House of Growth

We are helping you to get more clients through content marketing.

- Helped growth stage company to generate 1m traffic in a year

- Helped early-stage startup to go from 0 to 25k organic traffic per month in 6 months

- Helped seed stage company to go from 50k to 1m ARR in 14 months with content

No retainers! Cancel anytime !

Founder

Pemo

Advisor

Plug and Play Tech Center

Entrepreneur in Residence

500 Global

Helping 500 with screening and selecting startups for the program 

Supporting portfolio companies with GTM & and growth

Growth Mentor

500 Startups

KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology)

DIFC Innovation Hub 

Techstars

Rows

Helped Rows with kickstarting their content motion

Fitpreneur

Helping entrepreneurs to lose weight with minimal training and non-boring food. Lost 100 lbs under a year and I want to teach other founders to do the same.

Hustle Fund

Angel investing in early-stage startups with Hustle Fund. If you are building something cool in B2B SaaS space, feel free to message me for a referral to Hustle Fund.

Angel Squad Member

GTM for Early Stage SaaS | Co-founder @ Datapad | SaaS Growth Advisor | Reforge | 1x Exit |

I’m a marketer, 2x entrepreneur with 1x exit, and helped companies to go from 0 to 7 figures.

My achievements:

- Built 2 VC backed startups with one exit

- Built a high six figure productized marketing service in a year

- Became a mentor in top accelerators such as: 500, Plug and Play, Techstars

- Got to work with the portfolio companies of amazing investors such as A16z, Craft Ventures, YC

- Built a podcast with 20k downloads in a year-figure

- Transformed my body more times than Christian Bale ☺️

I had coffee with a freelancer trying to sell $2k per month services and failing.

Told me he was about to shut everything down. Working 70-hour weeks. 

Barely breaking even. Closing maybe 1 in 20 calls.

"I think I'm just not cut out for sales," he said.

I asked him one question: "Who are you pitching to?"

Turns out he was going after micro businesses. Pre-revenue or making $10k per month

"They need my service the most," he explained.

That's when I stopped him.

Need and afford are two different things.

A business doing $20k/mo has maybe $2k total for all their vendors. Your $2k service IS their entire budget.

A business doing $150k/mo might easily allocate $15k-20k  just for marketing. Your $5k service will go under the radar.

I told him to change one thing: Start pitching companies that are doing at least $100k per month.

He pushed back. "Won't they expect more? Won't I need to change my offer?"

Same service. Same deliverables. Just different prospects.

He messaged me two months later.

Closed three deals. All at $5k/mo. Same service he'd been trying to sell for $2k.

"The conversations were completely different," he said. "They actually had budget. They made decisions fast. Nobody tried to negotiate."

Here's what most freelancers miss:

When you're not closing deals, you assume something's wrong with YOU.

Your pitch. Your offer. Your website. Your sales skills.

But sometimes the only thing wrong is who you're talking to.

If you're doing outbound, tighten your targeting. Go after companies that can actually afford your services.

If you're getting inbound, put a qualifier on your booking page: "For B2B companies doing $100k/mo or more."

You'll talk to fewer people.

But the ones you do talk to will actually be able to say yes.

That freelancer isn't quitting anymore. He will be closing more deals soon 💪

John Ozuysal

Co-founder @Restartt | Founder @ House of Growth | 1x Exit

My #1 tip for freelancers and small agencies 

For making more money while keeping your sanity

"Stop trying to sell people who don't have money" 

Why are you grinding 60 hours a week for $3k/month while others work 20 hours for $10k?"

👇

It's easier to reach and maintain $10k+ per month with 2 clients instead of signing 10 clients. 

You will have a better quality 

Better margins

Better clients 

But you will most likely fail to do this, because you are afraid to charge higher prices

What is holding you back is: you are great at your craft, but you are horrible at marketing and positioning yourself.

At the end of the day, you might be better at what you do, but I will still make more money because I know how to do better marketing for myself.

Running an agency or freelancing is not all about the skill you are selling; it's also about learning how to position and market yourself.

My CMO friend just quit her $300K job.

Not because the company was failing. Not because she got a better offer.

She quit because she spent 80% of her time defending marketing instead of doing it.

