From TrueCoach Exit to Growth as a Service

In 2015, I co-founded TrueCoach with a simple thesis: personal trainers needed better software to manage their clients remotely. We were early to the online coaching wave, and we caught it at just the right moment.

Over the next seven years, we scaled the company to eight figures in revenue. We built a product that tens of thousands of coaches used daily. We raised funding, grew a team, and eventually found an exit that let everyone involved walk away with something meaningful.

What Comes After an Exit

After the acquisition, I took time to decompress. If you've ever been through a startup exit, you know the strange mix of relief, emptiness, and restlessness that follows. You've spent years building something, and suddenly that thing isn't yours anymore. You can read more about my full journey building GrowthMarketer.

I spent the first few months traveling. Then I started consulting. I helped a few companies with their growth strategies, mostly drawing on what had worked at TrueCoach. But something felt off.

The playbooks I knew weren't working the same way anymore. The three major shifts that broke traditional growth marketing were already underway.

Watching AI Change Everything

By late 2022, I started paying serious attention to what was happening with AI. ChatGPT had just launched. Image generation was getting good. The tools were still rough, but the trajectory was clear.

I realized that every growth discipline I understood was about to be rewritten. Content creation, ad creative, landing page testing, email copywriting, data analysis, the entire stack was shifting. The competitive advantage wasn't going to be knowing the old playbooks. It was going to be building new ones around these capabilities.

So I made a decision. Instead of continuing to consult on strategies that were becoming obsolete, I would spend the next two years learning everything I could about how AI changes growth.

Two Years of Rebuilding

I went deep. I tested every AI writing tool. I built custom workflows for ad creative generation. I experimented with AI-assisted content systems that could produce in a day what used to take a week. I studied how the best operators were combining automation with human judgment.

I also watched what didn't work. I saw companies waste money on AI tools that promised automation but delivered garbage. I saw the importance of the human loop, the strategic oversight that separates output from outcomes.

The knowledge I built at TrueCoach was still valuable, but it needed to be rewired around new capabilities. The fundamentals of growth remained the same: you need to reach the right people with the right message and convert them efficiently. But the execution layer had changed completely.

Why Growth as a Service

After two years of rebuilding my approach, I understood something clearly. Most companies cannot hire their way to this capability. The talent is too scarce, too expensive, and changes too fast to build in-house.

What companies need is access to a growth function that has already made the investment. A team that has spent years learning how AI changes execution. A system that combines modern tools with experienced oversight.

That's what GrowthMarketer delivers. Not a traditional agency selling hours. Not a software tool promising automation. A complete growth function that operates as an extension of your team, built from the ground up around AI-native workflows.

I spent seven years building one company. Now I'm helping eight companies at once. The model works because the leverage has changed. What used to require a full team can now be delivered by a smaller group with better systems.

This is Growth as a Service. And I believe it's the model that fits how growth actually works in 2024 and beyond.

Ready to Scale?

If you're looking for Growth as a Service built by operators who've been in your shoes, let's talk. Get in touch to explore working together.