Humans of Growth: Stories & Strategies Behind Business Growth & Business Development

Aly Hathcock
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

Behind every business & its growth is a human in the trenches.  On Humans of Growth, host Aly Hathcock interviews CEOs, CMOs, and marketing executives driving business development, demand generation, and brand strategy. These aren’t surface-level chats about lead funnels and KPIs. They’re raw, insightful conversations that reveal how real leaders build marketing engines, scale revenue, and create lasting customer relationships. Expect candid stories about leadership, growth marketing, sales enablement, brand positioning, content strategy, customer acquisition, and everything in between. From scrappy startups to enterprise marketing teams, we explore the playbooks, mindsets, and human decisions behind business growth. If you care about branding & positioning, marketing strategy, sales & customer retention, or the future of growth, this is your podcast.

  1. 1d ago

    Creator Marketing Strategy: Why Nano Influencers Beat Celebrity Deals

    You are being served over 800 pieces of unsolicited content every day. You dismiss almost all of it. The ones you do not dismiss have one thing in common: they feel like they were made for someone like you. Not by a celebrity you will never meet, not by a generative AI that has never used the product. By a real person whose life looks something like yours. That is what relatable content at scale actually means. And it is the reason follower count has stopped being the most important variable in creator marketing strategy. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Matthew Wilson, Global Head of Revenue at Scale Social AI, to break down how creator marketing has shifted, why one-million-dollar celebrity posts are losing ground to armies of nano and micro creators, and how AI is being used not to replace human content but to help brands get more of the right human content, faster. Matthew walks through the three algorithmic signals that actually determine content reach today (quality, originality, and engagement diversity), why a brand with a diverse audience cannot speak to everyone through a single spokesperson, and how AI-powered content intelligence allows brands to respond to audience behavior in near real time instead of waiting 30 to 60 days for a research report the audience has already moved past. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why 800+ daily content impressions have made relatability the single most important creative variable ✔ The three platform signals that determine content reach: quality, originality, and engagement diversity ✔ Why follower count no longer drives distribution the way it did five years ago ✔ The case for nano and micro creators: how five creators at 5,000 followers can outperform one celebrity deal ✔ How AI removes subjectivity from creator selection and lets audience behavior make the call ✔ Why generative AI content is generating backlash on social while AI-assisted human content is gaining ground ✔ The difference between passive UGC, briefed influencer content, and the hybrid approach in between ✔ How near real-time content intelligence allows brands to act on audience signals before the moment passes ✔ Using data to make the case for a creator strategy change when the CMO still wants the celebrity deal ✔ Why relatable content at scale is the next frontier for both enterprise brands and local businesses competing on limited budgets If you are a CMO, head of social, performance marketer, or brand marketer trying to figure out how to get more from your creator budget without throwing it at a single high-profile name and hoping it works, this conversation will change how you think about what content actually moves people. Because the algorithm already knows what your audience wants to see. The question is whether your creator strategy is listening. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about Scale Social AI here.

