Don't outsource growth to the algorithm

This Week’s Big Ideas 💡

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🚀 Applications for the speedrun Alpha fellowship just opened! Alpha is an in-person fellowship in San Francisco for students and recent grads (within 3 years), with two tracks:

• Founder track: we back you pre-entity, pre-idea, pre-team. Fellows get up to $250K in investment, plus over $1M in credits across AWS, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and more. Plus, weekly office hours and hosted sessions with speedrun partners.

• Talent track: spend four weeks embedded in the speedrun community, meet fast-growing portfolio startups, and land your role during the fellowship. We introduce you to companies to find your mutual fit, and you get office hours and access to exclusive fireside chats.

The founder track runs Jan 11 to March 5 (8 weeks), and the talent track from Feb 8 to March 5 (4 weeks). Apply now:alpha.a16z.com

We’re asking investors on the speedrun team what advice they find themselves giving founders again and again. This week, speedrun GM Josh Lu writes about the obligation founders have to seek creative growth opportunities opened up by new channels.

One of the biggest challenges for any startup is the need to get noticed. This problem is only getting worse as AI has significantly decreased the barriers to entrepreneurship. How do you get people to see and try the thing you’re making?

Facing this problem, it’s very tempting for a founder to YOLO a bunch of content into an algorithm and hope the algorithm does your work for you. “Buckshot growth” feels more and more like the default strategy for many new companies. This approach is an abdication of responsibility.

I often push teams to spend some effort understanding the new channels opening up around them. We’re in a rare moment when whole new ways of using the internet are appearing. In times like these, the best growth opportunities often appear before anyone has written a playbook.

Real hardcore growth hacking goes in waves, and the really fun growth hacking happens when there’s a new distribution paradigm and the rules are still being written.

The first spec I ever wrote as a growth PM was built around how Facebook handled app invitations. Facebook used to throttle the number of invites users of a new app could send to protect the platform from spam. It looked at the acceptance rate of the invites coming from your app. The higher the acceptance rate, the more invites a user could send on the app’s behalf.

For a brand-new app, a user could send only eight invites at a time. They’d select eight friends and would be forced to start the invite flow over if they wanted to invite more.

So I started looking at that heuristic. How could we unblock new users from inviting more friends when our apps were ready at launch? Could we create bots that sent each other invites to pump up our acceptance stats?

That’s what we did. For every app, we had an army of fake Facebook accounts sending invites to each other and accepting them. Our acceptance rates were at 100 percent. When we launched publicly, real users could send many more invites from the start. That led to a much bigger growth moment.

We also experimented with incentives. A feature would stay locked until enough of your friends were playing, or sixteen friends would have to click a button to unlock something for you. If they did, everyone got a prize.

And we played around with the copy. One of the most successful messages offered a gift you could send only to your BFFs – your “best friends forever.” Based on your game behavior, we’d show you your sixteen BFFs. For the recipient, the message was that you ranked them highly. That gave them a reason to click.

That was a long time ago, when no one knew what the hell to do on Facebook. It was like shooting fish in a barrel because everything worked as long as you had no shame.

That is what interests me about agents right now. I want to understand how they decide what to use, and what a startup can do to get in front of them.

Take SR007 company Lazyweb. The team has an MCP server that product managers and designers can use to come up with ideas for optimizing their flows. Their growth idea was simple: a bunch of agents are going to interact with this tool, so let’s tell those agents to use it as the default. In effect, they were telling the agent to bookmark them for the next time it did anything like this.

It’s the Wild West again. We are entering an environment where agents will do more and more of our tasks, as individuals, workers, and organizations. As with Facebook, the opportunity starts with understanding what determines distribution on the platform.

To find these growth hacks, you have to understand how everything works. Be a student of the game. Look at the reasoning traces of your agents. Try to understand how decisions are being made. What is interacting with what? Then go out there and shamelessly test things.

Dignity is reserved for when all the low-hanging fruit has been picked off by the people with no dignity, and all you’re left with is mature channels.

For an early-stage startup, there’s a huge advantage to being first. When no one else has tried something, you have more room to experiment and ask for forgiveness. But don’t be evil. Don’t be seedy. The fact that a channel is new doesn’t mean anything goes. But you should be bold.

Channels are saturating faster than ever. If a mature channel is working and everyone’s using it, fine, go play there. UGC and AI-generated UGC on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are table stakes. Be smart about those channels and disciplined in how you use them. But also reserve some of your time to do crazy shit.

I would push every team to spend time on moonshot channels, too. Don’t just take your growth story from the existing literature. It’s very easy to see what another successful startup did and decide you have to do the same thing. Maybe you do have to play in some of those more worn places. But as an early-stage startup, if you just do what everyone else does, it’s very unlikely that you’ll succeed.

Maybe you’re an S-class storyteller. There aren’t many people who can count on that. Either way, I would still do the work of finding smaller communities where people care about what I’m building.

Are you going to the niche subreddits and Discords where those people spend time? Are you doing the things that require real work and effort to get in front of people who actually care about the problem you’re trying to solve?

That’s why I don’t think founders should abdicate their responsibility to an algorithm. You should be much more opinionated about who might care about what you’re building, and whether the story you’re telling resonates with those people.

If you’ve tried all those things, gotten in front of those people, and still haven’t gotten traction, then maybe your product or your business isn’t there yet.

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