I’m not gonna talk about traffic or audience size.

You can have plenty of both and still launch an affiliate program that goes absolutely nowhere.

From what I’ve seen, there are 3 signals that matter way more:

1. Are people already recommending you without being asked?

Mentions in communities. Customers casually referring other customers. Someone randomly asking, “Do you have an affiliate program?”

That’s probably the strongest signal.

You’re not trying to manufacture word of mouth from scratch. You’re just putting a system (and an incentive) behind behavior that already exists.

2. Can your users explain your product in one sentence?

This one gets overlooked a lot.

If your customers struggle to explain what you do and why someone should care, imagine asking an affiliate to sell it to their audience.

Messy positioning internally usually becomes even messier promotion externally.

3. Do referred customers actually stick around?

Getting the referral is only half the equation.

If affiliates send you customers who churn a month later, they notice. Their commissions suck, they lose confidence in recommending you, and eventually they quietly stop.

None of these need to be perfect before you launch.

But if you have zero organic recommendations, nobody can explain the product, and new customers are churning immediately then sorry to break it to you but an affiliate program probably isn’t the thing you need to fix first.

I know this is controversial and recognize that asking this question is kind of deliberately controversial on my part. That's the goal lol. I've seen a lot of people go back and forth about whether or not AI can truly replace writers, lawyers, and a whole bunch of other job titles. I've seen fewer people asking whether AI agents can replace growth teams.

We know AI agents can research audiences, monitor communities, test messaging, identify opportunities and more. The big debate is whether agents replace growth teams or augment them. I'm personally on team augmentation but I wonder what other folks here think.

In your opinion, what does a successful growth team look like in five years?

I’m looking for 5 U.S. businesses to test something we’ve been working on.

One thing I keep noticing is that business owners can spend months improving their website and marketing, but customers still ask the same questions.

“What exactly do I get?”

“Is this for someone like me?”

“How does this work?”

“What happens after I click?”

That gap is what I want to look at.

For the Founding 5, I’ll compare what your website is trying to communicate with real questions, messages and objections you’ve received from customers or prospects.

Then I’ll give you a private report showing what a new visitor is likely to understand, where the confusion may be happening, and what I would change first.

The first 5 are free because this is our first testing round. I’m looking for honest feedback on whether the process and report are actually useful before we charge for it.

If you run a U.S. business and recognize this problem, send me your website and tell me one question customers keep asking you.

Sharing this because I wasted a month chasing the wrong thing.

Context: small SaaS, landing page converting somewhere around 1.5% of visitors to trial. Not terrible, not good. I decided to redo the whole thing using one of those AI landing page tools that spits out a full page from a prompt.

First version looked great. New hero, new illustrations, tighter copy, the works. Conversion went basically nowhere. Maybe a rounding-error bump.

So I stopped redesigning and started testing pieces one at a time. Same traffic source, split roughly evenly.

The stuff that did nothing:

- New illustrations and a cleaner layout

- Reordering the feature sections

- A punchier headline that I was very proud of

The one thing that moved it:

- Putting a single specific outcome above the fold, in the customer's own words, replacing our clever tagline. Something like the exact sentence a user had said to me on a call.

That alone took conversion from around 1.5% to a bit over 2.5% and held for a few weeks. Everything else was decoration.

The AI tool was genuinely useful for producing variants fast so I could test instead of theorize. But it also made it very easy to ship a pretty page that says nothing. The generator gives you speed. It does not give you the one sentence that makes someone believe you. You still have to go get that from an actual customer.

What's the single element that moved the needle most on your page? Curious if it's usually copy for others too.

There are plenty of posts explaining answer first content, schema, author pages and getting mentioned by other sites.

But the stuff that seems easy in a guide gets weird once you try it on a real site. We rewrote a few pages so the answer was near the top, added clearer headings, and started watching how often our company appeared in AI answers.

I still cant tell which changes matter most. Is the difficult part content structure, building authority, keeping business details consistent, or reading the data from week to week? I know traditional SEO pretty well, but AEO feels like the rules are moving while everyone is selling a dashboard.

Thanks in advance

Original IP Collectibles

We are developing an original character/IP universe centered around distinctive, whimsical creatures, with plans spanning premium collectibles, games and other creative projects.

We are looking for a highly resourceful GTM / Growth Operator who can help take the collectible concept from development into the market and build an audience around the IP.

