Daniel Lenz

I value simplicity, clear communication, and continuous growth, both personally and professionally, try to bring a thoughtful mindset, reliability, and a good a

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/LKBASXsV1S

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Most founders hide doubt. Josh Miller put it on YouTube in a series called “We Might Not Make It.”

That public vulnerability, more than any Arc feature, is what turned users into stakeholders at The Browser Company.

https://t.co/5vMODlgro1

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Incumbents often look unbeatable until you study their incentive structure.
Chrome, Safari, and Edge controlled nearly ninety percent of the browser market.

Not because they were great products.
Because they were defaults.
And Google’s business model actively punished meaningful innovation.
A better interface that reduced searches would have cost real ad revenue.

That structural ceiling is a gift to challengers.
You do not need to out-engineer the giant.
You need to out-care them where they are structurally forbidden from caring.

The Browser Company built on that opening.
They treated the browser as something that should feel, not just function.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/JmBcG8S22Z

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

The product your most loyal users love is sometimes the one holding the company back.
Most leaders will not admit this until the data becomes undeniable.
They hedge.

They rebrand the next version as an evolution of the old one.
They protect the story that already worked.
Killing a product people adore requires a specific kind of conviction.

It means disappointing the exact customers who made you famous because the market has already moved.

The Browser Company eventually stopped hedging.
They put Arc into maintenance mode and rebuilt around an entirely different bet.

That decision was harder than any feature launch.
Read the full case study: https://t.co/JmBcG8S22Z

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

The fastest-growing software companies of the last decade barely advertised.

Not because they were frugal.

Because they built the growth loop into the product itself — every invite, every shared link, every meeting was a soft pitch that cost nothing.

Marketing budget is what you spend when the product can't market itself.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Genuine question for the marketers here.
If your product vanished tomorrow, would your customers notice within a day, or within a quarter?

Every company I studied that grew without an ad budget could answer "within an hour."

What's your honest answer?

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Last day.

Here's the thing I didn't expect after pulling apart 18 of the biggest tech companies: how encouraging it all is.
Slack was the residue of a failed video game. NVIDIA was three engineers in a diner aiming at a market worth nothing, with sixty competitors already circling.

Salesforce attacked an industry a hundred times its size. Notion bet on connecting categories when everyone said the future was specialization. Zoom entered the most crowded market imaginable and won because it just worked.

Every single giant in the book was, at some point, the underdog nobody took seriously — right up until they changed the question customers were asking. The incumbents are never as safe as they look.

The Marketing Behind Rapid Growth is free on Kindle only until tonight. Tomorrow it goes back to its regular price. If you've been meaning to grab it, this is the moment.

18 real growth stories, the whole book → https://t.co/I18jfcP7Ar
If it's useful, an honest review would mean a lot. And tell me which company surprised you most — that decides what I decode next.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Thank you to everyone who grabbed The Marketing Behind Rapid Growth this week 🙏 The free window's closed, but the real part starts now — which of the 18 stories stuck with you?

Reply and I'll decode the winner next.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/tGBNAv82yu

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

One thing that stands out about @SiteGround: they stopped chasing broad “web hosting” keywords and built pages for Mambo, then Joomla, then WordPress.

Those organic spikes became live signals that told engineering what to build next.

https://t.co/bW7vsrtDWL

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

The most durable competitive advantage in a crowded market is not the best feature set.
It is the tightest loop between demand signal and product response.

When marketing and engineering still speak through product managers, the loop stretches.
When the two functions share the same data stream, the loop collapses.

SiteGround made marketing a direct input into engineering decisions.

Niche search demand, support tickets, and event conversations all fed the same roadmap.
The company that hears the market first usually builds what the market wants next.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/fu9Upjoe5a

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Independence is often romanticized.
In practice it is a structural advantage that protects long-term bets.

Outside capital usually compresses time horizons.
SiteGround never took external investors.
That freedom let them ignore the pressure to discount and chase volume.

They could wait for reliability metrics to justify premium pricing.

Twelve years without outside management hires followed the same logic.

Control of the decision clock mattered more than growth theater.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/fu9Upjoe5a

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

In 2006 NVIDIA started pouring money into CUDA — software that let people use graphics chips for things that had nothing to do with graphics.

There was no market for it. Investors didn't understand it. It added complexity and hurt margins.

For nearly a decade it looked like an expensive mistake.

Then AI arrived

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Is it better to build a slightly better product in a big market, or a genuinely new category in a market that doesn't exist yet?

Eighteen case studies later I lean one way. But I'd like to hear the other side first.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/Hlizpewhyq

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Looking at @attio, one founder decision stands out.

They killed a profitable CRM to spend 1,000 silent days building a custom database first. That architectural patience became their real growth engine.

https://t.co/LxhUyPOYs1

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Most companies treat positioning as a messaging exercise.

They debate taglines and landing page copy while the underlying product still carries the same trade-offs as everyone else.

The more durable approach is to resolve the actual gap first.

Salesforce offered flexibility at the cost of complexity.
Simpler tools offered speed at the cost of rigidity.

One team built the missing middle—database power without the tax—and only then refined how they described it.

Positioning works best when the product has already made the claim true.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/awKpgXPDve

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Marketing cannot permanently compensate for a weak product foundation.

Teams that ask growth to “work harder” around structural limits eventually discover the ceiling.
The opposite approach is rarer and more uncomfortable.

Build the underlying system strong enough that growth tactics amplify rather than paper over problems.

One CRM reached 75 percent organic signups and customers including Coca-Cola and ElevenLabs.
That outcome did not come from better ads.
It came from refusing to let product and story fight each other.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/awKpgXPDve

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

A product is a feature.

An ecosystem is a barrier your competitors can't cross even if their chip is free.

NVIDIA's real advantage isn't silicon — it's the millions of developers who already build the way NVIDIA taught them to.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Category creation isn't naming a thing once.

HubSpot spent years preaching it — books, an academy, certifications, a conference. Every piece of it built the category and generated demand at the same time.

Naming is the cheap part. Teaching the market is the work.