Zero Clicks #39: The Growth Hacker Strikes Back

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the implications of LLMs eating the world, with a particular focus of media and marketing. Here’s your TL;DR for what lies ahead:

• The big picture: It’s 2014 all over again

• Job posts: Forward deployed engineers vs. Deloitte consultants

• One great read: 20,000 words on AI existentialism   

• Best thing on the internet: “Look how bro glazed it”

Welcome back to Zero Clicks. Sorry it’s been so long.  It has been an….eventful start to the year at the day job which has deprived me of writing time. IYKYK.

I’m really excited for Zero Clicks in 2026. In my browser tab right now are three-quarter written pieces on everything from the psychologically seductive power of slop to how LLMs will paradoxically usher in a renaissance of institutional power. We’ve also got more Q & A features on tap with the most important builders of the modern internet. Thanks for bearing with me and thanks as always for reading. Onward…..

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The Growth Hacker Strikes Back

Old heads in technology love to bitch about enshittification and wax nostalgic about a superior bygone era of the internet. But which version of the web are we really pining for? I suspect that if you really dig into this problem, you’ll find most people’s “best version of the web” is the mean digital streets of 2013-4.

In those days, people religiously posted on Instagram, planned parties on Facebook and vibed across Pinterest and Tumblr. We were two years removed from the Arab Spring on Twitter. Amazon Prime added 10 million new members in Q4 of 2014 alone as the modern miracle of free delivery hit the masses. Nascent new platforms like Snapchat galvanized the imagination of what was possible in consumer tech. Most importantly, the massive societal externalities of connecting five billion inhabitants of a rock on a five inch screen were not yet fully clear.

The internet of those days that so many loved was the masterpiece of a creature known as the growth hacker. Staring with the ubiquity of large centralized tech companies in the early aughts, the modern web was built in three acts.

Stage 1: (Early 2000s- 2014:) Growth Hackers Galore: Hundreds of millions of people were onboarded into mass consumer tech in a fever dream of referral loops, weird-ass quizzes and listicles, programmatic SEO hacks and viral apps with monthlong half-lives. The builders of these often bizarre creations were the most coveted non-technical talent in the game.

If you remember the ice bucket challenge, that was more or less the final high water mark of this time. For additional cultural context, this is when True Detective Season 1 graced the airwaves.

The internet growth hackers built felt frenetic, unserious and at times incredibly annoying. But it also possessed a raw realness that has faded away.

Stage 2: (2014-2021): Paid Media Arbitrage: Once they hit critical mass of users, platforms turned against grey hat growth hacks that brought eyeballs but didn’t directly monetize them. More importantly, their ad platforms got so good that it made more sense for brands to just be really good paid media buyers instead of doing weird scrappy shit. You could put $1 into the machine and get a guaranteed $3-5 back and tech went into hypergrowth as a result.

Said bluntly, the cost of unlocking massive GDP growth on the internet was loss of joie d’vie in mass consumer internet products. The entire internet got painted the same shade of Balboa Mist greige that adorns every modern living room.

All told, Google, Amazon, Meta and the American 401k or pension holder was perfectly fine with this trade. 

Stage 3: (2022-2025:) Incumbent Advantage: By 2022, the platforms were a near perfectly competitive market, far too optimized for either growth hacks or targeting wizardry to provide any discernible advantage against the house. As a result, brands that were already dialed in on the algorithm (or could start new and endure insane levels of margin erosion) won. This was, effectively the profit taking era for the 95th percentile and above brands of the mid 2010s who understood unit economics and contribution margin. It was also a great time for sovereign wealth transfer from Temu to your Fidelity account. 

For much of 2023 into 2024, it felt like the wheels were coming off in all consumer marketing as Meta, Google and Amazon growth funnels broke for American enterprises that needed to turn a profit. Ultimately, it took AI’s Cambrian explosion set off by ChatGPT’s launch to get them dialed back in. 

Silicon Valley owes OpenAI an enormous debt of gratitude for saving it from the ennui of having to pump NFTs and the metaverse. The marketing profession owes OpenAI an even larger one for saving a generation of companies overreliant on the paid growth hamster wheel from a death spiral of diminishing returns from big platforms.

Now, things really get fun. The inevitable has happened and ads are coming to ChatGPT.  For now, OpenAI is being trepidatious and bizarrely apologetic about launching ads. The initial pilot is targeting large brands in a select few verticals who can conjure up a few nickels on top of their Super Bowl Ad buys to test a new platform with no discernible attribution beyond clicks. The simple reality of OpenAI’s unit economics say it won’t stay this way for long.   

Eventually, the floodgates will open and the growth hackers will eat.  It won’t be dialed in. It won’t be perfect. It will be the fastest growing consumer platform in history ripe with opportunities for arbitrage.

The first people to crack ChatGPT’s unique intent dynamics (both through savvy media buying and AEO strategies that augment paid ads) will find gargantuan direct response outcomes. Time remains a flat circle. It’s the growth hacker’s era again.

There’s another important element here– in building the future, the growth hacker will have an entirely new tool at her disposal that the ancestors in 2010 could never dream of. Enter Claude Code.