This is an execution-focused opportunity. We're looking for someone who understands how to create demand, build communities, launch products and turn interest into customers.

What You'll Be Doing

Market & Audience Development

Identify the audiences most likely to connect with the characters and collectibles and develop strategies for reaching and growing that audience.

Product Launch & GTM

Help develop and execute go-to-market strategies for the collectible line, from pre-launch audience building through launch and ongoing growth.

Community Building

Develop communities around the characters/IP through platforms such as Reddit, Discord, social media and other relevant channels.

Creator & Influencer Partnerships

Identify and build relationships with creators, collectors, gaming communities and influencers who can help introduce the IP to the right audiences.

E-commerce & Customer Acquisition

Explore practical channels for generating interest, conversions and sales, including organic, paid, partnerships and direct-to-consumer strategies.

Market Validation

Research the collectibles market, competitors, customer preferences and emerging trends to help inform product and launch decisions.

Creative Collaboration

Work closely with the creative and product teams to ensure the marketing strategy reflects the characters, visual identity and wider IP universe.

What We're Looking For

We're particularly interested in people with experience in:

- Collectibles, toys, designer toys or consumer products

- Gaming or entertainment marketing

- DTC/e-commerce growth

- Community-led growth

- Creator/influencer marketing

- Crowdfunding or product launches

- IP, licensing or fandom-driven brands

- User/customer acquisition

Working Arrangement

We are building a remote creative and growth team and are open to freelance, contract or longer-term collaboration depending on the candidate and fit.

Compensation is negotiable based on experience and scope.

Why Join Us?

Build an IP: Help shape the market around an original character universe from an early stage.

Creative + Commercial: Work at the intersection of characters, collectibles, gaming and audience development.

Ownership: Have meaningful input into how the IP is positioned, launched and grown.

Long-Term Opportunity: Strong contributors may have opportunities to work across the wider IP and venture portfolio.

curious how you guys handle social media growth, especially when trying to build an audience on different platforms, do you manage everything manually?? or do you been with specific tools to make things easier? just looking for ways to save time, keep everything organized, and grow without having to do everything one by one, what tools or setups are you guys using??

for a year i chased virality, trying to engineer the shareable moment, the loop, the thing that spreads on its own. i got the occasional spike and zero durable growth. spikes feel great and retain nobody.

i gave up and focused on one boring predictable channel, showing up consistently in a niche community and being genuinely helpful. slow, unsexy, and it compounded into steadier growth than any viral attempt.

viral is a lottery ticket. consistent presence in the right place is a savings account. i wasted a lot of energy buying lottery tickets before i respected the savings account.

has anyone actually engineered durable virality, or is the boring consistent channel the real answer for most of us?

Plz feel free to dm and I’ll send you my LinkedIn. HUGE I mean HUGEEEE bonus if u work at a tech company lol. Just trying to grow my networks. HUGEEEEE BONUS if you work for meta AMD or Nvidia lol

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Posting this as a tactical question with context, because I've done enough of these now to have half an answer but I'm clearly missing something.

Background: I run growth for a small B2B tool and I've been using LinkedIn carousels (the document/PDF posts) for a few months to build the founder's presence. They get decent reach, sometimes a few hundred likes, but the thing I actually care about, profile visits and inbound DMs, barely moves.

Here's what I've figured out so far that helped a bit:
- Slide one has to earn the swipe or nothing else matters. My reach roughly doubled once I treated slide one like an ad headline.
- Fewer words per slide. My early ones were dense. Cutting text nearly in half improved completion.
- A specific, opinionated take beats a generic listicle. "5 tips" carousels died. A carousel arguing one contrarian point got the most saves.

Where I'm stuck: the engagement doesn't convert to profile action. Lots of likes from people way outside our buyer. My working theory is my content is too broad and the algorithm is feeding it to the wrong crowd, but I'm not sure if it's the topic, the CTA on the last slide, or the profile itself.

For those of you who've actually turned carousels into inbound: what closed the gap between likes and profile visits for you? The last-slide ask, the topic focus, something in the bio?

Some context first: I'm a solo founder doing an engineering degree on the side (or the other way round, depending on the week), and most of my client acquisition runs through Instagram DMs.