  2. Oct 15

    AI Search Citations: How Earned Media Gets Your Brand Found in ChatGPT

    Most brands are trying to show up in AI search by optimizing their own website. That is not where AI is looking. According to research across millions of AI citations, 27 percent of what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity pull into their answers comes from journalism and earned media. Owned content, the stuff you control, is a much smaller slice of the pie. Which means the companies winning in AI search are not the ones with the best blogs. They are the ones with the best PR. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Natan Edelsburg, Chief Partnership Officer at Muck Rack, the communications and PR software platform that analyzed millions of AI citations to understand exactly what these models are reading and recommending. Natan breaks down what the data actually shows about AI search citations, why earned media now sits at the center of GEO and AEO strategy, and what businesses need to do differently as the lines between PR and SEO collapse. They dig into why paid media is barely showing up in AI results right now, how Reddit and forum platforms are getting crawled heavily by frontier models, and why press releases are having a genuine renaissance because longer, more comprehensive releases are being written for bots, not journalists. Natan also shares the "2% overlap problem": only 2% of the journalists PR teams are currently pitching are the ones AI is actually citing. That gap is where the opportunity lives. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why AI search citations come overwhelmingly from earned media and third-party journalism, not owned content ✔ The 27% journalism stat: what Muck Rack's research on millions of citations actually found ✔ Why paid media and traditional backlinks matter less in an AI-first search world ✔ The press release renaissance: why longer, comprehensive releases are now written for robots, not reporters ✔ How Reddit, forums, and niche Substacks are getting crawled heavily and cited frequently by frontier models ✔ The 2% overlap: why the journalists you are pitching today are mostly not the ones AI is citing ✔ How to build media lists that include AI visibility as a targeting criterion ✔ Why recency matters: most AI citations come from the last 12 months, not your evergreen content library ✔ How to use prompt sampling (and tools like Muck Rack's Generative Pulse) to monitor your brand's AI visibility ✔ Why the wrong information is showing up about your brand in AI, and what to do about it ✔ How PR is finally gaining the direct revenue attribution that has eluded it for decades If you are a CMO, chief communications officer, PR professional, or marketing leader trying to figure out how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, and why traditional SEO alone is not enough to get you there, this conversation reframes what earned media strategy has to look like now. Because if AI is your biggest new media outlet, the question is not whether you have a press release strategy. It is whether you have one built for the machines that are reading it. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about MuckRack here.

  3. Oct 1

    Why the Founder Is Usually the Reason the Business Stopped Growing

    Most founders hit a revenue plateau and immediately think they need more leads. No, they need to get out of the way. When a founder is the linchpin to every decision, the business can only grow as fast as one person can move. It doesn't matter how good the marketing is or how strong the sales process is. If the CEO is still approving every hire, getting on every difficult client call, and doing in two minutes what they won't let anyone else learn to do in thirty, the ceiling is them. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Larry Waddell, founder of Prism Inspired, a consulting practice that works with agency owners and founders to build the operational infrastructure that actually enables growth. Larry has spent years helping companies break through the three-to-five million revenue plateau by fixing the one thing most founders aren't willing to look at: themselves. Larry breaks down how to recognize when you have become your own bottleneck, what a senior leadership team actually looks like at a small or mid-sized company (and why it doesn't have to mean corporate bureaucracy), and the monthly meeting cadence that replaces chaos with rhythm without killing the culture that made the company worth building in the first place. He also gets into the real cost of doing things yourself, why shielding your team from hard clients or hard decisions is the thing that eventually makes your best people leave, and how to think about AI and automation as operational leverage rather than a headcount elimination strategy. In this episode, we cover: ✔ The signs that a founder has become the rate-limiting step for their own company's growth ✔ Why founders who bounce around the same revenue number year after year are almost always the common variable ✔ What a senior leadership team actually is at a three-to-ten million dollar company, and when to build one ✔ The four-week meeting cadence that keeps a leadership team moving without turning into death by committee ✔ Why letting Susie do it in thirty minutes instead of you doing it in two is actually the investment that compounds ✔ The "reach down to pull someone up" framework for backfilling when you promote from within ✔ Why shielding team members from difficult clients is setting them up to fail when they leave ✔ How to think about AI and automation as an operational layer rather than a replacement for entry-level hiring ✔ The "what, so what, now what" reporting framework that turns metrics into decisions ✔ Why the hollowing-out effect of AI makes deep human judgment more valuable, not less If you are a founder, agency owner, or CEO hovering around the same revenue number for two or three years in a row, wondering why good marketing and solid sales still aren't moving the needle, this conversation is the mirror you have been avoiding. Because you can't out-market a bottleneck you are creating yourself. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about Prism Inspired here.

