What Is Growth Marketing?
April 9, 2026
Finding What’s Actually True (and Acting on It)
The reason I went into growth marketing is the same reason I studied philosophy: to find out what's actually true.
In philosophy, you uncover truths about the world using logic. In growth marketing, you uncover truths about your product and customers using experiments. Growth marketing turned out to be the most practical version of my pursuit.
Tactics Don’t Tell You What Works
People think growth marketing is tactics: ads, referral programs, A/B tests. Those are just tools. The real job is figuring out what causes your product to grow. Once you understand that, the tactics become obvious.
A growth marketer is a detective. Channel expertise is not the point – it's a consequence. It's what happens after you find something that works and push on it. The real skill is going from zero to insight: forming hypotheses, running tests, identifying what's actually driving behavior. That skill transfers across every channel.
Growth Marketing Is Not About Channels
The work is straightforward, but not easy. You start by considering all possible channels, then narrow them down: are your customers there? How expensive is it to test? What's the realistic upside? From there, you design the fastest, cheapest experiments that could prove you wrong.
This is the core idea behind the Bullseye Framework from Traction – one of the first books I read on growth, and still the best. It's not about tactics. It's about method.
You Don’t Choose the Channel — It Emerges
Once you find what works, you go deep. I became fluent in Instagram ads not because I set out to, but because Instagram turned out to be the right channel for a product I was working on.
Experience across channels helps – but not for the reason people think. It doesn't matter because you "know more channels." It matters because it improves the speed and quality of your inference.
Senior Marketers Find the Truth Faster
The Only Thing That Separates Senior from Junior.
Not the channels they know.
How quickly they can find what's true – and act on it.