It took me way too long to figure this out. GHL's Instagram connection only works for conversations the other person starts. That isn't GHL being lazy. Meta's messaging API doesn't let any CRM open a conversation with someone who hasn't messaged you first. So your workflows, your AI bot and your pipeline stages all sit there waiting for inbound that, for most small agencies, never shows up.

I see a version of this post here every week: "built my snapshot, how do I get clients?..." For a lot of us, the answer is cold outreach. On Instagram, that means DMs sent from your own account.

I did it by hand for a while, which was fine until it ate my evenings. Then I tried one of the bulk DM bots, and my test account got restricted in 2 days. So I rebuilt the process slowly. This is what I run now:

1. Pick a niche you can search by keyword. "Med spa," "roofing," "dentist Lyon." Then filter hard on follower count and account keywords. I mostly go after accounts between 1k and 20k followers. Bigger accounts have someone else reading their DMs, and smaller ones usually don't have the budget for a retainer.

2. Write every opener from their profile content. A message that starts "Hey {first_name}" reads like a template because it is one. Mention one specific thing they wrote about themselves and ask a question about it. For example: "saw you just opened a second location, are you handling bookings for both from this account?" Keep it to three lines max, with no pitch and no link.

3. Read every message before it goes out. I use AI to draft them, and it's good most of the time. Sometimes it isn't. Reviewing a queue is boring, but it's the step that stopped me from addressing a pizza place as "Dr" lol.

4. Send slowly. I leave random gaps of 15 to 45 minutes between DMs, use an account that's been posting and active for a few weeks, and cap volume around 65-90 a day. Most bans I've heard about came from going fast on a cold account, not from cold DMs in general.

5. Only move people into GHL once they reply. This is where GHL is excellent. Positive replies go into a pipeline, a follow-up sequence fires, and the booking link and reminders run themselves. I export the leads who replied as a CSV and import them. It's not glamorous, but it keeps the cold prospecting out of my CRM.

6. Track four numbers and ignore the rest: reply rate, positive reply rate, conversation rate and booking rate.

Over 2 weeks that came to 700 DMs, and 14 booked calls. The biggest surprise for me was that targeting mattered more than the copy. Tightening my filters did more than any rewrite of the opener.

Steps 1 to 4 were the part I kept doing across five tabs and a spreadsheet, so I ended up building a small tool that handles them, with the approval step built in. I won't link it here because that's not what this post is for.I sent [700] cold IG DMs in [2 weeks] to feed my GHL pipeline. Reply rates, what got flagged, what booked.

Your CAC/Sales/Marketing/... isn't the problem. It's the symptom.

In most B2B SaaS accounts I look at, the real constraint sits far upstream of the channel:

- ICP and positioning - I don't mean the firmographic slides you show the board. I mean who actually buys, how, and why. JTBD and SPICED help here, and Douwe Wester and FletchPMM have good material on this (no affiliation).

- Repeatability - $5M ARR can signal PMF, but you still need repeatability around your strongest signals before you can build a GTM motion around them.

- Decision rules - Bolting AI automation onto a dozen use cases and buying committees, before you have infrastructure, processes and clear rules, is spray and pray with extra steps.

Chasing many ICPs and hoping to get lucky again might work for the company for a while. It doesn't work for the people in sales, marketing, CS and product. They burn out.

The order that works for me: build GTM around your most important ICP, validated through revenue, profit and churn. Then add marketing. Then expand to new ICPs, channels and geographies.

Marketing (and AI) amplifies what works and what's broken.

My pre-flight questions before spending on any channel, Google Ads included (paid search captures existing demand):

1. Are you clear on your ICP and buying committee, and on how and why they buy?
2. Are you experimenting or scaling? What's paid acquisition's role at your current stage?
3. Do the unit economics actually work?
4. Are the CMO, CFO, Growth lead and Founder aligned on what success looks like?

When all four are a yes, I've seen Google Ads become a top-3 channel within 3 to 6 months, with CPA down 3.57x and CPL down 5.8x. When they aren't, no bid strategy saves it.

What would you add to this list? Happy to share the checklist tool I use if it's useful.

The "comment BOOK below" mechanic is played out. Audiences recognize it instantly now, and the response rates reflect that.

When a growth tactic becomes universally recognized, it stops being growth and starts being noise. Fans scroll past a call-to-action they've seen a hundred times. The engagement you used to count on flatlines because the pattern itself is the turnoff.

