Welcome!

When you joined Growth Insights, we promised you one thing: growth tips and insights straight to your inbox that actually help you grow. And here they are. 🚀

If you haven’t already done so, bring your friend to our community. It counts over 10,000 founders and marketers who are buzzing with shared knowledge, tips, and networking opportunities.

Here’s your invite link:

Now, let’s dive in and get growing

Tip: Boost retention by making all plans available to teams

Source: Growth Bites

If you're only allowing teams to access your top tiers (or if you aren't supporting teams at all), you might be missing out. Cut churn by optimizing every plan for collaboration.

When working with individual users, churn rates can be pretty high (~5% per month). Teams, however, often have much lower churn rates (1-2%). And each account tends to grow more with teams, allowing companies to more easily reach net negative churn. Simply put, this is because more value is created and there's more friction in canceling when a user is collaborating with others. Plus, if a user is inactive, notifications from other collaborators might reactivate them. If your product already supports teams, consider opening up team access on all tiers — not just the more expensive ones. If your product is not set up for teams yet, consider pivoting to allow for collaboration. And this doesn't just apply to B2B companies. B2C companies can also find ways to support teams (like family and friends).

Life before and after AI

_{Brought by Solveo}

Remember what happened in Spain and Portugal not long ago? When the electricity, internet, and AI services went down for few days? People panicked. Hard. It’s the first reaction, right? Suddenly, they had to think for themselves. Write things by hand. Plan their day without reminders. No screens to scroll. But something unexpected happened. People started to slow down. Recharge. Remember what it felt like to not be “on” 24/7. Turns out, life without AI isn’t the end of the world, it just takes a minute to remember how to live it. Or…maybe not?

Imagine waking up in 1990. Or just remember the life before …  🙂  No smartphones. No Google. No ChatGPT. No Netflix recommendations. You ask a human for directions, read a physical map, and wait weeks for a letter. And now, AI writes our emails, drives our cars, and even diagnoses diseases faster than doctors.

What the heck happened?

AI didn’t just shake things up—it basically built a whole new reality around us. The other day, my grandpa asked me, “So what’s this artificial intelligence all about?” And then he continued, telling me that he installed it and talks to it now. He’s been chatting with it about Paganini—his favourite composer. (He’s old, sure, but he’s sharp—was a professor all his life, so learning new stuff isn’t a problem for him.)

And honestly, I had a moment. This man was born in the 40s. Now he’s texting on a smartphone and chatting with ChatGPT. Wild, right?

From how we work to how we relax, from medicine to the military, from shopping for groceries to tracking our fitness, from building cities to managing traffic, from designing products to predicting the weather, from tracking our health to recommending music, from navigating the world to organizing our schedules… AI has slipped into every part of life. But seriously—how did we function before it? And just how much has changed? 

Let’s take a look at the numbers, the history, and some pretty mind-blowing facts behind this whole AI wave👇

AI Made Building Easy. Strategy Is What Sets You Apart.

Source: Superhuman AI

This week’s takeaways come from a conversation with Jeff Bussgang — investor, educator, and serial founder — who shared a grounded perspective on how AI is changing what it takes to build and scale a startup.

Let’s break it down:

1. AI Has Changed the Game

Building is no longer the moat it once was. With the rise of no-code tools and generative AI, product creation is faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

What’s harder now — and more valuable — is knowing what to build, how to structure it, and how to get it in front of the right people. Strategic thinking, system design, and distribution are becoming the new edge.

2. The Strategic Founder Wins

“AI won’t replace founders anytime soon. But founders who use AI will absolutely replace those who don’t.”

The idea is simple: technical skills matter less when tools do most of the heavy lifting. What matters more is the ability to frame problems, move quickly, and turn ideas into scalable workflows.

It’s no longer about who can code — it’s about who can decide well and ship with speed.

3. Using AI to Find Product-Market Fit

The tools exist to compress the PMF process significantly. Here’s the general approach outlined:

• Build detailed user personas using models like NotebookLM or a custom GPT trained on customer data and interviews.

• Prototype using no-code tools without writing a line of code.

• Use AI-powered video tools (e.g. HeyGen, ElevenLabs) to generate demo content tailored to target segments.

• Run lightweight distribution experiments early to validate resonance before scaling.

It’s not about skipping steps — it’s about cycling through them faster.

4. Getting Past $1M Is the Real Test

Reaching early traction, especially with AI pilots, is more accessible than before. But converting $100K pilots into enterprise-wide rollouts? That’s where most stall out.

Three things are required to make the leap:

• A repeatable go-to-market motion

• Multi-channel distribution beyond the founder

• A roadmap for customer expansion post-pilot

This stage — sometimes called the “SaaS valley of death” — separates quick wins from long-term businesses.

5. The AI Paradox for Junior Talent

If AI automates the early grunt work, how will new professionals build the experience needed for higher-level judgment?

The answer isn’t clear. One suggestion: junior team members need to accelerate their learning by asking sharper questions, seeking feedback, and engaging in deeper reasoning earlier in their careers.

They can get to the outputs faster — but they still need to develop the intuition behind them.

6. SF Isn’t the Only Place to Build

Proximity to customers may matter more than proximity to other founders.

Application-layer AI companies that solve real problems for SMBs and enterprises may be better served by being closer to end users — in New York, Boston, or other hubs — rather than in the startup-saturated Bay Area.

Startups building for startups can grow fast, but they often stall. Solving practical, widely distributed problems is often a safer bet.

Bottom line:
AI is flattening the playing field. Strategy, execution speed, and customer insight are the new levers.

Those who know how to use the tools — and think clearly — will outpace those who don’t.

Thank you for reading! ✌️

We look forward to sharing more with you next week. Stay tuned!

Powered by Solveo