From Zero to +80K: The 7 Growth Levers Behind My Content Engine

Where humans thrive in the age of AI-first GTM - Gifts inside 🎁

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Dear GTM Strategist,

It is easy to spend your time looking at people further ahead. But every milestone deserves a pause. I just crossed 33K subscribers on Substack and 83K on LinkedIn, with 1 million monthly impressions, in two and a half years of consistent content creation.

None of it was an accident, and none of it was linear.

It started in November 2023 when I launched my book, The Go-to-Market Strategist. I had spent months prepping for the launch, and I had no idea what would happen. Luckily, it became a bestseller. That was the aspiration. But then: now what?

So I started a newsletter on Substack, mostly because the platform had embedded growth features and a few content creators I admire were using it. 🤷 No sophisticated agenda there. I also kept up the habit of posting three to five times a week on LinkedIn, since it had worked well for the book launch sign-up list. Why stop?

I want to be honest about how this actually happened, because most “how I grew my audience” content makes it look linear and inevitable. It was not. There was a 6-month period in mid-2025 where I genuinely lost the plot. I will get to that.

In this article, I will walk you through:

• The 7 growth levers behind GTM Strategist, in the order I built them

• The mid-2025 identity crisis that broke the pattern and forced a rebuild

• A simple 3-layer framework for thinking about your own lever stack

• What I am betting on next in AI-native GTM

So let’s get started. We have a lot to cover.

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7 levers in detail with useful how-to content

Before I walk through each lever, here is the shape of the journey. Every lever, once added, kept compounding. None of them replaced what came before.

What is interesting in this curve is what happened between February and September 2025. I was doing all the right things, and the growth flattened anyway. That was the period that broke me a little, and it was also the period that taught me the most.

Let me walk you through it.

Lever 1: Voice and Consistency (The Longest Reps)

The first 6 months after the book launch, I was just learning by doing.

Looking back, I’m not sure what I was doing exactly. But I was doing the work. One of the great things about GTM is learning to play to your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. My strength is being extremely hardworking and disciplined. Copywriting was never my passion.

I am a long-form girl. I don’t spend my days thinking about hooks, and I have a philosophical barrier to copying what direct-response copywriters do - it feels repulsive to me as a person. I acknowledge the discipline is highly effective for conversion-centric copy, and I will happily pay someone else to do it, but I don’t have it in me.

Luckily, social media and newsletter content are a different beast. You need something proprietary to say - and in the world of AI-generated everything, that matters more than ever.

My first instinct was to promote sections of the book in the newsletter. That worked for a while, but I quickly realized that not all the interesting GTM knowledge in the world lives between two book covers. So I started exploring topics that came up with my consulting clients and inside our community.

What I underestimated back then was how long it takes to find a voice that actually sounds like you. Not a “brand voice document” voice. A voice where people read three sentences and know it is you.

Today, you can shortcut a lot of this by embedding call recordings into your content AI engine. Back then, AI-assisted writing was barely a thing - ChatGPT had just properly launched - and I tried 6 different copywriters before I gave up. None of them could mimic my voice well enough for me to be happy with the output. So I sucked it up, developed just enough copywriting muscle to get by, and committed to writing everything myself, every single day for six months.

The reps are the moat. There is no version of this where you skip the early uncomfortable months.

🔗 Dive deeper: I documented the full first year of building GTM Strategist here - a useful read if you are prepping for a launch or building your own content engine backed by digital products.

Lever 2: Design as a Moat

When copywriters and AIs could not replicate my voice, I made a strategic call: I would write everything myself and double down on design instead.

I am obsessed with this meme - thanks for an awesome t-shirt, Peter!

This turned out to be one of the best decisions I made. Back then, most content creators were either DIYing something in Canva or paying stunning amounts ($200+) for a single infographic that honestly looked the same to me every time. I get it: don’t fix what’s not broken, but also innovate because people are getting saturated with formats.

