Volodymyr Khomichenko

Senior Marketing Director at @Zoolatech_com | Tech B2B Marketing Strategist | Amazon Author | Always Building | Turning Ideas into Growth

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

The hardest strategic skill isn't spotting the future.

It's funding it for ten years while it returns nothing and everyone tells you it's a waste.

NVIDIA did exactly that with CUDA. Almost nobody else has the stomach.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

I studied how 18 of the biggest tech companies actually grew — Slack, Stripe, Notion, NVIDIA, OpenAI.

Almost none of them won the way people assume.

Here's what actually drove it 🧵

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

There is a specific sequence that turns product-led growth into a durable company.
First deliver value fast enough that users experience it on their own.

Second, design the product so it matches how those users already think.
Third, let the product itself drive the top of the funnel.
Only then professionalize sales, success, and operations around the demand that already exists.

Skip any step and growth either never starts or breaks later under enterprise weight.

One database company followed this order almost by necessity and built a multi-billion-dollar franchise as a result.
Read the full case study: https://t.co/UPNMPgkA15

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Enterprise buyers rarely purchase the “best” technology.

They purchase the combination of capability and organizational trust that reduces their personal risk.
Developer preference gets the tool inside the building.
Operations, security, and reliability teams decide whether it stays.

Companies that ignore the second half eventually lose the contracts they thought they had won.

One database company recognized this gap after strong early adoption and deliberately closed it with talent programs and performance upgrades.

The result was a business that both developers and enterprise buyers refused to leave.
Read the full case study: https://t.co/UPNMPgkA15

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

One founder decision at @MongoDB stands out.
When Google App Engine made their platform vision irrelevant, they cut everything to a single database layer.

Narrowing scope was how they built something sharp enough to win.

https://t.co/7gku6Ia1Dw

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/t2gsKq6yMi

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/t2gsKq6yMi

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Three things that showed up in almost every company I studied:
1. The product pulled in the next user on its own.
2. They defined the category instead of competing in one.
3. Their real advantage sat next to the product, not inside it.
None of it was luck. All of it was deliberate.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Adobe told its customers that Creative Suite 6 would be the last version they could ever simply buy.

Petitions went round. Forums erupted. People genuinely felt betrayed.

Adobe did it anyway — and went from roughly 12 million users to over 30 million.

The most dangerous thing a company can protect is the model that made it rich.

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

People do not rally around a feature list.
They rally around who they get to become.
Most products sell capabilities.

The ones that scale sell identity.

A fragmented audience of freelancers, agencies, and solo builders needed a name more than they needed another widget.

Calling them Web Creators gave them a shared professional identity.

That single framing decision turned users into a movement.

Identity is sticky in a way features never are.
Read the full case study: https://t.co/Xr3X2qpLV4

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Better products lose every day.
The ones that win usually win on trust, not on cleaner code.

Users do not switch because a feature list is longer.
They stay when a tool makes them more competent and more profitable.

Education is the slowest form of marketing and the only one that compounds.

One company treated every feature release as a teaching moment instead of a sales moment.
Tutorials trained users into professionals.

Those professionals became the unpaid sales force.
Trust scaled faster than any ad budget could have.

Read the full case study: https://t.co/Xr3X2qpLV4

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

Looking at Elementor's early days, the decision to launch as a free plugin on https://t.co/EgSBNO0O3z mattered more than any later campaign.

Within a year they reached 100,000 active installs with zero paid media.

https://t.co/e1VKJceQVs

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/eJ61SqUb2e

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/eJ61SqUb2e

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

https://t.co/tGBNAv82yu

[Volodymyr Khomichenko @V_Khomichenko]

https://t.co/tGBNAv82yu

[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]

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.