What is the future of the growth function for online business look like?

I have thought a decent amount about how sales and marketing has evolved over the course of my career (call it last 15 years) and been thinking lately about what's next.

Reflecting on the last 15 years, I think the meta-trend is that in the late 2000s into the 2010s that marketing really dominated because the offline to online shift meant that there was always a new platform that was growing really fast. First it was? text (Adwords and Google SEO, then Facebook, then Amazon SEO) then images (Insta/Snap) and finally we are now somewhere in the video transition (TikTok/YT).

These shifts were fundamentally driven at some level by bandwidth and mobile growth. More devices with more?bandwidth allowed the move from text → images → video. In the developed economies, this seems to basically be at maturity. TikTok?growth seems to be plateauing. (I haven't seen the stats for YT but would guess the same).

There was a clear McLuhan-esque?"medium is the message" phenomenon in these growth channels. DTC brand growth paralleled Instagram's growth because if you're selling lifestyle (e.g. swim wear), photos are a clear medium for that in a way that text is not.

So for most of the last 15 years, being 'good' at growth largely involved figuring out the new platform's algorithm and how to adapt your brand's content to it and ride that?growth. With most of those platforms at a mature stage now, that era seems to be over for the most part. The people who have built defensible competitive advantages there (e.g. WebMD SEO) are now incumbents and likely to be able to maintain those but outside of some specific emerging niches, I don't think we'll see any big SEO success in the next 10 years.

Ditto for most of the other channels (with video being probably the one with most potential turnover). I think there is still room in most of these for just being better. When I look at the quality of podcasts now vs. 5 years ago, the big successes are just?really, really good and they invest a ton into the quality of the content and often production quality.

Ditto on Twitter. The good content is just a lot better than it used to be and you can grow there but it takes a lot more resources (and seems to shifting more towards video as well). So I think there is still some room at the top but it's gotten way more competitive. (Again, have not seen the data but suspect the Top 25 charts in iTunes for podcasts has had near 90% turnover over last 10 years for sure and probably very high over last 5 years)

So I've found myself wondering a lot more about what's next? I think one angle is a more targeted?sales based approach?with less "spray and pray" content creation and more account based targeting. For companies selling into medium to large businesses, this makes a lot of sense. It has made sense for a while I think but what's changed is just the the marginal return on other channels seems to have come?down so we'll see more sales function's being built out.

The concept of "product led growth" (PLG) has emerged in recent years and ways to build growth into the product that don't rely on the platforms has worked and I think still works for certain companies (e.g. Brian Balfour gave the example of Loom - you send a loom to someone else and they start using it in their company). If you can unlock this, it's powerful but I think really only works for consumer or consumer-esque products. PLG for products with $1k+ price points seems infeasible to me?

Another angle is what Venkat Rao has called the CozyWeb, a retreat from these fully open platforms into communities hosted on Discord, Slack, forums, etc. In this scenario, I'm not sure what growth looks like. It certainly is probably slower and involves a lot more high?touch communication and nurturing. I think this will also make it very defensible, just not super high growth (I personally like these sorts of channels - often times the fastest growing brands on open platforms also fell the fastest - see e.g. the slew of Amazon brands sold to aggregators that lived or died on their Amazon SEO).

In general, I think growth is just going to be a lot harder for most brands for a while and we'll see a bit less turnover in most categories than we have over the past ten years. In some ways, this is just a return to normal. The advent of the major internet platform companies was arguably something of an anomaly.

There will be other changes and this is more of a "growth is dead, long live growth" than a "growth is dead" post. I think the AI stuff is the most obvious next growth channel but I'm not sure how it plays out. A lot of people are focused on 'AI is going to take away traffic from Google, and reduce my marketing surface area.' This is probably true, but it's alo going to create some new arbitrage opportunities like we saw with the platforms (through?I don't know what those are).

What's interesting is that I think for the first time in my career, there's not an 'obvious' next channel (going hard in the paint on video probably still has a bit of a shelf life of a year or two for certain brands). Thoughts?