Growth is dead, long live growth

The past 15 years have been a beautiful, chaotic mess. The playbook for online growth was basically: find the new digital watering hole where attention is underpriced, figure out what the algorithm gods want, and exploit it until they inevitably change the rules. It was fun while it lasted.

echo "GROWTH.EXE NOT FOUND. REBOOTING NEW STRATEGY..."

The growth gold rush: a brief history

Each phase of this shift followed a predictable pattern. First, we had text (Google AdWords, SEO). Then images (Facebook, Instagram). Now we’re in the video era (TikTok, YouTube). This wasn’t magic—it was just a function of better bandwidth and better phones. More pixels, more eyeballs, more ways to extract money from people’s brains.

But here’s the thing: these platforms are all mature now. TikTok’s growth isn’t looking so infinite anymore. Facebook is just a mall full of boomer ads. YouTube is still king, but it’s competitive as hell. The era of easy arbitrage is over.

So what now?

The algorithmic free lunch is over

If you won early in one of these cycles, congrats—you’re probably still coasting. But for everyone else? The game has changed. There’s no more magical growth hack that’ll make you rich overnight. Winning now means:

  1. Actually being good. Look at podcasts. Five years ago, you could just ramble into a mic and get traction. Now? The top shows are basically Hollywood productions. Same with Twitter. Gone are the days of “just post threads.” Now you need elite content, distribution, and maybe a sprinkle of paid.

  2. Sales over marketing. Spray-and-pray content strategies are getting worse ROI by the day. For B2B, we’re going back to an old-school approach: targeted, human-driven sales. Less “growth hacking,” more “just sell the damn thing.”

  3. Product-Led Growth (PLG) works, but not for everything. If your product spreads virally (e.g., Loom, Calendly), great. If your product costs $1k+ and requires multiple stakeholders? Yeah, probably not happening.

  4. Welcome to the CozyWeb. Open platforms feel increasingly like pay-to-play hellscapes. The new move? Private communities. Discord servers. Niche Slack groups. Slow growth, high retention, much cozier. Not hyper-scalable, but also way less fragile than playing Russian roulette with Facebook ads.

  5. AI is gonna change things—but how? Everyone is freaking out about AI killing Google search (which, yeah, fair), but nobody really knows how AI-driven growth actually works yet. It’ll create opportunities, but what those are? TBD.

TL;DR: Growth isn’t dead, just harder

For the first time in my career, there’s no obvious next big growth hack. No magical channel where you can print money if you get in early. Instead, we’re shifting toward an era where execution matters more than arbitrage. You have to be good, you have to be defensible, and you have to be patient.

It’s not the death of growth. It’s just the death of easy growth.

Growth is dead, long live growth.