60+ new creative growth ideas

How to stand out when everyone is running the same playbook

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Tom Orbach writes the most delightful and actionable newsletter for anyone looking to grow their product. When we began discussing a collaboration, I asked him to take the best of his newsletter and turn it into a single post. Below is the most specific and creative collection of growth ideas you’ll find anywhere.

As a bonus, Tom made it easy for you to feed this list into your agent to brainstorm growth ideas for your own product. I encourage you to share this post and the Markdown file with your team (and agents)—it’ll get their creative juices flowing.

Tom writes Marketing Ideas, a newsletter about unconventional growth tactics with over 100,000 subscribers, leads growth marketing at Wiz (now part of Google Cloud), and built the Viral Post Generator, which hit 2 million users, was covered by Business Insider*,* The Guardian*, and BuzzFeed, and was acquired in under a week. Check out his newsletter, and find him on LinkedIn.*

A few years ago, I pitched my VP a growth idea that made zero sense on paper. It had nothing to do with our product, we had no way of knowing if it would work, and there was a real chance it would make us look ridiculous. But I ran with the idea anyway, and it became one of the biggest growth wins in the company’s history:

We built a fake toy store for cybersecurity executives.

We were a startup selling cloud security software, and we just wanted chief information security officers (CISOs) to notice us in a crowd of older, well-known brands.

The store “sold” a CISO panic button and blindfolds for your legal team. It cost almost nothing to make, went viral on Reddit, and brought 46,000 visitors in 24 hours. Our goal was to get attention, but our sales team ended up with hundreds of qualified leads—and in enterprise security, a single good lead can be worth seven figures.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s almost impossible to stand out these days. Everyone seems to be running the same growth playbook: high-production-value video-led launches, paid influencers, SEO/AEO, social, email, maybe some (poorly attended) events. Your competitors are in the same channels, trying to innovate in the same ways.

But attention always goes to what people don’t see coming. The unexpected gets shared for free, remembered for months, and usually costs less than one week of ad spend.

I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to collecting unexpected growth ideas that worked. Every time I see a startup do something clever, it goes into my list. And most of the time, I dig deeper or even talk to the team behind it: How did they do it? How could I make it even better?

After four years of doing this, here are my 64 favorite creative growth tactics, organized by what you’re trying to do:

1. I want to generate buzz (without paid ads/influencers)
2. I want my launch to make noise
3. I want other people to spread the word for me
4. I want more leads and conversions
5. I want to outsmart my competitors
6. I want customers to pay more (and be happy about it)
7. I want customers to stay forever

You might wonder: Won’t a list like this quickly become stale? Not likely. Each idea has been run by one company, in one niche, usually once. There’s a lot of alpha here right now before any of these ideas are overdone. Many people will read this post; very few will actually do them. This is your opportunity.

Also, you definitely don’t need to try all 64. Treat them like lottery tickets—most will do nothing, but one can hit big. Scroll down to a problem you have right now and get inspired by what’s relevant for you. Even better, feed this Markdown-file version of this post into your favorite AI agent and brainstorm which ideas make sense for your specific product, brand, and growth goals.

Attention is the most expensive asset in marketing, and the traditional playbook’s answer is to buy it. Everything in this section earns it instead, with concepts that are a little outrageous by design: jokes and public stunts that people share on their own. None of them need a launch, a funding round, or any news at all.

💸 Spend your marketing budget on anything that isn’t marketing: Gumloop spent its entire marketing budget filling Vancouver with street musicians (in front of branded signs) during a conference. Sticker Mule gives $100,000 a month to an influencer who gives strangers $100 bills on camera. People are tired of ads. Put that budget toward something your audience cares about funding, and you’ll stand out.

☎️ Set up a phone number where something cool happens: Cloaked, a privacy app, set up a hotline that reads you the sensitive information data brokers are selling about you, a perfect demo for their capabilities. Bland is an AI voice platform, so their billboard lets potential customers try it out by chatting with one of their agents.

🎁 Offer an amazing prize, with a ridiculous requirement: Browserbase’s CEO posted, “The easiest way to get Browserbase equity is to join our company. The second easiest way is by getting a Browserbase tattoo.” He even shipped a joke calculator for it (face tattoo gets 1% equity!). Or, to pull from a very different industry: a Broadway show called My First Time offered free tickets . . . if you proved you were a virgin (you had to take a lie detector test 😳). Only a few people will participate, but tactics like this generate content that attracts everyone else.

