Growth Champions

Influencer marketing in tech is shit at the moment. It’s riddled with fake ads, promotions, growth hacking strategies, bots, and people doing whatever it takes to win, even if it’s shit. Lies everywhere.

Meanwhile, teams need champions. They want to get the word out, and they need genuine feedback, interest, and usage from champions, early adopters, and the right people who need help with the product. From my time as a product manager, I loved talking to end users, and they loved me too. That was a beautiful relationship. We need to fix influencer marketing by turning it into champion marketing, even if the champions are paid.

A champion is truthful and says what it is, even if the product isn’t all that. A champion would ordinarily be interested in the product, or curious enough to want to try it out. It shouldn’t be forced.

Products that go viral and sustain that virality do so through champions using, talking about, recommending, and spreading the word, not 1,000+ botted influencers from some platform.

I recently had a chat with the team at Mercury and realized I was a champion who wants to see them succeed. I don’t need a fee to promote their product. Mercury needs to find more people like me, which is hard right now. I was a champion even before I signed up for Mercury, because they were the only fintech provider that would open a US bank account for a foreign founder in minutes.

Influencers at scale are usually guns for hire, and most of the time they’re not potential users. We know this because we’ve run influencer campaigns before. Product teams run early access programs and customer advisory boards. What do growth teams have?

Personally, I’ve been a champion for some of my favorite devtools over the last 10 years, namely Sanity, Netlify, Supabase, Cloudflare, and Grok Bot, without speaking to anyone on some of those teams. I always “market” these products for free.

We’ll find all the technology champions on the planet and incentivize them to do work they’d already do for free, starting with the first 1 million champions.