  4. Sep 17

    Crisis Communications Plan: What to Do Before, During & After a PR Crisis

    Most companies don't have a crisis communications plan. They have a hope that nothing goes wrong. And when something does go wrong, the instinct is to say nothing, wait it out, and let the lawyers run the room. That instinct is wrong. In the court of public opinion, silence reads as guilt. "No comment" is not a strategy. It is a confession. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Ron Sachs, founder of Sachs Media, a PR and communications firm with thirty years of experience managing crises for organizations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Ron breaks down what a real crisis communications plan looks like, who needs to be in the room, and why the brands that survive a crisis are almost always the ones that get ahead of the story rather than waiting for someone else to define it. Ron walks through case studies spanning Starbucks, British Airways, the Amateur Athletic Union, and a federally qualified health center caught in a four-million-dollar embezzlement scandal, drawing out the principles that separate a crisis well-handled from one that turns a short-term problem into a permanent brand scar. He also makes the case for "dumping your own bad news," the counterintuitive strategy of releasing damaging information yourself before someone else frames it for you. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why most organizations are already in a deeper crisis before the news breaks, because they have no plan ✔ The two categories that cover nearly every crisis: fiscal and physical ✔ Why lawyers are often the worst people to run your crisis response strategy ✔ The "court of public opinion" principle: why silence and "no comment" signal guilt, not caution ✔ What a holding statement is and how to use it to buy time without losing credibility ✔ How to dump your own bad news in a way that shapes the narrative instead of surrendering it ✔ The Starbucks case study: what a CEO response looks like when it actually works ✔ The Academy Sports example: what happens when a company follows policy over common sense in a crisis ✔ How to build a crisis communications team without dying by committee ✔ Spokesperson training: why not every C-suite executive should be in front of a camera ✔ Why updating the story matters as much as the initial response, and how to do it without overpromising If you are a founder, CEO, chief communications officer, or marketing leader who has never thought through what your organization would actually do if something went wrong tomorrow, this conversation is the planning session you have been putting off. Because people will forgive a mistake. They will not forgive a cover-up. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about Sachs Media here.

  5. Sep 10

    The Agency Trust Problem: What Bad Firms Don't Want You to Know

    Most businesses have been burned by at least one agency. And usually, it wasn't fraud. It was selective storytelling. Marketing agency transparency is the real gap between agencies that earn long-term trust and the ones that show up to monthly meetings waving impression counts while revenue sits flat. When clients can't access their own ad platforms, when reports are curated instead of complete, and when agencies say yes to every client idea just to protect the retainer, everyone loses. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Zach Phillips, co-founder of McMillan and Phillips, a creative agency with nearly two decades of experience across social, SEO, and digital strategy. They dig into why the agency-client relationship breaks down so reliably, what good agencies do differently, and why the rise of pre-packaged, templated marketing has made it harder for businesses to trust the real thing. Zach and Aly unpack the "cherry-picked dashboard" problem (where agencies bury the full picture behind favorable metrics), the art of pushing back on bad client ideas without becoming the bad cop every meeting, and why the go-to-market surge of course-trained agencies has burned small business budgets and poisoned the well for legitimate firms. They also get into what it actually looks like to translate marketing insights into sales and customer success, and why the data always tells a story when someone takes the time to draw the narrative instead of just reading the numbers. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why marketing agencies cherry-pick data and what a transparent report should actually include ✔ How agencies get blamed for problems they don't own: poor sales close rates, low retention, messy pipelines ✔ The "yes man" trap: why agreeing with bad client ideas always ends with the agency taking the blame ✔ How to push back on client ideas tactically without killing the relationship ✔ Setting benchmarks without pulling numbers from thin air: industry standards, reputable sources, and campaign-specific context ✔ Why the lowest bar for marketing agency entry has created a generation of templated campaigns that don't convert ✔ The difference between a $300/month "keep the lights on" agency and one that actually builds growth ✔ Why influencer marketing is overrated and SEO is still the most underrated channel in most budgets ✔ How to pass marketing insights to your sales team and customer success team in language they actually act on ✔ The storytelling skill that separates great agencies from ones that just report numbers ✔ Why "AB test that" is the most tactically sound response to a client idea you know won't work If you're a business owner who's been burned by an agency, a marketing director tired of being the company scapegoat, or an agency owner trying to figure out how to build real client trust without becoming a yes machine, this conversation names what most people in the industry won't say out loud. Because the agencies that survive long-term aren't the ones with the flashiest dashboards. They're the ones who earned the right to say "I told you so" without ever having to. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about McMillan and Phillips here.