🎈 Go anti-professional: One of the most viral LinkedIn posts of all time came from a manager who swapped her corporate headshot for a casual, no-makeup photo. Pick a norm of your own and break it in public. You might talk about how much roles actually pay or admit that a big launch didn’t actually meet internal expectations. People are tired of perfectly curated, glossy exteriors of the professional world, so a bit of human messiness will stand out.

🚯 Be loudly anti-AI: AI is obviously the biggest trend in the tech world, so if you’re willing to cut against the current, people will notice. Procreate’s CEO took a major stand on this (“I really f***ing hate generative AI”) and has shaped the company’s strategy around it. This level of commitment has to be company-wide, but when it works, it really works—that one video got more than 10 million views and now they’re known for it. If you’re going to avoid using AI to build your product, say it out loud and get public credit.

😂 Run a meme account for your industry: The CEO of 1up, an AI platform for sales teams, has publicly said that the company gets a third of their customer leads from memes. tl;dv has also brought in as much as a third of signups from social, like their TikTok sketch-comedy series roasting corporate meeting culture. You don’t have to be standup-comic funny to make this work, but you do need to understand the very specific ways your target audience thinks and talks.

🐵 Hire a fictional character: Trevor From Torq is a fictional junior media intern played by an actor who “works at” Torq, a cybersecurity company. “Trevor” posts memes on LinkedIn and gets stopped for photos at conferences. Especially in old-school or stuffy industries, a character can say things an official brand (or exec) can’t. Before hiring an actor, just try a new social media account that can test out a different style from your main profile.

✈️ Post a crazy job listing that doubles as a story: Rilla, an 80-person AI startup most people had never heard of, got a ton of attention (including press coverage by Fortune) because of its job listings: a $1,500/month rent stipend for anyone living within 15 minutes of the office, right alongside a blunt warning about 70-hour weeks. Anthropic made headlines for a week for telling people to not use AI assistants during their application process. Review your careers page or job description templates and add something that is startlingly unique, that only your company would say.

🎭 Give your whole team fake job titles on LinkedIn on the same day: This can’t be used too often, but LinkedIn boosts job changes with extra visibility. Tl;dv “promoted” all 50+ employees to CEO at once, leading to 50+ “new job” notifications hitting thousands of feeds. Plus, it set the stage for hilarious “I’m quitting my role as CEO” posts. 😂

📈 Use your product’s data to build an industry trend report: This is a great way to get regular press coverage. Carta used its massive collection of cap tables to create its State of Private Markets report, which tech publications love to quote. When the Ramp AI Index showed Anthropic passing OpenAI in workplace adoption, Axios built a big story around it. But you don’t have to start with a massive report. Just make a habit of publicly posting interesting (anonymized!) stats that your team uncovers.

✏️ Win those “+reddit” searches: People add “reddit” to Google searches to go straight to crowdsourced wisdom and skip the SEO trash. There are lots of ways to do this: start question threads that match what people search, be the first helpful comment when someone posts about problems you solve, host AMAs, and share free resources.

🎡 Make “the world’s first {familiar thing} for {your audience}”: This is how we got the toy store I mentioned above (I’ve also done a musical for CISOs and a meditation app for CISOs). Take something everyone recognizes—a store, a dating app, a comic book—and make it absurdly specific to your niche. Your target audience will love it and the mental mismatch will make everyone else share it. Spotify’s ad team did Spreadbeats, the world’s first music video in Excel. Their target audience (media planners) loved it and they won a bunch of advertising awards, which made them even more visible to those ad buyers.

A product announcement is rarely interesting on its own, even when the product is. Every idea in this section adds a reason to pay attention that has nothing to do with your feature list.

🕵️ Launch a rumor instead of a product: For months, Instinct (an invite-only personal AI assistant) was basically just a waitlist page: no team, no screenshots, and no price. But a few VCs and well-known founders got invites, and they started posting things like “as close to THE personal AI assistant we’ve all been waiting for” with no demo, because there was nothing public to demo. The replies were filled with people begging for an invite. By the time the founder finally introduced himself, Instinct had already raised $350 million in total funding and reached a $2.5 billion valuation. You can run the small version: launch invite-only, give early access to a few people your audience respects, and ask them to post what they think without showing the product. That’s how you seed exclusivity, hype, mystery, and a dash of FOMO.

🎪 Livestream the launch: A startup called Clicky teased their launch with a video pointing to a Luma page (yes, the IRL events app), got over 1,000 RSVPs, then went live on YouTube walking through the product to an already-stoked chat. Plus, they cut the reactions into a 25-second highlight reel, which meant a better launch day and tons of great follow-on content.