At the same time, most newsletters in our space looked the same - blocks of text with the occasional stock photo or screenshot. Investing in custom illustrations, frameworks, and visual systems made my content instantly recognizable in a LinkedIn feed.

Design became my first real differentiator, and it still is.

These days, the GTM Strategist design system is pretty sophisticated. We have fundamental brand assets and a brand book, and we are capturing great trends all the time. As we experimented with new formats, topics, and visual aesthetics, it became a little design lab.

🎁 Gift number 1: Based on the analysis of my best-performing LinkedIn posts in the last 90 days, here is a cheat sheet for designs that work well for me. The analysis was done with Miro’s MCP in Claude. Get it here.

The Big Lesson: When everyone else is racing toward the same AI-generated aesthetic (currently, orange Claude-generated images, even though ChatGPT became amazing at infographics), the things that are harder to copy (aesthetic illustration, complex graphics, atypical layouts) become more valuable. While I know plenty of people who are doing great work with AI-generated designs, I am continuing to invest in human-led design and branding.

Lever 3: Collaborations and Cross-Recommendations

You can go far on your own. You can go further with the right people by your side. Or, more simply: go where your audience already is.

I was such an underdog when I started. I am originally from Europe, English is my second language, and we have a slightly unconventional take on GTM here. Some would call it scrappy. I call it extremely pragmatic - we get the job done. The first year, I was not really taken seriously by the US-centric GTM crowd. The “big guys” mostly looked past or down at me.

But I was eager to show them I was not a force to be taken lightly. Not only can I outwork most people in the space, I genuinely believe I have good advice beyond theoretical fluff, built on solid fundamentals. Expanding the community and evolving from scrappy, bootstrapped startup roots toward an enterprise-relevant, GTM-first approach became a really important mission.

I am forever grateful to Kyle Poyar, Aakash Gupta, Aatir Abdul Rauf, David Pereira, and Pawel Huryn - among the first “big guys” who took me seriously. They invited me to co-create content, gave me real advice on how to grow, and helped me develop a more sustainable content flow. Not one that was rooted only in my product portfolio, but one that was starting to become a recognizable voice in the space.

People ask me all the time how to find this kind of person. My rule: I personally have to love their content and admire them as professionals.

How to find your people:

1. Ask your existing audience who else they follow and learn from in the space.

2. Use desktop research or AI research to map adjacent creators and operators.

Identifying them is not rocket science. Deserving their attention is the harder part. Sometimes it takes me months, even years, to build these relationships. Dozens of multi-channel follow-ups. The slow grind of becoming useful before becoming visible.

But once you find a real synergy, those partnerships become invaluable. They are the partnerships that shape ecosystems.

If you are building a brand right now: do not optimize for the algorithm before you have optimized for peer trust. The algorithm changes every quarter. Peer relationships compound for years.

I am still in touch with nearly everyone who supported me early on. We learn and grow together. Some sweet collabs coming up in the next couple of months. Stay tuned. 🫶

Lever 4: Free Assets That Feel Like Paid Products

In 2024 and early 2025, the “comment to get X” era on LinkedIn was in full bloom. Most of those posts were thinly veiled email harvesters. The asset itself was rarely worth the comment.

I took the opposite approach, almost by accident. The principle, in retrospect, is product-led growth applied to content: give away something for free that people would happily pay for.

This brought real, relevant attention to my profile. Not vanity engagement. The kind of attention that turned into clients, partners, and long-term subscribers.

There was a temptation around this time to go mainstream. The content creators I admired when I started out were shifting toward career, leadership, and personal-growth content. The reach of that kind of content was undeniable. But that was never my passion. I am obsessed with GTM.

Fast forward to 2026. “Comment to get X” is making a comeback because AI has made deep research available to an average student. Anyone can ship a free guide in a weekend. Which means the bar is back to where it should have been all along: the asset has to actually be good.

