look elsewhere.
On your growth charts, identify unlabelled channels with spikes and bumps whose exact origin you can’t define. These could be partnerships, community tools, or new content formats, for example. They are usually great indicators that you’ve found underpriced attention.
Some companies have done exactly this, to much success:
Midjourney: they grew rapidly through Discord, a platform that most growth teams would overlook. But it worked for them because Discord is inherently asset sharing-native and highly interactive, plus it has a robust developer ecosystem to integrate product experiences.
Duolingo: Duo, their mascot, became a TikTok sensation before brands even considered turning characters into social media personas. To this day, it is still one of the company’s most effective acquisition channels.
These aren’t traditional moves, but that’s what makes them work. If your initiative doesn't have a name yet, a playbook, a best practice… that might mean you're on the right track.
2. Master content-market fit as a proxy to channel-market fit
With different channels requiring different formats, you need to consider content-market fit as much as channel-market fit. Here are some companies that got this right:
Runway ML started as a research team building AI models. They didn’t have much experience with marketing, but when they began posting on X, they quickly found an audience of early tech adopters. Their model updates started going viral, not just with developers, but across a much wider crowd.
When the AI wave hit, Zapier shifted its content to focus on AI productivity. That helped them attract builders and operators across companies and grow one of the most popular AI productivity blogs and newsletters, all without spending a single dollar on ads.
The best teams don’t just pick the right channel, they tailor their content to win on it.
3. Build culture as a growth engine
With some products, community-led growth can be the right bet.
CharacterAI tapped into communities like animation fans who loved talking to their favorite movie characters. The company made it easy for them by featuring those characters right on their landing pages.
SunoAI grew through remix loops and musician community. They focused on people who wanted to generate music with single prompts and built around them.
It’s not enough to find a community. You also need to speak its language and become part of it.
4. Use human founders as a growth channel
In an era of AI-generated content saturation, authentic founder voices have become one of the most powerful growth channels. Have your founder write opinionated technical content, and you’ve created a direct pipeline of trust that no paid advertising can replicate.
Beehiiv’s co-founder regularly publishes in-depth LinkedIn posts about the company’s growth, feature launches, and other updates. These posts get lots of views, engagements, and can convert professionals into potential customers for their newsletter platform.
Example of Beehiiv’s founder-led sales on LinkedIn. Adam Robinson’s media presence has built enormous trust at scale for multiple businesses, including Retention.com and RB2B. Investors, partners, and early customers show up because they’re already bought into the founder, not just the product.
Competitors can copy your features and pricing. But your founder’s unique voice is the one thing they can’t copy.
5. Drive product-led developer growth
AI has created a paradox in developer marketing: while it enables non-developers to build, the most successful AI products still rely on developers to create community buzz.
DevinAI gained massive mainstream attention, but that buzz originated within developer communities first, then cascaded into other functions.
Devin AI, the AI engineer, generated buzz among the developer community at launch. Consider the competition between foundational AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Llama. Despite the open-source appeal of Llama or the enterprise promises of Gemini, ChatGPT continues to dominate, not due to technical superiority, but because developers find it easier to use.
Developers might not be your end users, but in AI, they’re often the ones shaping the buying decision.
Conclusion
Your next breakout growth channel won’t come from reading a LinkedIn post and copying what worked for someone else.
In a world where channels are noisier, platforms change weekly, and AI has commoditized content creation, the only real edge is building something no one else can copy.
So the right question to ask yourself isn’t What’s the growth strategy I should follow?, it’s What am I seeing that others haven’t spotted yet? And then, acting on it. Fast. If you’re waiting for certainty, you’re already late.
Find your own edge, and keep building around it. That’s the only way to win in a world where everything changes all the time. If you’re struggling to find the answers to these questions, let me know. I’d love to help.