I don’t normally talk about my business. Which is a strange thing for a marketer to admit, but there it is. I’ve spent my career making other people’s brands visible and almost none of it making mine.
So this is unusual. There’s something I want people to know about, and the only way to say it is to start at the beginning.
What growth marketing actually is
If you don’t know what growth marketing is, that’s completely normal, and I’d rather explain it than let you nod along.
It’s paid advertising, mostly. Meta and Google. It’s the work of finding the people who would love what you make, putting it in front of them, and figuring out what to do differently tomorrow based on what happened today. It’s the engine behind the thing a founder actually loves making.
Done badly, it’s a money incinerator with a dashboard attached. Done well, it’s the difference between a brand that stays small because nobody found it and a brand that gets to keep going.
Why I started Alkemia Growth
Two reasons, and I’ve never dressed them up.
The first was that I wasn’t meant to be in one place in the world, in one physical office, at one specific period of time. That’s just not the way I work. I wanted to build something that let me work from wherever I was and live the way I wanted to live, and I wasn’t willing to wait for permission.
The second was that I was done working for the Man. I’d had a great run in tech. But I was ready to work with founders who had visions of making things that mattered, and there’s only so long you can spend growing something you don’t believe in before it costs you something.
It started as just me and my first couple of clients. That’s part of why I’m still so connected to the brands I work with. I helped grow them. I believe in them. That isn’t a positioning statement, it’s just what happens when you spend years inside somebody’s numbers.
Do you have to choose between the spreadsheet and the spark?
Here’s the thing about me, and I think it’s what makes me good at this. I’m a numbers person who believes in magic.
People assume you have to pick a lane. The analytical one or the intuitive one, the spreadsheet or the spark. Analysts are supposed to be suspicious of instinct and creatives are supposed to be suspicious of dashboards, and everyone is supposed to stay where they were put.
I’ve never believed that. The best growth I’ve ever made came from refusing to choose.
What does a brand give up in order to grow?
Usually the thing that made it worth growing.
I’ve watched it happen from the inside more times than I can count. The discounting starts. The messaging gets flattened until it appeals to everyone and lands on no one. The distinctive thing gets sanded off because the distinctive thing is harder to scale. The numbers go up for a quarter and the brand is quietly worth less than it was.
The thing I’ve always stood by is this: it shouldn’t cost that. The founder is the one with the vision. Our job is to amplify it, and to make sure the growth you create stays yours and compounds for what you’re building, not for somebody else.
What’s still human in growth marketing?
More than the current conversation would suggest.
Knowing how people work, and knowing how the technology works, which are two different literacies that rarely live in one head. Seeing ahead of the trend rather than reporting it after it’s over. Reading the data instead of just collecting it, because collection has been solved and reading has not.
And the one I’d argue matters most: communicating what it means in a way that just clicks. A founder doesn’t need a report. They need to understand their own business better after the conversation than before it, and that is a human act.
That’s what an experienced team gives you. People who’ve watched the same patterns play out over and over and recognize the shape of a thing early. We’re a small team with big leverage, and that’s on purpose.
What the rebrand is actually about
We’re taking everything we know, all of it, and building it into tools that are uniquely ours, so we can put it directly in your hands. Somewhere you can reach it.
That’s the fusion. Human intuition and amplified intelligence, working together so results compound instead of just adding up.
Because I think AI should be two things. One, accessible. And two, yours. Not a generic tool that everybody in your category is running the same way. Intelligence built on your brand, your customers, your numbers, so that what it learns belongs to you.
That’s the part we carry, so you can go build the bigger thing. The one only you can see.