Meanwhile, incredible products without it will fail.

Growth and distribution make or break products.

This is what this newsletter is about — growth & marketing tactics that worked:

Social

1 promo tweet, 1 million views
When sarcasm turns viral

Conversion

Airbnb's least-famous growth hack

SEO

My enemy is my friend
Free lists, free leads
Going after your main keyword

Sales

60 million cold emails
Leads on auto-pilot

Advertising

Selling it before making it

Influencer marketing

Free lists, free leads
Praise-led marketing

Guerilla marketing

How Bumble turned campuses into free ads

Product

Make something impossible

✌️

Paul
lepaulb.com

But I stumbled on a way to hit 20%. And new leads, every day, on autopilot.

Here’s the story.

I run Airefs. It helps brands get found in ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.

Right now, everyone’s trying to figure this out. Big knowledge gap.

I spotted a random LinkedIn post promising a guide to ChatGPT rankings - you’d need to comment to get the guide.

It went crazy.

That’s not a post. That’s a gold mine.

I scraped all the comments with Phantombuster.

Then set up an automated daily drip of connection requests.

Each one referenced their comment, and shared my own shorter, battle-tested guide.

No pitch. Just: “Saw you commented on this, here’s some extra value.”

20% replied.

And now, every day, new conversations show up in my inbox.

Why did it work?

• The timing (hot topic + recent engagement).

• The targeting (only people already interested).

• The framing (relevant, value-first, not spammy).

I hate self-praise. But this one worked too well not to share.

So he changed his twitter name and followed them.

No ads. No cold emails. Just a follow.

Its target audience are Data Protection Officer (DPO).

Tom, marketing lead at MineOS at the time, knew two things:

1. DPOs are overlooked, and uncelebrated.

2. People love celebrating their peers’ achievements.

This sparked him to launch the Top DPOs to Follow: a simple idea to spotlight the unsung heroes of compliance.

Here’s how it worked:

• MineOS launched a ‘Top DPOs’ initiative & set up a nomination email address.

• They asked social media followers to vote for their favourite DPOs via email.

• They reached out to the most-voted ones, congratulated them, and invited them for interviews.

All of the DPOs accepted the interview, which was then published on MineOS website + LinkedIn, with a bespoke banner for each DPO 👇.

Being celebrated in the spotlight, they all re-shared the posts on their LinkedIn, amplifying the reach of MineOS.

Free, organic influencer marketing!

PS: Tom writes an awesome marketing newsletter.

In the early days, to win over university campuses with no money, the founder —Wolfe Herd — got creative.

She spotted "No Phones" signs outside lecture halls banning texting and apps like Snapchat. Wolfe Herd recreated the signs—this time adding Bumble to the list.

She also paid students to walk into packed university lectures—10 minutes late, wearing bright yellow Bumble shirts. They’d apologize for being in the wrong room, then walk out, leaving hundreds of students buzzing about Bumble.

He has over 100,000 followers on Twitter. Usually, his tweets get between 5k-20k views.

One day he tweeted 👇

He got 30+ ideas that day.

24 hours later, he tweeted his favourite 👇

Within a week, he had received

• 960,000 views on his tweet.

• 100+ signups to TweetHunter at a <$30 CPA.

Build an audience 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦.

They’d just expanded from SF to NYC, but bookings were still low.

At the time, paying to stay in a stranger’s home over a hotel room was a tough sell.

One of the issues: the listings didn’t look inviting, particularly the photos.

So Airbnb hired professional photographers and sent them to all the NYC listings, to shoot bright, welcoming photos.

Bookings took off and the following month, revenue doubled.

Airbnb made pro photos a standard for new listings.

The results 👇

I’m all for an ugly MVP, but people are drawn to what looks good.

But when you need to dive deeper into the data, it’s not that easy to use.

So every month, thousands googled “how to X in Google Analytics”.

Often, they find helpful articles like this one.

They are written by Fathom Analytics — a Google Analytics competitor.

At the bottom of each article, Fathom shows this 👇.

Imagine this across hundreds of articles, ranking for 1,000+ keywords.

That’s a 100% free, always-on, global marketing engine driving new users to Fathom.

You could tell they were fake—their voices flat, their expressions stiff.

Then one day, Joshua Xu, CEO of HeyGen, shared this 👇

His tweet got over 3 million views.

Make something people thought impossible and you’ll be an overnight success.

PS: HeyGen just released Avatar 3.0 🔥

It outlined how Salesforce hit $100M ARR by mastering outbound sales.

It clicked for Bill and his company, Athyna: cold email was their next move.

He started small, sending 50 emails a week. Responses were good.

Then 1,000 emails, 10,000, 100,000—all sent from @hello.athyna.io.

Until one day, disaster hit. Athyna got blacklisted. They couldn’t send or receive emails.

So what did Bill do?

He adapted.

He spun up new email-sending domains. But this time, he split the email volume across multiple domains, each branded separately.

If one got shut down, no problem—most of the volume was still safe. He’d just add a new domain and keep going.

Today, Athyna sends 60 million emails a year, driving $6M in ARR. That’s $0.10 per email.

The main thing you do in a CRM? You make lists.

Lists of people to email. Companies to call. The problem? It’s slow and tedious.

folk fixed that. They’ve built hundreds of ready-made lists, free to use in their CRM.

Think ‘1000 YC Founders’, ‘UK Family Offices’, ‘Top 100 Marketing Influencers’.

To spread the word, folk used two strategies:

1. Inbound: SEO landing pages for each list, so people searching for “Top 100 Marketing Influencers” find it fast.

   

2. Outbound: Influencers post list previews on LinkedIn. Comments unlock the full list, driving engagement and reach.

   

Why this works:

• People love free resources.

• They’re already searching for these lists.

• They get hands-on with folk to access the list.

Even more so if you’re a small fish in a big pond.

But ScreenPal, a screen recorder, found a way.

In April, they bought the domain screen-recorder.com. Instead of redirecting it to their main site, screenpal.com, they turned it into a separate, standalone product (alongside a mention of their main product).

This new product was a simpler version of ScreenPal, 100% free, with no installation or account needed.

The simplicity caught on. It spreads through blogs and Reddit threads, racking up 200+ backlinks within weeks.

The best part? People naturally shared just the URL — screen-recorder.com — which included their target keyword.

Today, screen-recorder.com ranks #1 for that main keyword.

He was eager to show off the first version and get as much feedback as possible.

In his mind, Reddit was the perfect place for that.

But he knew a promotional post wouldn’t get many views.

So, he built an AI bot that replies sarcastically to every comment on a Reddit post.

He posted about the bot in the /r/internetIsBeautiful subreddit, sharing the URL to the bot code on his new sandbox website.

And of course, he had the bot run on the post itself.

In two days, the post was viewed over 300,000 times, received 480 upvotes and 2,200 comments. His code sandbox was visited 10,000 times.

Unfortunately, nobody was willing to invest in his idea.

So he went on to prove the concept on his own:

• Step 1: make a 3D realistic water can that looks real.

• Step 2: film a $1,500 promotional video with the fake can.

• Step 3: advertise the video on Facebook for $3,000.

In 90 days, he got

• 3 million views on his video.

• 20,000 followers on his Facebook page.

• Tens of messages from interested retailers.

With that success, he was able to raise a small round, to produce his first batch of real cans with real water in it.

Today, his water company is worth $1.4 billion. Its name is Liquid Death.

PS: The original video is gone from the internet but you can enjoy watching this one.