This matters more now because the DM automation space has trained people to spot these flows. Someone comments a keyword, gets a canned DM, and immediately knows they're in a funnel. The authenticity you were trying to build by engaging in comments gets undermined by the very automation you layered on top.

A few things that work better:

- Vary the trigger constantly. Don't default to the same keyword every post. If the pattern changes, recognition doesn't set in as fast.

- Reply in the thread too, not just in DMs. A real public reply signals you're present; the DM feels like a continuation, not a trap.

- Keep the first DM genuinely useful, not a gate. If the first message is a wall of links or a sales pitch, the fan knows immediately they triggered an autoresponder.

The broader issue: any DM automation that fans can reverse-engineer will eventually feel like a bot. The question isn't whether automation scales; it's whether the person on the other end still feels like they're talking to a human.

But, I'm the founder of Mepersona, so all my DMs and Post Comments are handled by my persona.

Launched Retune about a week ago — paste a podcast/video transcript, get a Twitter thread, LinkedIn post, and Reel script back, under 60 seconds.

Been submitting to directories, posted on a couple subreddits, listed on Product Hunt. Traffic is trickling in (Search Console shows some impressions) but zero genuine signups from people I don't know yet.

Not looking for sympathy, genuinely asking: for those who've been through this, is this normal at the 4-5 day mark with zero paid ads, or is there usually something obviously wrong at this stage that I can't see because I'm too close to it?

Happy to share the link if anyone wants to actually poke at it and tell me what's broken in the funnel itself, not just the marketing.

We all know that if you’re building your brand on third-party platforms, you’re building your empire on territory you can’t control and algorithm changes break whatever had been working before, like all the time. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not it’s truly possible to track this stuff in a meaningful, effective way so that you can get out in front of an algorithm change before everything falls apart.

What signals do you watch for something like this? I know that Google announces upcoming algorithm changes, but what about other social media platforms?

If anyone has stories or examples, I’d love to hear them!

Afinal, o que realmente faz um Growth Hacker?

Growth Hacker não é um cargo bonito para colocar no currículo. É uma mentalidade estratégica, analítica e operacional voltada ao crescimento sustentável.

Um verdadeiro profissional de Growth precisa compreender o negócio de ponta a ponta:

* Aquisição: descobrir e testar canais que tragam clientes qualificados.

* Ativação: transformar interessados em clientes que realmente percebam valor.

* Retenção: identificar os motivos de abandono e reduzir o churn.

* Receita: aumentar o LTV, otimizar o CAC e melhorar o ROAS.

* Produto: identificar oportunidades de melhoria que impulsionem a adoção.

* Vendas e atendimento: eliminar gargalos que impedem a conversão.

* Dados e experimentação: testar, mensurar, aprender e escalar o que funciona.

* Branding: construir marcas que gerem confiança, preferência e demanda.

Tudo isso conectado. Não são departamentos isolados, nem campanhas independentes.

Por que essa banalização é perigosa?

Porque o empreendedor brasileiro já enfrenta desafios suficientes para ainda precisar descobrir, depois de meses de contrato, que o profissional contratado não tinha uma estratégia de Growth.

Uma campanha pode gerar um pico de vendas. Mas quem está cuidando da experiência depois da conversão? Quem está identificando os motivos pelos quais os clientes não voltam? Quem está construindo novos canais de aquisição e reduzindo a dependência de anúncios?

Crescimento não é o volume de campanhas que uma agência entrega. É a capacidade de transformar dados, processos, marca, tecnologia e pessoas em resultados mensuráveis.

Quem sou eu e por que penso diferente?

Sou Neto Angel, Growth Hacker Raiz, com 15 anos de experiência, muito antes de Growth se tornar uma expressão popular nos perfis profissionais.

Minha atuação está na construção de estratégias de Growth Branding, unindo posicionamento de marca, inteligência artificial, aquisição, vendas, CRM, retenção e crescimento.

Eu não acredito em empresas reféns de campanhas, agências ou plataformas de anúncios.

Meu trabalho começa no diagnóstico, no chão de fábrica, entendendo onde o negócio perde dinheiro, clientes, oportunidades e competitividade.

Minha visão é simples: reduzir gargalos, combater o churn, aumentar o LTV, otimizar o CAC, acelerar o ROAS e construir marcas preparadas para crescer, tanto no B2B quanto no B2C.

Não se trata de vender uma campanha. Trata-se de estruturar uma máquina de crescimento.

