What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is figuring out what makes a product grow and scaling it.

The reason I went into growth marketing is the same reason I studied philosophy: to find out what’s actually true.

In philosophy, you try to uncover truths about the world using logic. In growth marketing, you uncover truths about customers using experiments. Growth marketing turned out to be the most practical version of that pursuit.

People often think growth marketing is tactics: ads, referral programs, A/B tests. Those are just tools. The real job is figuring out what causes your product to grow. Once you understand that, the tactics become obvious.

A growth marketer is a detective. Channel expertise is not the point—it’s a consequence. It’s what happens after you find something that works and push on it. The real skill is going from zero to insight: forming hypotheses, running tests, and identifying what’s actually driving behavior. That skill transfers across every channel.

The work itself is straightforward, but not easy. You start by considering all possible channels. Then you narrow them down: are your customers there? how expensive is it to test? what’s the realistic upside? From there, you design the fastest, cheapest experiments that could prove you wrong.

This is the core idea behind the Bullseye Framework from Traction—one of the first books I read on growth, and still the best. It’s not about tactics. It’s about method. In philosophical terms, tactics are accidental; method is essential.

Once you find what works, you go deep. That’s how specialization happens. I became fluent in Meta ads not because I set out to, but because Meta turned out to be the right channel for a product I was working on. You don’t choose the channel—the truth does.

Experience across channels helps, but not for the reason people think. It doesn’t matter because you “know more channels.” It matters because it improves the speed and quality of your inference.

That’s what separates a senior growth marketer from a junior one.

Not the channels they know.

How quickly they can find what’s true—and act on it.