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For most of the past 15 years, the playbook for growing a consumer product was close to a science. We saw this up close at Hulu, Crunchyroll, and HBO Max. Each of those companies scaled by investing in similar growth functions:
Audience development: growing followers and engagement on all social platforms, aimed at driving awareness and affinity for our brands.
Lifecycle comms: using low-cost channels, like email & product notifications, to communicate with our "owned" audience to drive engagement & revenue.
Paid media: as long as the CAC : CLV math made sense, we'd scale spend across Facebook, Google, and all other ad platforms to bring on new subscribers.
Partnerships: building relationships with all sorts of strategic partners, YouTube channels / podcasters / etc., with the goal of driving awareness, acquisition, and engagement & retention.
We weren't unique in how we were structured. Lots of consumer companies had a similar makeup. You definitely needed some art, especially in creative and brand functions. But the playbook was well understood and success was, to a large extent, dependent on execution.
A friend of mine always comes back to the central thing LLMs are really good at: "more". They ship a lot more code, make a lot more media, and broadly bring a lot more noise (and some value & signal) into our world. Like a tsunami, all of that noise has been gradually taking over all the channels we depended on for growth.
Email, text, and voice calls are all being crushed by spam. When was the last time you actually paid attention to a DM, email, or text from an unknown number or person?
Bots and automated posts are taking over social feeds, with platforms rotating whimsically between whack-a-mole to protect the UX and finding ways to make money on the flood of AI-generated media. You have to wonder whether DAUs & time spent on these apps continues growing as their feeds become more bot- and ad-centric.
Bringing all this together, the growth channels we depended on for quite a while are becoming way less effective. This is happening at the same time the amount of consumer products are exploding, whether they be vibe-coded, VC-backed, or everything between.
All these channels have been growing in noisiness for some time. We've been reading the same story for a while: "attention is all that matters". That's why we've seen text -> image -> video, and those videos getting shorter & punchier, and broadly hot takes getting hotter, all for the sake of grabbing someone for more than a millisecond as they scroll their feed.
The "more"-ness of AI is taking this noisiness into the stratosphere. Some implications I've been thinking about recently...
The incredibly obvious one is the noise will make it really hard for any new consumer products (and, to a lesser extent, B2B / enterprise products) to breakthrough and gain traction. If that plays out, then AI may be much more of a sustaining technology than a disruptive one. All the existing winners will just become WAY bigger, and there won't be many new consumer companies / products that gain traction.
This is less applicable to non-VC-aspiration consumer products. It could actually be really cool if we see a huge ecosystem of people building their own hyper-niche software products and earning a comfortable living from their work. But based on what we've seen so far in online ecosystems, there's usually a power law dynamic, where less than 20% capture over 80%+ of profit. So, I'd love to see it, but a touch skeptical it'll happen.
Another implication is that the nosiness leads to new growth tactics & playbook. After all, growth channels are ALWAYS evolving and changing. Really good growth teams are the ones that find the new opportunities and leverage them to drive awareness, affinity, and bring on new customers.
But I have no clue what those new tactics look like, or where the new channels will come from.
Based on what we've learned from the internet over the past few decades, social media in particular, I'm not sure everyone wants to be in the same room with each other. Will we ever have new hyper-scaled platforms like Instagram / TikTok / Twitter / YouTube, with billions of users? If not, how do the new VC-aspiration consumer products get attention if NOT by using at least a similar growth playbook?
A somewhat related idea I've been rotating around is how we may be in a temporary phase with new AI products, where everyone is working on very similar "AI for X" ideas. Further, these are all trying to apply AI to existing problems, not so much coming up with radically new, audacious ideas.
The classic example: the first filmmakers simply pointed a static camera at stage plays. Initially, they weren't thinking of what films could actually be from first principles. The new technology, which was definitely amazing, was only used as an additional delivery mechanism for something that already existed.
A quick scan of YC's recent batches and you have to scroll for a LONG time before you get to a startup that isn't "AI agent for [insert existing job / task]" or "AI-native [insert existing SaaS category]". In a way, this is contributing to the noise! If you're working on an idea that other startups are working on, and you have to fight through mountains of AI-generated media and swarms of bots, it's going to be pretty hard to get attention.
BUT, there is hope. We seem to be inching our way out of this phase, with a rotation away from the too-plausible ideas and more software-only products, toward physical products (robots, drones, wearables, space hardware, biotech), and some truly novel ideas (first hotel for the moon).
These ideas are audacious and definitely hard! They're also inherently attention-worthy. Similar to SpaceX in its early days, the idea is so profound (e.g., reusable rockets), and the story around it so captivating (e.g., "colonize Mars"), that it's WAY easier to fight through any noise. These ideas and stories are way more likely to spread than the 100th version of AI law firms, AI CRM, AI billing.
For anyone running growth right now, the channels we leaned on for the past 15+ years are getting noisier & more crowded at the same time. Everyone is doing the same thing: publishing the same launch video, trying to be provocative or witty to stand out, leaning into mass comms in a spray & pray hail mary. More than any point in the past decade or so, it's important to search for new channels, new tactics, a new playbook.
This has always been true: marketing channels are always evolving. The great marketing and growth teams are continuously on the hunt for arbitrage and new opportunities.
The other pretty obvious thing to do is try to align yourself with truly unique, audacious ideas and stories, ones that are inherently worthy of attention. Of course those are extremely hard to execute against. But if you can nudge your way toward that north star, your story will be naturally exciting & shareable, and you most likely won't be swimming in the flood of folks vying for attention.
This is certainly a starting attempt to actually feel out my own thinking. I'd love to hear what you think! Reply to this email or send me a note.
Thanks as always for reading,
Reid
Reid DeRamus
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