🧱 The Boring Growth Stack
A working playbook for early crypto and AI teams that need attention to turn into users.
This is not a strategy deck. It's the unglamorous system I'd set up in the first 30 days if someone handed me a product and said, make people care.
I got tired of waiting for the next job to have work to show. So I started building this.
How I think about growth
The order of operations most teams get backwards.
A 90-day setup
Day 1 to day 90, no brand workshop.
The AI workflows
So I'm not doing the same work by hand.
Content that compounds
Four pillars and a weekly rhythm.
Creator campaigns that don't feel like spam
Build a loop, don't buy noise.
A teardown
Applying the lens to a brand I've never worked with.
A sample calendar
14 days, laid out, not just described.
If you want the short version: learn the product, pick one channel, ship every day, and cut what doesn't move people.
Start with How I think, then the 90-day setup. The rest is the system.
Most teams start with "we need content." That's usually late.
Content is what you do after you know who this is for, why they should care this week, and where they already hang out. If you skip that, you get a pretty calendar and a quiet account.
The order I use:
- Who is this actually for?
- Why would they care this week, not in theory?
- Where do they already spend time?
- What can we ship fast enough to learn from?
- What becomes a system after it works once?
If I can't explain the product in one sentence, I don't start posting yet. I go learn it. I've done this more than once in categories I didn't grow up in. Crypto was one of them. I spent the first stretch nodding in meetings and googling under the table. Then I learned enough to write for people who could tell if I was faking it.
I've also learned this the hard way: most marketing fails because the person writing it never bothered to understand the product. They write around it. You can always tell.
So I start closer to the thing itself. Then I make it readable. Then I make it repeatable.
This is the version I use when there is no team, no playbook, and no time to "align on brand" for six weeks.
Days 1–14 · Get dangerous enough to ship
- Write one sentence for the product. If it needs a paragraph, it's not ready.
- Pick one main channel. Not five.
- Look at what's already there. Keep the few things that work. Ignore the rest.
- Make a two-week calendar. Ugly is fine.
- Ship every day. A post, a reply, a short video, a teardown. Something that exists in public.
The point of the first two weeks is not scale. It's taste. You find out what the product sounds like when a human says it.
Days 15–45 · Find the thing that works, then do it on purpose
- Watch what gets replies, saves, profile visits, or signups.
- Turn the winning format into a series.
- Start one creator loop. One. Not a giant influencer spreadsheet.
- Cut anything that only looks busy.
- Write down the weekly rhythm so you don't invent the job every Monday.
This is where most teams get bored and start a rebrand. Don't. Boredom usually means the system is starting to work.
the system that's working
the team
a rebrand
Days 46–90 · Make it boring on purpose
- Same pillars.
- Same weekly cadence.
- Same way of judging a post.
- One experiment a week, not twelve.
- Build the small tools that stop you from copying the same work by hand.
Proof this isn't theory: I ran this loop for Fuel's Write-A-Thon at Scribble, $20K in rewards, one brief: write one thread about what you built with Fuel. No content calendar, no tone guide, one job. 344 threads came out of it, 488K impressions, and Fuel landed on Kaito's post-TGE Community Leaderboard next to Polkadot and Starknet. They never asked for that, it came from the loop working. The campaigns that underperformed were the ones where the ask grew past one clear job per creator.
By day 90, I want three things:
That's the job.
What days 1–14 actually look like, applied to a hypothetical early-stage crypto product. Ugly on purpose, per the rule above.
Week 1: find the voice
- Day 1: one-sentence explainer post, plain language
- Day 2: reply to 5 relevant threads in the category
- Day 3: "here's what we're building and why" thread
- Day 4: screen recording of the product, 20 seconds, no voiceover
- Day 5: a founder or team take on a category debate
- Day 6: user or tester quote, screenshotted
- Day 7: recap, what got saves this week, what didn't
Week 2: repeat what worked
- Day 8: redo the best-performing format from week 1
- Day 9: teardown of a comparable product, what they do well
- Day 10: behind-the-scenes, a decision the team made and why
- Day 11: reply-guy day, no original post, just presence
- Day 12: short video walkthrough of one feature
- Day 13: one creator DM sent, brief attached
- Day 14: what shipped, what got cut, what's next
The calendar isn't the deliverable. What you learn about the audience from running it is.
Four pillars. That's enough.
1. Product made simple
Explain the thing like a person, not a landing page.
Good looks like: someone who doesn't work there can repeat it.
2. Proof
Show the work. A launch, a user moment, a before-and-after, a "this is what changed."
Good looks like: specific enough that it couldn't belong to any other company.
3. People
Founders, users, creators, the team. Someone has to be in the story.
Good looks like: it feels like a room, not a broadcast.
4. Point of view
A take. What you believe about the category.
Good looks like: someone disagrees, or saves it because it said the quiet part.
Weekly rhythm
4 short posts · 1 longer piece · 1 video or teardown · 1 community touch: reply, space, comment batch, whatever makes the account feel alive
If a pillar never gets saves, replies, or clicks for a month, it gets rewritten or cut. I don't keep posting out of loyalty to a calendar.
The rule: don't buy noise. Build a loop.
A useful creator is not the person with the biggest following. It's the person already talking to the people you want, in a way that doesn't make your product feel taped on.
The loop I use:
- Find people already close to the audience
- Give them a brief they can actually shoot or write
- Make participation easy
- Show the result in public
- Invite the next one
🚫 What I never outsource
- The brief
- The taste pass
✅ What a good brief has
- What the product does in one line
- Who this is for
- One job for the creator, not seven
- What "done" looks like
- What they should not say
If the creator needs a 12-page doc to understand the campaign, the campaign is the problem.
A brand I've never worked with. Applying the same lens.
What's working
Content rides the news cycle in real time: odds screenshots posted within minutes of an event, no lag. That's the proof pillar done right: specific, timestamped, couldn't belong to anyone else.
What's not
There's no point-of-view pillar and no people pillar. Every post is the market talking, never a person. It reads like a terminal, not a room: nobody to reply to, nothing to disagree with.
One fix: put a face on it. One recurring voice, a trader, a researcher, an in-house account, giving a take on why a market is moving, not just what the odds are. That's the missing pillar, and it's the cheapest one to add.
I am not an engineer. I got tired of doing the same research and outreach work by hand.
☀️ Daily briefing
Pulls what's moving in a category so I don't start the morning from zero.
🔍 Creator research
Helps me look at who is already talking about a product or a problem, instead of guessing from follower counts.
♻️ Content repurposing
Turns one decent idea into a thread, a short post, and a starting script. I still rewrite it. The tool just stops the blank page from winning.
The point is not "AI did the job." The point is I can spend my time on taste, judgment, and the parts that actually need a human.