🤫 Build in not-so-public: What’s better than building in public? Building alongside a private WhatsApp or Telegram group that makes early users feel like insiders. Base44’s founder called creating early-user groups “one of my best decisions” on the way to an $80 million acquisition six months after starting. Those insiders give you critical early feedback, but they’ll also be a guaranteed source of hype when you launch.

👀 Use incomplete information to pull on people’s curiosity: Ahead of a big partnership announcement, Lovable posted “coming today…” with the other org’s logo blurred out. People jumped into the replies to share their guesses, and this teaser post ended up with 2.2 million views. By the time they made the big reveal (they’d partnered with Shopify) a few hours later, there was already buzz.

🪖 Recruit a micro-influencer army: Create an open ambassador program with no follower requirements and no content approval. Anyone can join, post about you, and get paid based on impressions. This opens things up to fans of your product who have a good instinct for generating attention, even if they don’t already have a large audience. Tl;dv pays $100 per 20,000 views (capped at $700 per post). This has helped them consistently bring in more than 10 million impressions per month. A hundred small creators can often out-distribute one big sponsorship, for a fraction of the price.

🎟️ Let waitlist members cut the line: Show each signup their exact place in line, and move them up for every friend they bring. Robinhood made this move famous a few years ago, when they landed nearly 1 million signups before launch, with each member bringing in three more on average. It scales all the way down: I ran a waitlist-cutting promo before launching my newsletter, which helped drive a bunch of my early subscribers.

🙋 Launch from the founder’s account, never only the company page: This is obvious to some, but it’s so important that I have to include it. Personal profiles get two to three times the organic reach of company pages. DuckDuckGo launched with the founder’s casual “What do you think of my new search engine?” post. If you have the budget, run thought-leader ads on LinkedIn on the founder’s post instead of boosting the corporate announcement.

🎣 Get reporters to pitch you with the “Journalist Bait” framework: I know from personal experience—I’ve been featured in Business Insider, The Guardian, and BuzzFeed without pitching anyone. Your company update is not news to a journalist. They only care about spotting the next big trend. Reframe your product release as a “proof of a cultural shift” and post it on social. Let them find you.

Word of mouth is sometimes mistaken for luck. But it’s closer to a design problem: give your happiest users something that makes them look good when they share it, and they’ll do your marketing for you.

🏆 Ship your top users a physical trophy: YouTube sends creators Play Button plaques at 100K, 1M, and 10M subscribers. OpenAI has mailed its API users a custom metal “token” at 10 billion, 100 billion, and 1 trillion tokens processed. Everyone wants to show off their accomplishments, and you know the people who receive one of these are going to share a pic on social media (plus put it on their desk or office wall forever).

🖼️ Give certificates with their name in big letters: When a customer hits a milestone, send a digital certificate built around their name. Again: people share what makes them look good. When we started doing this at Wiz, customer social shares jumped 300%. Bonus points for sending one to their boss too (“Awarded for building the kind of team that includes [Name]”).

🎧 Ask 20 experts one tiny question, then publish the results and give them credit: Email the best-known people in your field with one small ask. Like this: “What’s your favorite song to work to?” Then build a Spotify playlist with all of them, post it, and shout out each expert. I do this every year with security celebrities, and all of them share it, every time.

📸 Put your logo where people take screenshots: X redesigned their interface so that when you screenshot any post, the “Ask Grok” button immediately changes to the logo “X.com.” Every screenshot is now branded. Find what people screenshot most in your product (a result, a score, a report) and make sure your name or brand is right there.

👀 Make using your product a public act: To save a thread on X, Readwise users reply “@readwise save thread” in public, under the thread itself. Every save is a tiny ad, posted by a happy user, shown to everyone else reading the replies. Senja’s free testimonial widgets carry a small “Powered by Senja” link, so every free user’s website automatically advertises Senja—that’s tens of thousands of views a month, and hundreds of signups. I call this word-of-sight marketing: if your product has an action that people repeat daily, move it where others can see it.

🏅 Run weird world records and halls of fame: Clay celebrates the users who used the product in the strangest place (underwater, up a mountain, on jet skis). Of course every featured winner posts about it. Duolingo’s users wanted their streaks celebrated so badly they built a hall of fame themselves, now tracking more than 373,000 members.

🧶 Offer swag that makes people feel like insiders: Most swag is so generic it’s invisible. No one is going to notice that 2mm logo on a crappy pen. We’ve been giving out an ugly Christmas sweater that people beg for (1,000 comments on one giveaway post). What’s the difference? The sweater was covered with inside jokes and Easter eggs that only cloud security engineers would get. Just like Anthropic’s “thinking” hats, the key to nailing this is to make the swag say something about the person who wears it.

