The way I understand it, which may not be a complete picture of the reality, it’s just my impression, is that growth marketers are marketing pros that are killer with spreadsheets, can see the big picture strategy, and are always looking for exponentials.
Who are best growth marketers example ever?
Mark Zuckerberg and Chamath Palihapitiya.
They founded and then growth-engineered Facebook to be a viral, network effects, exponential machine. I don’t know who coined the term viral coefficient, but they perfected it. From what I recall, they continued to test hundreds and hundreds of tiny things to make Facebook go viral. Everything from onboarding, do nudging, to contact importing, to the Facebook News feed, to the WhatsApp purchase for installs, all of it. I think Mark Zuckerberg is probably, actually the #1 growth marketer to learn from if you had to choose one person that’s fully in the game.
Zuck is fully in the game
Zuck just purchased a 49% stake in Scale AI and is bringing Alexandr over. Why? Because he’s playing the strategic growth game against AI competitors in Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mark knows he’s pretty strong on the social layer, but he’s fighting a few battles:
- vs TikTok: their growth has outstripped Instagram, and the Facebook platform is slowly fading
- vs Apple: Apple’s iOS14 rollout threw a huge wrench in Meta’s tracking abilities – for this reason Zuck needs to fight Tim on this front, and is trying to leapfrog to the next platform – wearable glasses + Oculus.
Zuck was all in on the metaverse. But that money has been shifted over to AI and data center spend. He dabbled in crypto with Libra. He’s handed that torch on to Stripe with his blessing.
BUT
I think Zuck and Meta will pull it all together. Literally all of these most trending things Meta is doing:
- They own top social media networks – and a conglomeration of top players in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
- They own their own data centers – not dependent on AWS or Google Cloud
- Zuck is now getting political and forming political alliances across the aisle
- Zuck is in and at the Octogan, most importantly
- He’s a sworn frenemey of Elon Musk and they were almost going to fight? Excellent growth strategy honestly. No one does better media than Elon Musk, and if you want to wrestle a wild animal, things are going to get bloody.
But Sam Altman also said that ChatGPT broke all the rules about startups that he knew, he didn’t have the network effects, or the immediate distribution. The product was just so insanely valuable that it took off on its own. Word of mouth marketing. This is rare, but it’s also how all the great consumer tech companies got big – from Google to Netflix to Tesla.
So the rules may be different with growth marketing in 2026, 2027, and beyond. It’s a new era with AI and growth marketing. Things will change, but there are universal principles of growth that are foundation to life itself. So in my mind, there will always be this position needed. But what do growth marketers actually do?
What do growth marketers do?
In my opinion, growth marketers work in tandem with the CEO, CTO, CFO, and
Who are allies to growth marketers?
I think growth marketers must have a strong alliance with the CEO, CTO, and CFO. If the growth marketer has them all on board, the sky is the limit.
Who are frenemies to growth marketers?
The CMO and the head of PR or communications, and maybe HR, are the frenemes of a growth marketer. For a growth marketer to be at their zenith, they are wild pioneers on the frontier looking for gold – the next great exploit. They are risk takers, explorers, true space cadets looking for the next thing.
Great growth marketers tend to be into AI, crypto, lifting weights, and getting deep into historical naval battles. They probably played Starcraft or Command and Conquer series, or Age of Empires II. They want to see the big picture, but also find exploits. They are an anthropologist, marketer, and deep thinker. They are that like that person in your friend group that can be a wild partier, but then changed their ways and is now a really chill deep thinker.
But a growth engineer is the true power-up for a growth marketer
A growth engineer is a software engineer that seeks out and scales growth strategies. I use the word strategy carefully because the growth engineer sees the entire architecture of the mission, and prioritizes, connects the dots, and builds the machine.
The growth marketer and growth engineer are like Sam and Frodo together – incomplete without each other.
Growth marketing terms, tactics, strategies
There will be an amazing growth marketing glossary soon, mind you, I love glossaries. But here’s a quick, partial, incomplete, yet presently salient list of the growth marketing terms I know of:
- Exponential growth
- Growth s-curve
- Asymptote
- Viral coefficient
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Scale AI
- Query
- Cash flow
- Power laws
- Logistical growth
- Geometric growth
- Machine learning
- Linear regression
- Reinforcement learning
- K nearest neighbor
- Kaggle
- Stripe’s Bridge acquisition
Why do growth marketers do it?
I’d wager that a real growth marketer does it because that’s what they were meant to do. Either by nature, by happenstance, or by luck, mathematically the top 1% of growth marketers are going to be amazing at their job and also love it. They will feel that they were meant for it. They are rare and they are often startup founders themselves that love growth.
Why do they do it? They can’t do anything else.
Why do the next 10% of great growth marketers do it? I think they feel truly called to study the underlying universal principles of growth to understand nature, humanity, and the universe better. I think this group looks to great company founders and respects them, but knows that growth marketing is truly calling their name, and they wouldn’t want to be a founder across all different company systems. These growth marketers just want to perfect and scale their craft, and use to enrich their own life and the lives of those close to them.
Why do other great growth marketers do it? For the top quartile 25% of growth marketers – why do they do it? Growth marketing will be in demand for a long time. I think this new era of AI – with optimization for ChatGPT, Google AI, and others on the precipice, things are looking more interesting for those with great ideas, a grand strategy, and a desire to market and show growth.
This is me writing this, even though it seems like AI writing doing this because it’s such a boring set of words in a trio: growth marketers are strategic (yes really strategic, not just using this word off-hand, like they are playing chess strategic, or deep in fantasy football, or taking over the USSR), intelligent (smart people, that are normal and can communicate, and are curious and want to learn more), deep thinkers (great growth marketers would think 30 hrs a week to do a solid 5 hours of amazingly valuable work). They can get excited about ideas, and always want to be testing (test 10x to find the gems, scale your hypothesis, do matrix creation and testing, learn and implement the latest machine learning techniques). They know when to go into hypergrowth mode, and when to do some internal maintenance and infrastructure improvement.
Growth marketers: who will you be this year? Why do you do it? What are your names? DM me.
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