Why most growth advice sucks (and what I’m building instead)

Good morning. In this edition:

⚡ The hidden costs of tactical growth advice
🔥 Why your team keeps rebuilding the same failed funnels
🧠 The myth of "just test more"
💣 What I’m building to kill all of this

⚡The hidden costs of tactical growth advice

Most advice online is tactical because tactics feel easy. Digestible. Actionable. They make you feel productive.

• I audited over 10,000 Google Ads accounts and here’s how you 8x your profit.

• Here are 5 ad angles that always convert on Meta Ads.

• Try this onboarding hack to boost customer retention 9x.

Are they helpful? Sometimes. These types of posts are typically exaggerations.

Repeatable? Rarely. Context matters. What worked for them might not work for you.

Costly? Always. The cost is this:

You start solving problems in isolation, instead of fixing the system. And eventually you forget what you were optimizing in the first place.

🔥 Why your team keeps rebuilding the same failed funnels

Ever feel like you're solving the same problem every quarter? One month it’s CAC. Then it’s retention. Then you’re back to CAC again. Your team’s stuck in a loop, but not the kind that compounds.

It’s because your execution is disconnected from your learning.

• You don’t know why that campaign worked.

• You can’t find the insight from last quarter’s test.

• The new hire has no idea what the old team already tried.

That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a system design problem. And the real issue isn’t lack of effort. It’s lack of structure.

🧠 The myth of “just test more”

“Test more” is not a strategy. It’s how you burn money while feeling smart.

The myth is that velocity = progress.
But most teams don’t need more tests. They need better tests.

• Speed-to-insight beats speed-to-launch.

• 10 experiments with no learnings is just noise.

• 1 high-signal win that you can templatize? That’s growth.

Most testing calendars look like a Jackson Pollock painting, and I’m not a fan of Pollock’s paintings. They’re too busy, abstract, and expensive (i.e. they insist upon themselves). If you want signal, you need a testing system with memory, prioritization, and leverage baked in.

💣 What I’m building to kill all of this

For the last 6 months, I’ve been quietly building Growth Marketing OS — the system I wish I had 10 years ago.

It’s not a course.
It’s not a deck.
It’s the complete operating system I use to:

• Build better growth loops

• Run experiments that compound

• Train teams without burning them out

• Scale performance without scaling waste

It’s what I used to help brands grow from $1M to $100M.

And on June 2, I’m opening it up.

Not to everyone. Just to people who get this newsletter. For FREE.

I didn’t build this to sell a template. I built it because I kept seeing the same problems at every stage of growth and I needed a system that could fix them at the root.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your startup journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.