Growth Hacking Never Died. It Just Learned to Think For Itself

Agencies are shedding staff even as ad budgets grow, cold email is losing its punch, and a lab-style startup called enso is stepping into the gap left behind, betting that AI agents can do what human growth hackers no longer can.

The Next Web reports that enso operates unlike a typical marketing vendor. There is no dashboard, no sign-up page, and no self-serve pricing. Instead, the company runs controlled experiments on major distribution platforms on behalf of its clients, testing hypotheses about how content gets surfaced, then publishing the results, including the ones that fail. Its founder has given the practice a name, agentic growth hacking, and is reportedly writing a book on the subject.

The company’s own history is unusual for what it chose to disclose rather than bury. It launched as an AI agent marketplace, raised a $6 million seed round led by NFX, then abandoned that model entirely to focus on growth research, later raising $25 million for the pivot. Most startups scrub an early failed direction from their story. enso put it on the About page.

That transparency lines up with a shift some in venture capital have started calling “service as a software.” For two decades, software companies sold access: a login, a set of features, and the expectation that a human on the other end would do the actual work. The newer model sells the finished result itself, generated largely by autonomous agents, with proof attached rather than a features list. When the product is an outcome rather than a tool, sample sizes and failed tests become the marketing material, not something to hide.

The backdrop explains why a model like this is gaining traction now. Two channels that powered business-to-business marketing for years are faltering at the same time. Paid advertising has become considerably more expensive, with cost-per-click climbing at its fastest pace in years as more products compete for the same shrinking pool of attention. Meanwhile, AI-generated answer summaries are increasingly intercepting search traffic before it ever reaches a company’s website, cutting into the clicks that content marketing used to reliably deliver. Advertising spending is rising globally, yet traditional agencies built to serve that spending are cutting thousands of jobs, a sign that clients are trimming line items rather than walking away outright.

Where enso positions itself is in the space opening up between those two fading channels. Rather than competing for search rankings or auction-based ad placements, its research focuses on the surfaces buyers are moving toward instead, including the AI systems that summarize and cite sources when answering questions directly. The company argues that being quoted by one of these systems is becoming as important as ranking on a search results page once was, and that almost no firm in the growth marketing space is focused on that surface yet.

A few things support enso’s case for expanding further. It has effectively created and claimed a category with “agentic growth hacking,” a label venture investors tend to reward when there is no obvious existing product to compare it against. Every experiment it runs also adds to an internal map of how major platforms make decisions about visibility, a resource that becomes more valuable as those platforms keep changing their rules. The recent hiring of a VP of Creative, a somewhat unusual move for a company built around measurement and testing, suggests the next phase may combine that research engine with more traditional creative craft.

There are real risks built into the model. Every tactic enso surfaces exists because a platform did not anticticipate it, and platforms retain the power to treat clever workarounds as abuse once they notice them, particularly when the scale involved is an entire fleet of agents rather than a single person testing an idea. There is also the question of whether the approach can survive scaling beyond the judgment of one founder, something the company appears to be addressing through a forthcoming book, public interviews, and open-source materials meant to codify its methods.

Growth hacking, as an industry term, was widely considered finished a few years ago. enso’s wager is that the discipline simply needed agents fast enough to keep pace with the platforms it targets, and that the approach may end up defining what comes after today’s AI sales tools rather than competing with them directly.