Growth hacking

Growth hacking

Your business model worked in 2024. It might be dead by December 2026. AI tools are getting cheaper, faster, and more capable every quarter. The companies that survive will be the ones who build moats that machines cannot cross. Most founders think they have time to figure this out. They believe their expertise or relationships will protect them. They scroll past AI news thinking it applies to someone else's industry. That comfortable denial is the fastest path to irrelevance.

You've conquered the enthusiasts. Now comes the harder part: reaching everyone else. Employees using AI effectively save 5.4% of work time weekly -over two hours per 40-hour week. At a company of 5,000, if just half of employees achieve that efficiency gain, you've created the equivalent of 125 additional full-time employees without increasing headcount. The opportunity is massive. But scaling from early adoption to majority usage requires understanding why most people resist new technology-and what changes their minds.

Many new entrepreneurs buy software believing that it will be plug and play. However, software onboarding is a complex process and something that takes a long time, especially when you factor in things like the need to train multiple employees. Unfortunately, a lot of SAAS platforms also have poor onboarding processes. While they might provide a minimum level of support, they really give you the assistance you need to implement effective solutions in your enterprise at scale.

Hello, I am about to launch a website which offers an analytic tool which will enable traders in the financial market to analyze their performance. I will post on a few selected forums an offer of free full use of the tool. CHat GPT claims that a period of 30 days will be enough as by then users will be well familiarized with the system and a longer period will be unnecessary.

Let me be blunt: if you're still dumping money into digital lead generation and wondering why your conversion rates are dismal, you're fighting the wrong battle. I've grown the number of closed loans by 35% over four years not through fancy CRM systems, not through paid advertising, not through some revolutionary fintech solution. Through relationships; old-fashioned, face-to-face, coffee-meeting, show-up-consistently relationships.

Feeling overwhelmed isn't a time-management problem - it's a leverage problem. But understanding smart AI strategies can get you out of the weeds and back to focusing on the kind of work that actually helps your business grow. You'll learn how to turn AI into an invisible team working behind the scenes to support your business without adding more tools, noise or complexity.

The Learning Management System (LMS) market is crowded, competitive, and increasingly mature. New platforms launch every year, feature sets continue to converge, and buyers face no shortage of options. Yet, despite these conditions, a subset of LMS companies continues to grow significantly faster than the rest, often by implementing effective business growth strategies. This growth is not accidental. It is directly related to the changes in the L&D market. Specifically, the focus has changed.

Moving from exclusivity to syndication isn't just a tactical move. It's a smarter, more flexible way to grow in a crowded digital world. A few years ago, exclusivity meant success. However, today, audiences have an abundance of choices. Growth now depends on the value you deliver, how far your message travels and how relevant your content feels, not on keeping content locked in one place.

In 2024, Yanni Pappas was two months into his first full-time job as a business development representative (BDR) at Workshop-an Omaha-based company that provides internal communications teams with email marketing tools priced from $5,000 to $100,000 per year-when he got transferred to a new role. Now working as a "special products BDR," he was cut off from his company's inbound lead system, making his task of landing demos with prospective customers infinitely more difficult.

In 2026, the EdTech market is crowded and mature. LMS, LXP, skills platforms, AI-powered learning tools, and compliance solutions all compete for the same budgets. Nowadays, buyers are more cautious. CFOs reduce spending while enterprise deals take longer. In the meantime, customer acquisition costs keep rising, and switching costs are lower than many vendors expect. The hard truth in the market is this: great products are now table stakes.

The digital economy is shifting faster than most teams can adapt. The Epic vs. Apple ruling, which loosened the App Store's control over payment flows, simply accelerated a transition that was already underway. In practical terms, Epic challenged Apple's right to force developers into using its in-app payment system, opening the door for brands to steer users toward alternatives with different economics. When attribution visibility narrowed under Apple's app tracking transparency (ATT), customer acquisition cost (CAC) climbed.

Lately, one of the biggest challenges in growth for eLearning and HR tech companies is lead generation. The market is so crowded, with customer acquisition costs rising and buyers being hard to reach, making lead generation a challenge. As a result, HR leaders, L&D teams, and enterprise decision-makers are becoming increasingly skeptical of marketing claims. Taking into account this environment, relying solely on ad hoc campaigns and generic SaaS playbooks seems to no longer work.

"When I arrived, Pinterest, like everybody else, was trying to clone TikTok," he says.

Sometimes software founders are a weird bunch. They've built their businesses on open source software and the contributions of people who've done a lot of work for free. They've benefited at great length from infrastructure and tooling built on open standards that facilitate free exchange of data and ideas. Yet when it comes to their own software business, they hold the opinion that you should have as much vendor lock-in as possible when it comes to your users.

Every founder feels pressure to reinvent, to launch something new, move faster, or chase the next big idea. But in my experience building Piece of Cake Moving, the most reliable path to growth isn't constant reinvention; it's consistent execution. When products and pricing look similar, execution becomes the defining differentiator. Small operational details compound into a noticeably better customer experience. The difference between a forgettable experience and a remarkable one often comes down to the smallest moments.

