In 2015, I co-founded TrueCoach with a simple thesis: personal trainers needed better software to manage their clients remotely. As a growth marketer, I saw an underserved market with massive potential. We were early to the online coaching wave, and we caught it at just the right moment.
Over the next seven years, we scaled the company to eight figures in revenue. We built a product that tens of thousands of coaches used daily. We raised funding, grew a team, and eventually found an exit that let everyone involved walk away with something meaningful. The full story of how I scaled TrueCoach to exit is worth reading if you want the tactical details.
What Comes After a Startup Exit
After the acquisition, I took time to decompress. If you've ever been through a startup exit, you know the strange mix of relief, emptiness, and restlessness that follows. You've spent years building something, and suddenly that thing isn't yours anymore. You can read more about my full journey building GrowthMarketer.
I spent the first few months traveling. Then I started consulting. I helped a few companies with their growth strategies, mostly drawing on what had worked at TrueCoach. But something felt off.
The playbooks I knew weren't working the same way anymore. The three major shifts that broke traditional growth marketing were already underway. Channels were saturated. Attention was fragmented. The tactics that had worked for years were producing diminishing returns.
Watching AI Growth Transform Everything
By late 2022, I started paying serious attention to what was happening with AI. ChatGPT had just launched. Image generation was getting good. The tools were still rough, but the trajectory was clear.
I realized that every growth discipline I understood was about to be rewritten. Content creation, ad creative, landing page testing, email copywriting, data analysis—the entire stack was shifting. The competitive advantage for growth marketers wasn't going to be knowing the old playbooks. It was going to be building new ones around these capabilities.
This wasn't incremental change. This was a fundamental rewiring of how growth marketing would work. The companies that figured out AI growth first would have an insurmountable advantage over those still running 2019 playbooks.
So I made a decision. Instead of continuing to consult on strategies that were becoming obsolete, I would spend the next two years learning everything I could about how AI changes growth.
Two Years of Rebuilding My Growth Marketing System
I went deep. I tested every AI writing tool. I built custom workflows for ad creative generation. I experimented with AI-assisted content systems that could produce in a day what used to take a week. I studied how the best operators were combining automation with human judgment.
I also watched what didn't work. I saw companies waste money on AI tools that promised automation but delivered garbage. I saw the importance of keeping a human in the loop—the strategic oversight that separates output from outcomes. AI without direction produces noise. AI with experienced guidance produces leverage.
The knowledge I built at TrueCoach was still valuable, but it needed to be rewired around new capabilities. The fundamentals of growth marketing remained the same: you need to reach the right people with the right message and convert them efficiently. But the execution layer had changed completely—from server-side attribution to AI-powered creative production.
What it means to be a real growth marketer in 2024 is fundamentally different from 2015. The role requires understanding AI tools, building systems that scale, and knowing when to automate versus when to apply human judgment.
The Key Decisions That Shaped This Path
Looking back, there were a few pivotal moments that determined where I ended up:
Betting on depth over breadth. I could have continued consulting across many clients with surface-level advice. Instead, I went deep on AI growth capabilities for two years before taking on any new clients. That investment in learning paid dividends.
Choosing operators over agencies. I spent time learning from people who had actually built companies, not agency teams who had only run campaigns. The difference in perspective was enormous. Operators understand that growth isn't about tactics—it's about building systems that compound.
Accepting that the old playbooks were dead. This was harder than it sounds. I had seven years of proven strategies from TrueCoach. Admitting that much of that knowledge needed to be rebuilt required ego death. But clinging to outdated approaches would have made me irrelevant.
Building for leverage from day one. I knew that if I was going to deliver growth as a service, I needed systems that could scale across multiple clients without linear increases in effort. That meant investing heavily in AI workflows before taking on the first client.
For the deeper philosophy behind these choices, read Trust Your Path.
Why Growth as a Service Is the Future
After two years of rebuilding my approach, I understood something clearly. Most companies cannot hire their way to this capability. Finding the right growth marketer is hard enough—but the talent is too scarce, too expensive, and changes too fast to build in-house.
The math doesn't work for most companies. A senior growth marketer with AI-native skills costs $180K+ per year. Building a full growth team costs even more. And by the time you hire and onboard that team, the landscape has shifted again.
What companies need is access to a growth function that has already made the investment. A team that has spent years learning how AI changes execution. A system that combines modern tools with experienced oversight.
That's what GrowthMarketer delivers. Not a traditional agency selling hours. Not a software tool promising automation. A complete growth function that operates as an extension of your team, built from the ground up around AI-native workflows.
I spent seven years building one company. Now I'm helping eight companies at once. The model works because the leverage has changed. What used to require a full team can now be delivered by a smaller group with better systems. That's also why we only take 8 clients—to maintain quality while delivering real results.
You can see the details of how we run growth for 8 clients simultaneously without sacrificing quality.
Growth as a Service: The Model for 2024 and Beyond
This is growth as a service. And I believe it's the model that fits how growth actually works in 2024 and beyond.
Traditional agencies are stuck in the past—billing hours for tactics that don't move the needle. I've written extensively about the real economics of marketing agencies—how they draft on client momentum and take credit for growth they didn't cause. Internal teams struggle to keep pace with how fast AI growth tools are evolving. The companies winning right now are the ones with access to operators who have already done the work of rebuilding their systems around new capabilities.
Growth as a service sits at that intersection. You get the strategic depth of an experienced growth marketer, the leverage of AI-native systems, and the accountability of someone who has built and exited a company. No learning curves, no ramp-up periods, no hoping your new hire figures it out.
The future of growth marketing isn't about doing more. It's about having better systems that produce compounding results. That's what I spent two years building. That's what I'm now delivering to the companies I work with.
Ready to Scale with Growth as a Service?
If you're looking for growth as a service built by operators who've been in your shoes, let's talk. We bring the AI-native growth systems, the strategic experience, and the execution capability—so you can focus on building your product and serving your customers.
Get in touch to explore working together.
Robbie Jack•Dec 01, 2025•7 min read