Historically, software has been the tool of the manager more than the individual contributor. Most modern SaaS is effectively  analytics, dashboards and workflows--- things that oversee and even abstract away the work from doers. 

While the SaaS boom of the prior decade created enormous enterprise value, it often empowered a regression to the mean and lowest common denominator way of working. The best and the worst sales rep on your team have used more or less the same Salesforce dashboards throughout their whole careers. This likely elevated your worst rep and slowed down your best.

Claude Code turns that entire dynamic on its head– it is literally nothing without imagination, vision and some amount of literary panache in your prompting. But it is liquid hydrogen for the growth hacker.

At first blush, it’s difficult to discern the significance of Claude Code for everyday knowledge workers vis a vis existing vibe coding tools and the basic fact that it isn’t that hard to cheaply offshore rudimentary technical tasks.  At various points in my career, I have employed:

• a 19 year old kid from Florida who could build Clay tables to satisfy any lead gen request I could dream of. (apparently, things like this now go for $2,500 per!) 

• An Uzbekistani developer I met on UpWork who built jaw droppingly good custom web pages with ROI calculators for enterprise prospects in hours

• An Israeli engineer who lived off-grid in the mountains of Spain and could build anything in Wordpress at $50-70/ hour.

• An offshore team in India who could also do any of the tasks above, about 80% as well as the narrow specialists above, for roughly half the price.

If vibe coding is best defined as “writing something in English and getting a technical product as the output,” I’ve effectively been vibe coding my entire career. I write an email, exploit the generational arbitrage that is the supremacy of the US dollar and voila, I am a software engineer!

If there’s one thing to know about the “growth hacker”, it’s that he always has a guy. 

Claude Code is something fundamentally different. Adding direct access to a repository of institutional knowledge, memory and integrations into most facets of your professional life creates a true thought partner in building. It’s not that Claude Code is smarter than your guy, it’s that it has context that would take days to convey to a partner….that often you might not even remember. Sam Altman’s dual ecstasy and melancholy around building with Codex (OpenAI’s competitor to Claude Code) illustrates this dynamic well.

Maybe 1% of white-collar workers will bother to even play with Claude Code this year. But you better believe all those folks who created shareable “what’s your dating aura?” quizzes on Facebook in 2009 will.

After a decade of being pompous and thinking the moniker was gauche and below me, I’ve come to embrace my brand as a growth hacker. Hell, it’s the only job in tech that feels futureproof right now. If this sounds desperately like a mid-senior level big tech employee currently trying to reassure themselves that they are still relevant in the modern workforce……. yes.

In Brian Morrissey’s parlance, we’ve just rebranded the “hustler” or “growth hacker" as “high-agency.” I dig it. This is our time.

Forward Deployed Engineer, Alephic

Originally pioneered by Palantir, the forward deployed engineer job title is about to explode in the market thanks mostly to Claude and his friends at the other model companies. For those who have marketing, media or general Marshall McLuhan type sensibilities, I highly recommend checking out Alephic, a rapidly growing AI consultancy. Read their post “it’s a good time for weirdos” (who are basically growth hackers with slightly better branding) and you’ll get it.

Forward deployed engineer is probably the best job for an ambitious generalist who (regrettably) five years ago may have opted to head to McKinsey, Goldman or Google to accelerate their career. Too many weirdos got boxed into corporate normalcy in the last generation because it was the only commercially sensible play. Now, we get to be free.

Chief Growth Officer, AI-Native, Morning Consult
This role is a good friend’s backfill so please get in touch if you’re interested. Morning Consult is a fascinating company– part media, part SaaS, part high-margin research…layered under the smart umbrella positioning of “global decision intelligence.”

The hallmark of businesses that can navigate a transition to an AI-first world is access to unique, proprietary data and Morning Consult has it in spades. Salary range ain’t bad for the space here either.

Global Partner Lead, Deloitte, Anthropic
Here’s one for the “AI will kill all major management consultants” crowd. Anthropic is grabbing your beer and hiring for an account lead to work only with Deloitte.

Private Equity Partnerships Manager, OpenAI
I can’t imagine what kind of schemes will get cooked up here but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they won’t be great for the American laborer.

The adolescence of technology, Dario Amodei

First off, it’s just not fair that such a prominent tech executive can write this well. Dario’s command of lofty vernacular is unmatched. But it's the timing of choosing to publish that I find most intriguing.

One year....or even six months ago, it was easy to cynically write off Dario's existentialism towards AI as a content marketing strategy. Grand prognostications about mass societal and labor disruption are a great way to drive FOMO in the enterprise and accelerate deal timelines. 

But now that job is done. It's hard to see a commercial angle here--this feels incredibly raw and purely from the heart. Still, it feels like there is something of a disconnect between the gravity of the moment that Dario suggests and how conservative and vanilla his proposed societal and political solutions are. Shakeel Hassim at Transfomer covers this well here.

Much of it ultimately comes down to a (naive?) hope that our better angels will prevail. Maybe that’s as good a plan as any.

I generally despite “I just can’t” as a phrase but nothing else could remotely describe Alison Luchs, 47 year employee of the National Gallery of Art, making videos introducing 17th century Italian masterpieces with gen Alpha slang.  This is spit out coffee good.

Be warned: “look how bro glazed it” is my new catch phrase.