Brief aside: Every journey starts somewhere. I’ve been meaning to launch my personal website for ages but kept finding reasons to put it off. Now that it’s actually time to launch, I’m excited about carving out my own tiny corner of the Internet to share some stuff I think could be helpful or interesting to others. Spoiler alert: I have a hunch some themes will emerge, particularly about the intersection of “old-school” growth hacking and modern-day LLMs. I became a full-stack marketer and developer in the before-fore times – pre-“Attention is All You Need“ and pre-pandemic – and I’ve been an LLM power-user since early 2023. However, I didn’t become fully LLM-pilled until I started building my own tools back in Q1 2024. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think current frontier models are a panacea for all of our problems, but I do think it’s insane how quickly I can go from 0 to 1 with a well-defined specification and some context engineering. Anyway, be sure to come back sometime and check out the Tools page to see what I’m using to scale growth marketing, as well as more “Insights” here for what I’ve learned since.
Why Growth Is More Than a Buzzword
At its core, growth is simply the disciplined pursuit of creating more value for more people. That means understanding your customers deeply, measuring what matters, and iterating relentlessly. It also means resisting the temptation to chase vanity metrics and instead focus on the levers that actually move the needle.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits them and sells itself.” - Peter Drucker
I would probably extend this quote to explicitly call out domain, but the important thing to note is that internalizing that idea can have a profound impact on how you communicate about your product or service. Integrated Marketing Communications is an academic lens through which you can view this idea, but you can also just think of campaigns as conversations, funnels as journeys, and metrics as stories about real people making real decisions.
The Framework We Keep Coming Back To
Over the years, one mental model has proven itself again and again. It’s called the Three Pillars of Sustainable Growth:
- Acquisition - Finding the right people through the right channels at the right cost (and the right time).
- Activation - Ensuring those people experience your core value as quickly as possible in a way that is actually helpful for them.
- Retention - Building habits and relationships that keep customers coming back, ideally in a way that fills them with joy.
What I like about this framework is that each pillar reinforces the others. For example, great retention makes acquisition cheaper, fast activation boosts retention, and efficient acquisition funds the experiments that improve everything else. But one thing I’ve noticed that some people can easily lose sight of when focusing intently on these three pillars is the importance of the relationship with the customer throughout the entire journey. For example, even in transactional relationships there are benefits (like higher conversions) when you focus on delighting the customer. So it’s still important to think about the experience of the customer when (e.g.) performing funnel math, which might appear dry and clinical and exclusively quantitative on the surface, but can actually be heavily influenced by qualitative factors like how a customer feels at any given touchpoint.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here is a taste of the topics we will explore in upcoming posts:
- Why your onboarding flow is probably your biggest growth lever
- How to build an AI-powered attribution model that better reflects reality
- Lessons from scaling inbound and outbound campaigns across multiple verticals
- The role of content marketing in B2B demand generation, and the tools you should be using to improve this channel
A Note on Philosophy
I believe in a few guiding principles that shape how I approach every engagement:
- Data over opinions - Gut feelings are a starting point, not a strategy.
- Systems over tactics - One-off wins fade; repeatable processes compound. (Also, Do Things That Don’t Scale, yes, but be smart about it - especially now that LLMs can build small, useful tools very, very quickly. i.e. the calculus on XKCD’s Automation is very different now.)
- Clarity over complexity - If it can’t be explained simply, it’s not understand well enough.
- Speed over perfection - Ship, measure, learn, repeat. In other words – don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
What Comes Next
In the weeks ahead, I plan to share deep dives into real-world case studies, tactical breakdowns of campaigns that worked (and ones that did not), and frameworks you can apply to your own business today. I’m also looking forward to sharing examples of tools I’ve built to help unlock the superpowers of the proverbial 10X Growth Hacker. 🚀
If any of that sounds useful, stick around (or sign up for the newsletter below). And if there is a topic you’d like me to tackle, reach out on the contact page. I’d be happy to learn more about what’s interesting to you or what business problem you’re looking to solve.
Thanks for reading and see you next time! 👋