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The Growth Playbook Is Dead: How AI Companies Are Rewriting the Rules

After 15-20 years in growth, only 30-40% of traditional playbooks still work. Here's what's replacing them—and why you need to spend 95% of your time innovating.

By Babuger Team
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The Old Playbook Is Broken

Here's a confession from one of the most successful growth leaders in tech: after 15-20 years of building growth engines at companies like Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, and Amplitude, only 30-40% of that knowledge still applies.

The rest? Throw it out.

This isn't about small tweaks to existing frameworks. This is a fundamental reimagining of how growth works in the age of AI.

From 80% Patterns to 95% Innovation

In traditional growth roles, success looked like this:

  • Identify 80% of patterns from previous experience
  • Apply proven frameworks to new contexts
  • Optimize existing user journeys
  • Tweak conversion funnels

    • The work felt "repetitive in a way"—the same problems with localized solutions. Copy, paste, optimize.

    In AI companies, that ratio has flipped:

  • 5% optimization
  • 95% innovation

    • Why? Because the market moves so fast that optimizing existing loops barely matters. By the time you've perfected your funnel, the product has changed. The LLM has improved. Consumer expectations have shifted.

    Optimization Is No Longer Worth Your Time

    Traditional growth teams spend most of their energy optimizing existing user journeys:

  • Identify drop-offs from acquisition to activation
  • Tweak the dials to improve conversion
  • A/B test button colors and copy
  • Polish the onboarding flow

    • In fast-moving AI markets, this approach fails for a critical reason: competition doesn't sleep.

    "Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays. To be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem—it's reinvention of the solution."

    When competitors can spin up a new AI product in weeks, your carefully optimized funnel becomes irrelevant. The only sustainable advantage is continuous innovation.

    What Actually Moves the Needle

    1. Ship Constantly and Create Noise

    The most effective growth strategy isn't a clever campaign—it's velocity.

  • Ship every day, multiple times per day
  • Have engineers announce their own features
  • Maintain constant "noise" in the market
  • Let shipping velocity be your retention strategy

    • When users see continuous improvement, they stay engaged. When they voice feedback and see it implemented within days, they feel heard. This creates loyalty that no marketing campaign can buy.

    2. Give Your Product Away

    This feels counterintuitive for AI companies where every interaction costs money (LLM pass-through costs are real). But the math works differently:

  • Free credits for hackathons
  • Sponsor anyone who wants to demo your product
  • Remove monetization friction entirely
  • Track giveaways as marketing costs, not margin erosion
    • "If somebody wants to have a hackathon at their work and asks for free credits, why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activation for us from using us? We're like—take it. How much do you need?"

    The trick: get more people to try it. The wow moment does the selling.

    3. Build in Public

    Founder socials. Employee socials. Building in public.

    This works because:

  • People want to rally behind teams, not just products
  • Authenticity cuts through AI-generated noise
  • Vulnerability builds trust
  • Users feel connected to the humans behind the product

    • The key is personality. You can't have ChatGPT write your posts. The corporate filter has to come off entirely.

    4. Social Is the New Organic

    Five years ago, organic marketing meant SEO. Rank on Google. Build backlinks.

    Today, organic means social:

  • What is your CEO posting?
  • What is your team sharing?
  • What are users saying about you?
  • What content are creators making?

    • For B2B, that's LinkedIn and X. For consumer, add TikTok and Instagram. Either way, eyeballs have moved—and your strategy needs to follow.

    Product Market Fit Every 3 Months

    Here's the most disorienting part of growth in AI: product market fit isn't a milestone you achieve. It's a treadmill you run on.

    Why it changes so fast:

  • Technology shifts: New model releases create step-function changes in what's possible. Every 3 months, the underlying capabilities expand.
  • Expectations shift: What consumers expected 8 months ago versus now is "night and day." They've seen what's possible and demand more.
  • Competition shifts: New entrants can match your features in weeks. Differentiation requires constant reinvention.

    • The result? You can't focus solely on scaling. You have to continuously recapture product market fit while scaling—simultaneously.

    The New Growth Stack

    Minimum Lovable Product (Not Viable)

    Viability is so 2010. In 2026, if it's not lovable, don't ship it.

    This means:

  • Every interaction communicates brand
  • Design is a first hire, not an afterthought
  • "Love marks" and unique interactions matter
  • Utility plus emotion beats utility alone

    • Activation Is Everyone's Job

    In traditional companies, growth teams obsess over activation—getting users to the aha moment.

    In AI companies, the core product team already thinks about this constantly. The agent improving means the entire lifecycle improves. Growth can focus on standing up new loops instead of polishing existing ones.

    Community Amplifies Everything

    Community isn't just a nice-to-have. It amplifies:

  • Word of mouth
  • Social posting
  • Retention mechanisms
  • Feature feedback loops

    • Build it early. Run it on Discord. Hire community managers. Create ambassador programs.

    What This Means for Your Team

    If you're building a growth team for an AI company, optimize for:

  • High agency: People who can figure things out without specialists
  • High autonomy: People who own work start to finish
  • Fire in the belly: People for whom this isn't a paycheck
  • Chaos tolerance: People who create clarity, not seek it

    • The work is fundamentally different. Growth teams now launch integrations, build features, and write agentic workflows. They're deeper in product than ever before.

    The Uncomfortable Truth

    If you're optimizing funnels while competitors are shipping daily, you're losing.

    If you're gate-keeping your AI product behind a paywall while competitors give it away, you're losing.

    If you're running the 2020 playbook in 2026, you're losing.

    The winners are the ones willing to throw out what worked before and discover what works now—again and again and again.

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