  6. Sep 3

    The One Ad Channel That Doesn't Annoy People (And How to Buy It)

    Marketers have been obsessed with digital channels for a decade. But one of the oldest advertising mediums has quietly become one of the most measurable. Today's billboards are not static signs on the highway. They are digital, data-driven, and capable of changing in real time based on the weather, a live sports score, or a stock market trigger. And most marketers have no idea how to buy them. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Sarah Carney, VP of Programmatic Media at Big Outdoor, to break down how digital out of home advertising actually works in 2026, what it costs, how to measure it, and why brands of all sizes are using it to reach the right audience at the right moment without annoying them. Sarah explains how programmatic DOOH works across formats (highway billboards, transit screens, taxi toppers, ATM screens, Times Square spectaculars), why dynamic creative lets you swap messaging in under two minutes based on real-world triggers, and what attribution in outdoor advertising actually looks like now. She also walks through the Knicks campaign her team ran for Epic Games, where they turned around new Times Square creative in under eight hours the night of game four, and swapped it again live when the Knicks won. In this episode, we cover: ✔ What programmatic digital out of home advertising actually is, explained in plain language ✔ The difference between static and digital out of home, and what going digital unlocks ✔ Day parting: how brands like Starbucks run DOOH only during morning commute hours ✔ Dynamic creative: how campaigns change in real time based on weather, sports scores, or stock data ✔ Why out of home is the only ad channel that does not annoy people (and what the research says about long-tail performance) ✔ Brand safety in outdoor: why you will never run next to a political article or a weird website ✔ How attribution works in DOOH, including device tracking, ID graphs, and 30-day look-back windows ✔ What DSPs you need to access out of home inventory (and why Meta and Google do not have it) ✔ Minimum budgets, local targeting, and why small brands and three-zip-code campaigns are viable ✔ 3D digital billboards: what they are, how the creative works, and what is currently running in Times Square ✔ The social amplification effect: why influencers post in front of DOOH creative and what that does for reach If you are a founder, CMO, media buyer, or agency owner who has never bought outdoor advertising because you assumed it was only for legacy brands with massive budgets, or because you thought you could not measure it, this conversation will completely reset how you think about the channel. Because the smartest place to advertise right now might be the one your competitors have not figured out yet. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about Big Outdoor here.

  7. Aug 27

    Confused People Don't Buy: Fixing the Friction in Your Buying Process

    You can have great ads, a full pipeline, and a sales team that closes. But if your buying process is confusing, your onboarding is messy, or marketing and sales are telling different stories, your growth is going to flatline. Because customers don't care where marketing ends and sales begins. They only experience one company. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Nikki Leonardi, marketing strategy consultant at ClearEdge, who has spent nearly two decades sitting at the intersection of marketing, sales, and customer experience. Nikki works with everyone from funded startups to enterprise teams, and her diagnosis is almost always the same: it is not a marketing problem. It is an alignment problem. Nikki breaks down why the customer journey does not end at the signed contract, how to find the friction points in your buying process before your prospects find them for you, and why the one metric most companies ignore (NPS passives) is actually the most valuable signal in your entire customer base. She also explains why AI amplifies your customer experience, good or bad, and what that means for how LLMs are going to surface (or bury) your brand going forward. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why most growth challenges have nothing to do with marketing strategy and everything to do with alignment ✔ How to walk your own buying process as if you are a first-time prospect (and why your CEO has internal biases that make this harder than it sounds) ✔ The "confused people don't buy" rule: where buying process friction actually shows up ✔ Why marketing and sales silos are an internal communication problem, not a strategy problem ✔ What should happen in the first 30 to 90 days of onboarding and why most companies drop the ball ✔ The five KPIs that actually tell you whether your customer experience is working: retention rate, referrals, lifetime value, acquisition cost, and brand reputation ✔ Why NPS passives are more valuable than your detractors and why almost no one pays attention to them ✔ How customer sentiment is increasingly influencing LLM and AI search visibility ✔ Why marketing amplifies whatever experience already exists, good or bad ✔ What it looks like when marketing and customer success actually work together instead of handing off and walking away If you are a founder, CMO, marketing director, or customer success leader trying to figure out why your leads convert but do not stay, or why growth keeps stalling despite solid top-of-funnel numbers, this conversation will help you find where the real leak is. Because marketing is not the engine of growth. Customer experience is. Marketing just accelerates whatever is already there. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about ClearEdge here.

