Julian Cross

For us, building our own tool is a bit of a weird loop. We build it to help other startups with their growth, but we have to use it ourselves to actually run our own growth.

For me, that s one of the most humbling parts of building a product using it while it s still clunky and half-finished.

We do our everyday outreach there, track our own funnel, test the email sequences, and look at our analytics... And all of this is happening inside the exact same environment we re selling to other teams. It s kind of a mirror within a mirror =D

But it s also brutal. When the dashboard lags, I feel it. When a feature is confusing, I m the first one to get frustrated.

Search performance reports typically include keyword rankings, organic impressions, clicks, and conversions.

As Google AI Overviews appear more frequently during commercial research, marketers have another part of search visibility to measure.

I don't want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)...

I've been doing product marketing and growth for a while now, and I feel like every single piece of advice right now is telling founders they need to become full-time influencers. "Post on LinkedIn every day," "start a YouTube channel," "build in public."

I get the logic people buy from people. But it's exhausting. It feels like we've shifted from "build a great product and tell people about it" to "build a great product and then spend 4 hours a day performing authenticity on social media." And the worst part is, most of it just looks like the same recycled motivational platitudes.

So, how do you actually build trust and drive growth without forcing the founder to become a content creator?