This month, somewhere in an office with exposed brick and a kombucha tap, a founder who would rather sell a kidney than rent his codebase will wire $80,000 to an ad platform for thirty days of access to strangers’ attention. Next month he will wire it again. He has, in effect, signed a lease on his own growth: a lease with no equity, no rent cap, and a landlord who personally runs the auction that sets his rent. In board meetings, he will describe this arrangement as a strategy.
It is not a strategy. It is a subscription. And the defining feature of a subscription is what happens the moment you stop paying.
Founders are, as a species, obsessive about ownership. They own their code, their brand, their cap table; they will endure eighteen months of legal correspondence over half a percent of equity. And then they take the single activity where compounding matters most, which is how customers find them, and rent it by the month, at auction, from a counterparty whose revenue model is that they never stop.
I think this is worth noticing. I built a whole method around noticing it.
In fairness to the ad auction
Let me be fair to rented growth, because it is not stupid. It is seductively rational. Paid acquisition is fast. It is measurable to the decimal. It scales with a slider. It produces the one thing a growth lead under quarterly pressure craves above all else, which is a dashboard that moves when touched. If your product prints money on every conversion, buying attention at a profit is not a sin. It is arithmetic.
The trouble is in the fine print of the arithmetic. An ad auction is a market in which you bid against every other company’s desperation, which means their rising costs become your rising costs, forever, by design. Your rent only goes up. Nothing accrues. And on the day you stop paying (a down round, a budget freeze, a CFO with opinions) the traffic does not taper politely. It stops the way a treadmill stops.
But here is the thing: the ads are rarely the actual mistake. They are the symptom of an earlier, quieter mistake, the one about how the decision got made in the first place.
Growth by analogy, or the guidebook to an empty goldfield
Most growth strategy is not reasoned. It is copied. “HubSpot won with content, so we’ll do content.” “Dollar Shave Club had a viral video, so we need a viral video.” “Everyone’s on TikTok.” Approximately 91% of B2B marketing strategy consists of imitating a company with a different product, different margins, and a different decade, then acting surprised when the results differ. I call this Growth by Analogy, and it is the true villain of this manifesto. The ads were merely its most photogenic accomplice.
The mechanics of why it fails are worth slowing down for, because they are genuinely interesting and almost never discussed. Every playbook you have ever read encoded three things about its author: where their customers’ demand lived, what their unit economics could sustain, and, most fatally, when they did it, because every channel is an arbitrage, and every arbitrage closes. In 1849, the way to get rich in California was to go dig. By the time the guidebooks to the goldfields were rolling off printing presses in Boston, the accessible gold was gone, and the people getting rich were the ones selling guidebooks, shovels, and, in one famous case, trousers. A growth tactic that has a name, a conference track, and a certification program is a guidebook to an exhausted goldfield. The publishing of the playbook is itself the evidence that the playbook has stopped working. You are not reading a strategy; you are reading an obituary with action items.
First principles growth is the opposite move. Not “what worked for them,” but “what is actually true here.”
The physics your market already obeys
Strip away the borrowed beliefs and every market has a physics: observable, boring, and largely ignored. Demand for what you sell already exists somewhere, in some form. It is being typed into search boxes, argued about in communities, whispered between operators as referrals, or sitting latent behind a problem people haven’t named yet. Your economics can sustain some acquisition costs and not others. You possess exactly one or two unfair advantages, and (a hard truth, gently delivered) enthusiasm is not among them.
A first-principles growth strategy is derived from these facts, the way an engineer derives a bridge from loads and spans rather than from photographs of other bridges. You map where demand actually lives. You find the intersection of that demand with the thing you can do better than anyone. And then you build. Not a campaign, but an asset: a thing you own, that captures demand while you sleep, that is worth more in year three than in year one. A campaign is an expense that ends. An asset is the only thing in marketing that compounds.
There is a five-second diagnostic for telling the two apart, and I recommend running it before your next planning meeting. Imagine switching off every dollar of paid spend for thirty days. Whatever growth survives is what you own. Everything else was rent. I call it the switch-off test, and I have watched it reduce eight-figure marketing budgets to a single surviving blog and an email list. (The blog, it later turned out, was the only line item with a positive slope.)
The growth engine that generated $90M+ in revenue
This is not a theory I developed in a hot tub. I spent years running exactly this method inside Close, the CRM, where the growth engine was not an ad budget but a library of owned assets: deeply-researched article after deeply-researched article, built against what salespeople were actually searching for and asking each other. That library became a primary driver of new trial signups, outranking competitors who outspent us on marketing by a multiple, and it kept driving them, month after month, at a marginal cost of approximately zero. The compounding curve is not a metaphor. It is a graph, and it embarrasses the paid one.
Should you be suspicious of this story? Yes, and I will do it for you: some of it was timing. Content in the mid-2010s was cheaper ground than content today; that particular goldfield now has guidebooks. But notice what the timing objection concedes. The channel was of its moment, and the method was not. The method was: ignore the playbooks, read the demand, build the asset your physics pointed at. Run today, the same derivation points different companies at entirely different assets—programmatic tools, original research, communities, a sales team’s answers turned into a public library. The asset changes. The physics don’t.
The commitments
Everything above reduces to eight commitments. They are the whole method, minus the consulting fees.
- Reason from physics, not playbooks. Strategy is derived from your market’s observable demand, your economics, and your unfair advantage, never inherited from someone else’s case study.
- Build assets, not campaigns. Every major growth investment must produce something owned that still works in three years.
- Own the distribution or don’t count the growth. Traffic you rent is revenue with a landlord.
- Measure in years, not quarters. Assets are judged on lifetime value and compounding slope, not on the campaign window.
- Pass the switch-off test. If paid spend stopped for thirty days, growth must survive. If it wouldn’t, that is the strategy’s verdict.
- Go deep before wide. One channel mastered outperforms five channels attempted; width is what you earn after depth.
- Treat best practices as expired arbitrage. By the time a tactic is a best practice, its edge has been priced in. Its publication is its obituary.
- Remember that distribution is equity. You would never rent your product. Stop renting the only other thing that compounds.
If you want to start before you fully believe me, which is, frankly, the correct level of skepticism, do three things this week:
- Run the switch-off test on last quarter’s P&L. Mark every growth line item as rent or asset. Sit with the ratio.
- Write down where your demand actually lives: what your buyers search, ask, and forward to each other. Evidence only; no analogies to other companies permitted.
- Name the one asset at the intersection of that demand and your unfair advantage, and redirect one month of rent into starting it.
That’s it. That is first principles growth: notice you’ve been renting, read your own physics, build the thing that compounds.
You don’t have a marketing problem. You have an asset problem.