One company hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue before its first birthday. Another has 34 million users building real software—including 11-year-olds creating functional apps. These aren't outliers anymore. They're the new benchmark for what's possible when you throw out the traditional growth playbook.
Here's what's wild: the head of growth at one of these companies says that only 30-40% of what she learned over 20 years in the field still applies. The rest? Completely obsolete.
If you're building an AI company—or any company competing in AI-adjacent markets—the rules have fundamentally changed. Let me break down what's actually working.
The New Growth Equation: 95% Innovation, 5% Optimization
For decades, growth teams focused on optimizing existing funnels. Find the drop-off points. Run A/B tests. Squeeze another 3% out of your conversion rate. Rinse and repeat.
That playbook is dead.
The fastest-growing AI companies have flipped the ratio entirely. They spend 95% of their energy innovating on growth—standing up entirely new loops, launching features that double as marketing, creating experiences nobody has seen before. Only 5% goes to optimization.
Why? Because the market moves every three months. Consumer expectations shift. Model capabilities leap forward. Your competitors multiply. The company that's optimizing yesterday's funnel is already falling behind the one that's inventing tomorrow's growth engine.
Product-market fit used to be something you achieved and then scaled for years. Now it expires quarterly. The AI companies winning today treat product-market fit as something they have to recapture constantly—not a finish line, but a treadmill that keeps accelerating.
Minimum Lovable Product: Why Functionality Is Now Table Stakes
Remember when having a working product was enough? Those days are gone.
The barrier to building functional software has collapsed. When anyone can spin up a working prototype in minutes, functionality becomes commoditized. What differentiates you now is how the experience feels.
The smartest AI founders have replaced MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with MLP: Minimum Lovable Product. The standard isn't "does it work?" It's "does it make people feel something?"
One fast-growing company literally named itself after this principle. Their internal rule: if it's not lovable, it doesn't ship. When something feels off, people drop everything to fix it—sprints and schedules be damned.
This isn't soft thinking. It's strategic. When your product creates an emotional response—when users feel like they suddenly have superpowers—they can't wait to tell others. They post screenshots. They drag friends in. They become your marketing department without you asking.
Word of mouth doesn't come from adequate experiences. It comes from moments that blow people's socks off.
The Counterintuitive Move: Give Your Product Away
Here's where most founders get it backwards: they gate their AI product behind paywalls because the compute costs are real. Every interaction costs money. Protecting margins feels responsible.
But the companies growing fastest are doing the opposite. They're giving their product away aggressively—and tracking those giveaways as marketing spend, not margin erosion.
Think about it differently. When someone wants to host a hackathon at their company using your AI customer workspace, what do you do? The slow-growth answer is to make them pay or limit their access. The fast-growth answer is to ask them how many free credits they need—and then give them more than they asked for.
That person is about to do your marketing and activation work for you, inside an organization full of potential customers. Why would you create friction?
This approach works because you're not competing for eyeballs on Google or Meta. You're not bidding against every other company for the same expensive ad real estate. Instead, you're investing directly in high-intent users who will spread the word organically.
One company found that influencer marketing delivers 10X the results of paid social. Not because they're paying more—because the cost per genuine eyeball is dramatically lower when someone trusted demonstrates what's possible.
Build in Public: Ship Velocity Is Marketing
The old model separated building from marketing. Engineering shipped features. Marketing announced them. Weeks or months later.
The new model collapses that entirely. Shipping velocity becomes your marketing strategy.
The fastest-growing AI companies ship daily—sometimes multiple times per day—and talk about it constantly. Their engineers don't hand off announcements to a marketing team. They post directly about what they built. The CEO tweets growth numbers and lessons learned in real-time.
This creates a different kind of relationship with your market. People start logging into social media specifically to see what you've shipped. Every new feature becomes content. Every improvement becomes a reason for churned users to come back and check what's changed.
It also works because authenticity cuts through. When the people building the product are the ones sharing the journey, corporate polish falls away. Users see the humans behind the software. They pick a team they want to root for.
The Activation Flip: When Product Is Growth
Traditional growth teams obsess over activation—getting users to that first aha moment. They optimize onboarding flows, reduce friction, add tooltips and tutorials.
AI companies have flipped this entirely. The core product team now owns activation, because in an AI product, the agent experience IS the activation moment.
Think about it: when someone prompts your AI and it delivers something useful, that's simultaneously the product working and the user activating. Every improvement to your model improves the entire customer lifecycle at once. There's no separate "activation optimization" workstream because making the AI better IS activation optimization.
This frees growth teams to work on things that would have seemed bizarre a few years ago—launching new integrations, building features, creating entirely new use cases. The traditional growth playbook of micro-optimizing funnels just doesn't move the needle when your core product can leap forward with each model improvement.
Your Playbook For AI-Era Growth
Building an AI customer workspace or any product where customer data creates value? Here's what the fastest-growing companies are actually doing:
Ship something weekly that you can talk about publicly. Velocity creates noise, and noise keeps you top of mind.
Give your product away generously to anyone with high intent. Hackathon organizers, community builders, early evangelists—these people do your marketing for you.
Build for delight, not just functionality. When the cost of building drops, experience becomes your moat.
Get founders and team members on social sharing the real journey. Authenticity compounds.
Accept that product-market fit is temporary. Plan to recapture it every quarter as capabilities and expectations shift.
The companies that will win aren't the ones optimizing hardest. They're the ones constantly reinventing what growth looks like—and building products so good that customers can't help but spread the word.