When people want something, it usually pays off to go the extra mile and create a special asset for them. Be selective. Not all followers are equally valuable to your business. Plenty of people would love anything for free.

What matters more than ever is ICP fit. If you have to go the extra mile to make something deeper, more meaningful, more researched - do it. If you go with mainstream blockbusters like “Comment to Get My Productivity OS,” and you work on neural computing consulting, it will not help grow your business.

The point is to find the right audience, not to boost vanity metrics.

🎁 Gift number 2: A little stash of my past “comment to get X” assets, in case you missed them on LinkedIn.

🔗 Dive deeper: My 5-step LinkedIn viral post framework - “comment to get X” does not work the way it used to, but when you nail the topic, it is still magic.

Lever 5: You Are the Niche (And Why I Almost Walked Away)

This lever overlaps with Lever 3, but it deserves its own section because it almost made me quit the whole thing.

The temptation to broaden the range of topics was real. You can easily get thousands of likes on LinkedIn by oversharing your personal life, riding generic leadership trends 🥱, or quoting Steve Jobs for the millionth time.

Big content creators call them “audience growers”.

I call them “if you see these three times, hit unfollow”.

What kept me grounded was a simple realization: I am obsessed with GTM. The day my content stops being about GTM is the day I stop showing up with conviction, and readers can feel that.

This cost me time. It probably cost me follower count. But it built the only thing that actually matters long-term: a reputation as a thought leader in the space. You cannot build that by accident, and you cannot build it while chasing every adjacent trend.

And then, for a couple of months in 2025, I lost touch with that.

When everything stopped working 🤯

Now we get to the part most growth stories skip.

Mid-2025 was very difficult for me, not only as a content creator but as a person. I was struggling to find my voice because mainstream AI had arrived with these grand promises of agents doing everything for us. I am a big believer in AI technologies, but I was not (and still am not) convinced we are at that point yet.

Around the same time, the LinkedIn algorithm shifted. Posts that used to hit 20K impressions consistently started struggling to reach 10K. The same effort. The same topics. The same care. Half the reach.

I was tired. I was frustrated. The constant algorithm games took a real toll on me. It became a negative spiral.

The Substack growth flattened too. You can see it clearly in the chart above. February to September 2025 is a near-plateau, even though I was publishing consistently.

But there is no nice way to say this: I lost a lot of my enthusiasm. I did not know what I was doing wrong. The honest answer, in retrospect, is that I was not doing much wrong. I just could not figure out fast enough how to adjust. The ground had shifted underneath me, and the system I had built was no longer the right system for what was about to happen next.

I needed a break.

My husband and business partner Anže, and I packed our bags and spent a month in Indonesia. It was fun. We came back with a clearer head, but also a little empty-handed. I was not sure what came next.

The answer came from two directions at once.

Lever 6: Curated Brand Partnerships (That Add Value)

Before I go further, I want to be transparent about something.

Brand partnerships are how I keep this content free and accessible to everyone who needs these insights. No paywall, no premium tier, no “subscribe to unlock.” Just one direct trade: I work with a small, curated group of partners, and in exchange, the work stays open for the entire community. Huge thanks to all our partners 🫶

That is the deal. And because that deal matters to me, I take partnerships very seriously.

After Indonesia, I went back to first principles: give people what they want.

I talked to community members. I reflected on what content I actually enjoy consuming. The conclusion was simple. Everything has to be useful, hands-on, and well-researched. Especially now that creating content has become so easy, having something smart and useful to say is the only sustainable way to remain relevant.

But the bigger shift was how I started thinking about brand partnerships.

I stopped seeing partners as sponsors who get a shout-out in exchange for a banner. I started seeing them as part of a GTM Strategist ecosystem - a curated tool stack that produces real ROI and sustainable work for the community.

Sourcing from our consulting work, I invited a small group of tools (up to 6 a quarter) we already use and trust to build long-term partnerships with us. Not for one-off campaigns, but for ongoing collaboration. In return, we get a steady pulse on what is new in their ecosystem, and our community gets something genuinely useful: tactical, practical content built around tools that actually work together.