🎩 Publish a “Top 25” list of leaders for your industry: At Mine (my previous startup), our target audience was data protection officers. So we built a Top DPOs hall of fame. When we told each featured person that they had made the list, every single one of them shared it.

🐙 Give your power users a mascot: GitHub used Octocat to turn one of the most boring categories imaginable (version control!) into an identity that people actively choose to put on laptop lids and hoodies.

You don’t need another form or another ad campaign to get more leads. Some of the best sources are places you never think about, like your 404 page or your Zoom settings. All these ideas leverage surfaces that we all touch every day but, for some reason, don’t consider to be platforms.

⚡ Use your product on dream customers, then send them the results: Pick 8 to 10 companies that you’d love to have as customers and give away free value. Send them the output of your product (the report, the audit, the analysis, etc.), without them even asking. Much better than asking them for a demo call. Vanta’s founder sent Segment a custom SOC 2 gap-assessment analysis before Vanta even had a product, and Segment became the design partner that shaped the company. (For B2C: Try this out on target celeb users.)

🗣️ Make Zoom redirect to your testimonials page when calls end: Zoom has a buried setting (post-attendee URL) that automatically opens a URL of your choice in attendees’ browsers, in the background, the second a call ends. My team points this at our testimonials page, so every demo closes with the prospect getting some social proof to browse through. Set yours to the page you most want prospects to see next.

💌 Change your popup’s “No thanks” to “Maybe later”: Wikimedia does this on its donation popups, part of an operation that raised $184 million last year. Copy it in your own popups: swap your decline buttons for “Maybe later,” and when someone clicks, show one more small box: “Want us to remind you? Leave your email.”

🌫️ Put a blurred screenshot behind your signup form: One of the weirdest A/B tests I ever ran: adding a blurry product screenshot behind the signup form boosted conversion 25%. It triggers curiosity and a progress illusion (you feel like you’re almost inside).

❌ Put your 404 page to work: AI chatbots invent URLs all the time, so your 404 page may now be getting more traffic from hallucinating LLMs. TestResults offers these visitors a prize: “These sexy AirPods trunks are yours. With your name on them.” Pretty weird! But if someone wants them, they fill out a form that has an opt-in lead capture element. Add something like this to your 404s and turn an annoying dead page into a moment of customer delight.

🎣 Start video ads by naming who should watch: In the first three seconds of any video ad, say the viewer’s job title (or specific problem) out loud. “Hey, product managers” works much better than going straight to talking about your value prop. Deel, Gong, and HubSpot all do this.

💬 Run free office hours in your LinkedIn comments: Prove your team’s expertise by offering personalized advice for anyone who replies. I did “Drop your website URL below and I’ll reply with one marketing idea” and answered hundreds of responses. This brought me thousands of newsletter subscribers, probably because it proved I know my stuff. Figure out what value you want to be known for and offer it for free where people are already scrolling.🛝 Replace your “Book a demo” button with a “Try it yourself” playground: No one wants to give their email for nothing or wait for a Zoom call. Set up a dummy version of your product so that people can get to an aha moment without signing up or adding their credit card info. For inspiration, check out Plausible’s live analytics dashboard for its own site metrics, or Linear’s demo workspace, where you can actually create and manage tickets without even signing up.

🗓️ Make premium free during weird windows: Pluralsight occasionally offers Free Weekends, opening its entire 7,000-course library Friday to Sunday, no card required. A timeboxed window creates urgency a permanent free tier never will. This is like freemium with a deadline.

🤖 Add an “Ask AI about us” button: At the very bottom of Youform’s homepage, they have this section: “Scrolled so much but still not sure? Let your favorite AI tell you if Youform is the right fit.” There’s a button each for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI, and clicking one opens that LLM with a pre-written prompt. Since buyers and potential customers are going to do AI-powered research for you anyway, you might as well shape those conversations. Heads up: Claude just started flagging pre-written prompts that arrive through a link—so keep yours short and neutral to avoid suspicion.

🧪 Give away a mini-tool: Take a feature of your product, strip it down to one simple interaction, and offer it to the world, 100% free (and no email or signup). The Wordware team built a tiny site that roasts your X profile using their Sauna AI. 8.1 million people tried it and more than 400,000 signed up for the real product, which helped them land one of YC’s largest seed rounds.

💼 Create your industry’s job board: People are always looking for new jobs, including your target customers. So catch their attention by collecting every open role in your niche (not just the ones your company is hiring for). DataGrail runs one for privacy professionals, and if you’re not already tracking Lenny’s Jobs, what are you even doing? Bonus: You may get some industry credibility too. When we launchedcloudsecurity.jobs at Wiz, publications would cite it whenever the security job market came up.