  8. Aug 20

    Brand Creativity vs Performance Marketing: How to Build a Brand Worth Remembering

    Everyone is following the same playbook. Post more. Run better ads. Optimize the funnel. And so every brand ends up looking, sounding, and feeling exactly alike. Performance marketing got incredibly efficient. It also got incredibly forgettable. In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Will Burns, founder of IdeaSicle X, a creative strategy firm that builds brand ideas for companies trying to get their soul back after years of chasing ROAS. Will spent decades at agencies like Arnold before building a platform that brings together four creative experts virtually to generate brand ideas, taglines, and manifestos faster and more honestly than the traditional agency pitch process. Will breaks down why a brand idea at the top changes everything below it, including hiring, product development, social media, and yes, even your performance marketing. He explains why the typical brand presentation (three polished options, one shoved down the client's throat) is a waste of everyone's time, and why presenting twelve taglines at once is actually the most efficient path to a brand truth everyone can agree on. He also gets into what really happens to creativity in a group brainstorm, the three research-backed techniques that measurably increase creative output, and why AI is a better muse than it is a creative director. In this episode, we cover: ✔ Why performance marketing breeds transactional relationships and kills brand equity over time ✔ What "random acts of marketing" look like and why they signal a brand with no idea driving it ✔ The brand idea framework: how one clear idea should inform hiring, product, and every channel ✔ Why presenting twelve taglines beats presenting three every time ✔ How to write a brand manifesto and why more companies need one ✔ What the average CMO tenure (under two years) does to long-term brand building ✔ The walking study: why a walk increases creative output by 40% and the science behind it ✔ Psychological distance and the placebo effect: two more research-backed creativity techniques ✔ Why traditional brainstorms are flawed and what to do instead ✔ AI as a creative muse: how Will built IdeaSicle X's spark tool and what AI can and cannot do ✔ Why vibe coding let him rebuild a platform for $500 that cost $70,000 the first time If you're a founder, CMO, creative director, or agency owner who keeps hearing "we want bold creative" and watching clients approve the safest option, this conversation will reset how you think about what brand strategy is actually for. Because AI can execute faster than any team alive. The only thing it cannot do is have an idea worth remembering. ______________________ RESOURCES: Get help finding the right marketing partner. Learn more about IdeaSicle X here.

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About

Behind every business & its growth is a human in the trenches.  On Humans of Growth, host Aly Hathcock interviews CEOs, CMOs, and marketing executives driving business development, demand generation, and brand strategy. These aren’t surface-level chats about lead funnels and KPIs. They’re raw, insightful conversations that reveal how real leaders build marketing engines, scale revenue, and create lasting customer relationships. Expect candid stories about leadership, growth marketing, sales enablement, brand positioning, content strategy, customer acquisition, and everything in between. From scrappy startups to enterprise marketing teams, we explore the playbooks, mindsets, and human decisions behind business growth. If you care about branding & positioning, marketing strategy, sales & customer retention, or the future of growth, this is your podcast.

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