Some of our best-performing content in the last 90 days has been partnership content - the “how to use X” deep dives, the workflows, the real implementations. Every piece is researched. Some experiments will work, some will not, and that is fine. The decisive call was this: stop shying away from naming the tools, and be ruthlessly honest about which ones we recommend.

The results have been strong on the partnership side, too. UTM links never capture the real value, even though we are consistently in the top 3 to 5 content creators for almost every brand we collaborate with. That is not me bragging. That is me saying we hold ourselves to a measurable standard, and we walk away from partnerships that do not clear it.

I get pitched at least three times a day for brand collaborations. Most of them, I redirect to other creators who would be a better fit. It does pain me to say no, especially to smaller tools and to people I personally admire. But sustainability and trust come first.

It took me years to build trust with this audience. It would take one or two bad partnerships to lose it.

So I am almost annoyingly selective. I try every tool myself. I will not feature anything I would not personally recommend to a client or use in our business for years.

Lever 7: Riding the Claude Code Wave (Early)

The second answer came at the start of 2026. And it changed everything.

Claude Code went mainstream. I was lucky to get into the ecosystem early - and I made a deliberate choice to share what we were learning openly as we figured it out, instead of waiting for a polished playbook.

The result: 3 to 5x my usual growth benchmarks in 90 days.

Some of my best-performing assets in that window have been built around Claude Code, context engineering, and what I am now calling the GTM brain - a proprietary AI-native GTM system that compounds rather than degrades with every model update.

🔗 Dive deeper:

• The GTM repository for Claude Code

• The GTM guide to AI context engineering

• Build your GTM brain (a demo with Attio)

That last part - “compounds rather than degrades with every model update” - matters more than it sounds.

For content writing specifically, we moved everything into the Anthropic ecosystem and built a system that consistently produces great results without getting worse every time a new model ships. I still firmly believe in human editing, but for the first time, I am genuinely happy with how we are innovating in content creation.

Very meta: Claude helping build Claude content

Did we burn too many nights and weekends in Claude Code? Yes.

Was it worth it? Yes.

The other unlock was the rest of the stack. Claude Code for mockups. ChatGPT for infographics. Wispr Flow for voice-to-text. I can speak faster than I can type, and Wispr Flow lets me move at the speed of thought. Not affiliated - just genuinely obsessed.

My Wispr Flow stats

The pattern here is the same as Lever 3 with collaborations: be early to the platforms that are about to matter for your audience, and share what you learn openly as you figure it out.

Major Unlocks on this journey: The Lever Stack, in 3 Layers, One Moat 🏰

Looking back, I can group the 7 levers into 3 layers.

This is the framework I would hand my November 2023 self if I had a time machine. I do not, so I am handing it to you instead - in the hope that your demand generation journey will be a little smoother than mine.

The foundation layer - voice and design - is the part you cannot skip. Everything else rests on it. (Great candidates for your .md files, by the way. 😉)

The distribution layer - collaborations, free assets, niche discipline - is how your work reaches the right people.

The compounding layer - curated partnerships, platform bets - is where the brand starts working for you instead of the other way around.

Most people try to start at the top of the stack. They want partnerships before they have a voice. They want platform bets before they have an audience. It does not work that way. Each layer rests on the one below it.

Together, they compound into a distribution moat 🏰.

This is the holy grail of AI-native GTM. Products have never been easier to copy and build, so the speed of traction is the name of the game. And almost no one builds that moat overnight. It takes commitment, iteration, and the kind of dedication that does not photograph well.

That is the annoying part. It is also the part that makes the moat real - and the part AI can actually help you with, if you let it.

In the meantime, take care, and good luck building your own stack.

Catch you at the next milestone (50K newsletter x 100K LinkedIn, hopefully) 🤞

Maja

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