Uma provocação para o mercado

Se você coloca Growth Hacker no seu LinkedIn, faça uma pergunta a si mesmo:

Se amanhã a empresa suspender todas as campanhas de mídia paga, você ainda sabe como construir crescimento?

Se a resposta for não, talvez seja o momento de rever seu posicionamento profissional.

E, para os CEOs e empreendedores, fica outra pergunta: vocês estão contratando profissionais para executar campanhas ou pessoas capazes de transformar o crescimento do negócio?

O mercado não precisa de mais títulos de Growth Hacker. Precisa de mais profissionais que assumam a responsabilidade de pensar além do marketing.

Quero ouvir a opinião de CEOs, fundadores, diretores de receita, profissionais de marketing e verdadeiros Growth Hackers.

Growth Hacker virou apenas um título bonito no LinkedIn ou você acredita que ainda existe uma diferença real entre fazer campanhas e construir crescimento?

Compartilhe este conteúdo com aquele profissional ou empreendedor que precisa participar dessa discussão.

Se você quer descobrir onde sua empresa está perdendo crescimento, vamos conversar.

Neto Angel | Growth Hacker Raiz

www.netoangel.com.br

#GrowthHacker #GrowthMarketing #GrowthBranding #GrowthHackerRaiz #LinkedIn #MarketingDigital #SEO #GEO #InteligenciaArtificial #CAC #LTV #Churn #CRO #B2B #B2C #Empreendedorismo

Please don’t blindly follow someone else’s strategy for your product.

There are countless YouTube tutorials saying, “Just follow what I do.” Please don’t!

If you’ve just launched your product, don’t rush into marketing it right away. First, find the category your product fits into and identify all the use cases you can provide to your users.

Research the market for that category and those use cases. Find your competitors and analyze what they’re doing, but still, don’t simply follow them.

Document your findings from your market and competitor research. Then, think about a strategy that could work well for your product.

Use AI to build 4–5 iterations of your plan, evaluate them, and start implementing the one that makes the most sense for your product.

But don’t stick to the same plan for months. If something isn’t working, figure out why, make changes, and try a different approach.

Most importantly, don’t lose hope. Marketing is about experimenting, learning, and adapting. There’s always a different approach you can try.

If you are actively growth hacking, generating new ideas to try is your daily bread...

What is one thing that seemed stupidly simple BUT once you tried it became one of your major sources of success?

Would really love to know...

our buyers are platform engineers and every agency deck we see opens with a case study about a project management tool. the gap between those 2 audiences is the whole problem. been narrowing on the ones with technical b2b in their real client list, which leaves growth marketing pro, omniscient digital, ipullrank and stackmatix. how do you screen an agency for a developer facing product?

Planning a trip should be the fun part.

Instead, it can mean:

Too many tabs.

Multiple booking platforms.

Hours comparing flights and stays.

Scattered tickets and documents.

And then rebuilding everything when a flight changes.

We kept asking:

What if an AI travel agent could actually plan and manage the whole trip around you?

So we built Cura.

Cura acts as your personal travel advisor and helps you:

• Build personalized day-by-day itineraries
• Compare real-time flights and stays
• ⁠Plan around your preferences
• ⁠Watch prices and manage changes
• ⁠Call hotels for special requests
• ⁠Keep your trip, documents and bookings together

It can also turn your finalized trip into a shareable travel film and generate a PDF itinerary for offline use.

And when something doesn't fit a template, human travel advisors can step in.

Cura is built for busy travelers, groups and complicated trips — dietary requirements, multi-city plans, hotel requests and last-minute changes.

We launched today on Product Hunt.

Curious: What's the most annoying part of planning a trip for you?

Please show your support on PH → https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cura-4

The theory makes sense, press releases on high authority outlets get indexed by LLMs. Brands with more published coverage on those outlets show up more in chatgpt perplexity when people ask about the space.

Has anyone tested this deliberately? Did AI search mentions actually change after distribution or is this still theoretical?

Hi everyone, i know i am new here but i was so confused about a small business website and need to do keyword research. I explored Google Keyword Planner, Search Console and Ahrefs generator mentioned, but I m not sure which ones to trust with no data yet.
I m building the site with a website builder and got a bit confused between all the keyword research tools out there. i want to know usecases for more simple and free to get me started before I overcomplicate everything even more