Startup Growth Playbook

Distribution-first marketing strategies for AI-era startups. Clone into any project directory and let an LLM agent auto-generate and execute a marketing plan from the codebase.

Quick Start

cd your-startup-project/
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/startup-growth-playbook.git marketing/

Then tell your LLM agent:

Read marketing/AGENT.md and follow the protocol.

The agent will:

1. Discover — scan your codebase to understand the product, niche, and audience
2. Select — pick the best 2-3 strategies from the playbook
3. Plan — generate a tailored plan.md with real tasks and metrics
4. Execute — produce marketing artifacts (content, SEO pages, outreach, etc.)
5. Handoff — when the next step requires app-code changes or live rollout, generate an implementation-ready handoff instead of endlessly expanding docs

No manual setup. No forms to fill in. The protocol bootstraps from your code.

What's Inside

File	Purpose
AGENT.md	Self-bootstrapping protocol — the agent reads this first
playbook.md	8 distribution strategies with implementation steps and agent tasks
startup-template.md	Plan structure (used by the agent, not by you)

The 8 Strategies

1. MCP Servers — let AI assistants sell for you
2. Programmatic SEO — generate thousands of keyword-targeted pages
3. Free Tool — build a grader/calculator as top-of-funnel
4. Answer Engine Optimization — be the source ChatGPT and Perplexity cite
5. Viral Artifacts — make product outputs shareable
6. Newsletter Acquisition — buy an audience for $5-20K instead of building from zero
7. Content Repurposing — one pillar piece becomes 50+ across channels
8. Parallel Instagram Reels Content Engine — high-volume meme-remix short-form video across parallel Instagram accounts for consumer mobile apps (5-6 month grind; credit: Caleb Dean / Runify, via Superwall Podcast; primary-source analysis in research/runify-content-engine-analysis.md)

Output Structure

The agent commits marketing artifacts to subdirectories:

marketing/
  plan.md         — tailored marketing plan (auto-generated)
  content/        — tweets, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, blog posts
  seo/            — keyword research, page templates, generated pages
  tools/          — free tool specs or source code
  outreach/       — newsletter targets, DM templates
  aeo/            — FAQ content, schema markup
  artifacts/      — viral artifact designs, share copy

Important Boundary

By default, this playbook is designed to generate and organize marketing work inside marketing/.

If the next valuable step requires:

• publishing pages in the real app
• wiring homepage or product UX changes
• implementing share flows
• adding analytics
• submitting sitemaps or checking live behavior

the agent should switch from content generation to an implementation handoff unless the user explicitly asks it to modify the product code.

Source

Strategies 1-7 are derived from Greg Isenberg's Startup Ideas Podcast. Strategy 8 is informed by Caleb Dean's public account of Runify, including the Superwall Podcast with Joseph Choy.

License

MIT