Probability and statistics affect every aspect of our lives. After all, statistics is simply taking the probability of any given event and putting it down in plain black and white. This means that the lessons businesses can learn from casino odds can easily be applied to every element of your operations. Hedging your bets is useful for more than just managing your betting bankroll; it can be essential for ensuring your business remains profitable even when you make a new investment or try a new approach.

Over the last couple of years, the most interesting thing I have noticed when studying the brands dominating in the digital era is that most of the successful new big market disruptors - those making millions of dollars a month from online ads alone - have risen to fame thanks to their own internal marketing teams. This is especially true for those in the e-commerce space, who have grown predominantly through Facebook advertising.

Here's what actually happened: A Microsoft employee working on Bing proposed a seemingly minor change to how the search engine displayed ad headlines. The idea required minimal effort-just a few days of engineering time-but it was buried among hundreds of other proposals. Program managers deemed it insignificant and let it languish. The breakthrough came when an engineer, recognizing the low development cost, decided to test the idea anyway.

Building authority through smart content placement People judge your brand by where they see your content. Publishing on well-respected industry sites does something powerful. You tap into their existing readership. You also borrow credibility from their reputation. Their audience already trusts them. That trust transfers to you when your content appears there. Working with professional guest posting services simplifies the whole process. They identify sites that match your niche. They create content that fits editorial guidelines. They land placements that bring actual visitors.

Three weeks ago, I tested something that completely changed how I think about organic traffic. I opened ChatGPT and asked a simple question: "What's the best course on building SaaS with WordPress?" The answer that appeared stopped me cold. My course showed up as the first result, recommended directly by the AI with specific reasons why it was valuable. I hadn't paid for advertising. I hadn't done any special promotion.

Shoham Lachkar is an industry-recognized mobile growth expert with over 15 years of experience in ASO (app store optimization), SEO, and performance marketing initiatives. Lachkar holds expertise in ASO, organic growth, user psychology, and mobile marketing and contributes to building scalable frameworks globally. As a leader across multiple top mobile-gaming and marketing organizations, she oversaw ASO strategy for a global portfolio of widely used apps and collaborated with brands whose products have achieved significant reach across major app stores.

Britain's small business leaders are embracing a new ethos of marginal gains, with fresh research revealing how the so-called "1% mindset" is quietly shaping a new wave of SME growth. According to Adobe, which has launched its Adobe Express 'One Better' movement alongside entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, more than 90 per cent of SME owners familiar with the term believe that making small, continuous improvements delivers measurable benefits to productivity and profits.

You know, look, I'm uh I'm pretty active on launch day trying to understand what's working. I'm looking for feedback. Um both, you know, an example, I'm on X trying to understand like see if people, average users how they're experiencing the product. I probably ping people back saying, look, you know, this is a valid point, we should address it. So, in some sense, I'm looking at that trying to assess it.

Remember when stuffing keywords actually worked? Those days are dead. Today's on-page SEO serves one simple purpose. It tells Google what your page is about. That's it. Nothing more. You need a decent title tag. A meta description that makes sense. Headers that organize your content. Some relevant keywords sprinkled naturally throughout your text. But here's what nobody tells you. You can have perfect on-page optimization and still get buried on page 10 of Google.

Every sales leader faces the same tension. Close deals faster to hit revenue targets, but maintain high standards to avoid bad fits, legal issues, or deals that fall apart post-signature. Push too hard on speed, and you end up with buyer remorse, contract problems, and unhappy customers. Move too cautiously, and competitors snatch opportunities while your team is still scheduling discovery calls.

Meadow Lane, a gourmet grocer in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood, opened Friday at 11 a.m., attracting quite the line of hopeful and hungry shoppers. The brainchild of former venture capitalist Sammy Nussdorf, the store had a cult following before it had a physical retail space. He's been posting about the storesince June 2024, and some of his taste-tasting videos of the menu have gone viral.

Let's be real. The learning tech space is more competitive than ever, and achieving significant growth feels almost like a dream. One common issue for many companies is increased customer acquisition cost (CAC), which leads to long sales cycles and slow revenue. To reduce CAC, you have to align your marketing and sales efforts, focusing on various initiatives and daily activities. In fact, sales and marketing alignment is shown to boost close rates by 67% and revenue growth by 19%.

AI gave everyone speed - but that same speed flooded every distribution channel. Search traffic's down, inboxes are overrun, and even virality is harder when everyone's shipping quickly. In this episode, Emily Kramer reveals the strategy behind today's breakout companies: ecosystem. Instead of going direct, win through partners, creators, communities, and integrations that already have your audience's trust. If you're still relying on the old playbook in an AI-saturated world, this episode will help you rewire your strategy.

Emily Kramer has identified a pattern in how top AI (and non-AI) startups are able to break through the noise and grow unlike at any other time in history. Once you see it, you immediately rethink your growth strategy. I did! After reading the first draft of this post, I got a whole new level of understanding for why my product pass has been