Here's what her last month looked like:

Week 1: Explaining why paid ads cost more than they did in 2019

Week 2: Convincing the CEO that LinkedIn impressions being down isn't her fault

Week 3: Justifying why the blog gets less traffic (spoiler: AI search)

Week 4: Trying to explain to CEO why they should not send 10000 email messages without finding message market fit

And she's not alone.

Every marketer I know is drowning in the same bs.

Paid media is 3x more expensive. 

Organic reach is in free fall. 

Cold email is basically spam now. 

Webinars? Ghost towns. 

Events? Don't even start.

But here's the thing that nobody wants to say out loud:

Marketing still works.

It's just harder now.

And instead of letting marketers adapt and execute, we're forcing them into conference rooms to justify their existence to people who've never run a campaign in their lives.

Your VP of Sales has an opinion. 

Your CFO read a LinkedIn post. 

Your CEO's nephew's best friend built an AI agent replacing 100 person marketing team

Everyone's a marketing expert suddenly.

Meanwhile, the person you hired to actually do marketing?

They're in their 6th meeting this week, explaining why brand building takes longer than a quarter.

Here's what should happen instead:

Hire someone good. Give them a clear goal. Let them work. Judge them on results.

And please stop taking marketing advice from people who've never built anything.

Marketing is hard enough without having to convince everyone it exists.

Let your marketers do their job.

Last year, I generated $3m pipeline only from LinkedIn

Here is my simple yet time-consuming playbook

This isn't going to be rocket science, but you really need to commit and spend time 

1. Create a list of accounts that could be your potential customers

2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile; treat it as a landing page so that people can understand what you do.

3. Start adding people from your list, don't pitch anything and don't leave any note 

4. Create topic clusters around the problem you are solving with your product or service. You should also write about your learnings from your sales, marketing, and product team.

5. Post content at least 3x every week for 6 months 

6. Engage with the content of the people you have on your target list. Don't leave nonsensical AI comments, but leave thoughtful comments to build relationships.

7. Don't give up; stay consistent for 6 months. I know many of you will create content, but skip the commenting phase. Don't do this, this is a great way to get the attention of your ICP.

Do this consistently, and you will generate a pipeline for sure. I know because I have done it many times.

It's simple, yet most of you won't do it because it is not easy.

If you need help with Linkedin ABM, Restartt is here to help you

These 3 skills helped me take my agency from $0 to $30K/month in the early days.

You need to learn these skills to go $30k+ per month

1. Create a cold offer people can't ignore

Stop with the "30 leads in 90 days or I work for free" nonsense.

My inbox gets flooded with that exact offer 10 times a day.

You need something so compelling that saying no feels stupid.

2. Master free traffic generation

You don't have a budget for ads yet.

That means you'd better get good at:

LinkedIn DMs that get responses

Cold emails that get replies

Content is going to help, but in the short term, your best friend is cold outreach

3. Learn basic account-based marketing (ABM)

The easiest way to close high-ticket sales:

Identify prospects who need your services → Build relationships with them → Engage with their content → Create resources specifically for them → Make your offer

It's basic relationship building that most people skip.

Here's what I'm assuming:

You're already good at what you're selling, and you've nailed your market positioning.

If you haven't, fix those first.

These 3 skills only work when you have a solid foundation.

Running a service business is not just about getting good at what you deliver. It's also about mastering getting attention and closing

Paid search? Expensive and barely delivers.

Paid social? Same story.

LinkedIn? Pay-to-play and worse every quarter.

SEO? Most companies don’t even care.

GEO? No one understands it 

Events? Overpriced with shrinking ROI.

Cold outbound? Stopped working a decade ago.

Signal-based outbound? Smart in theory, messy in execution.

Creators? Only works if you’re Clay.

Webinars? Ghost towns.

Blog? No one’s reading.

Gated content? People hate it.

Branded swag? Costs a fortune and kills the planet.

ABM? Needs 7 figure tool stack

My advice?

Stop doing all of it.

Replace all your teams with AI agents as the AI gurus suggest, and stop investing in all these channels.

Do that and you will help people like me to win easily 

Here’s the truth:

Marketing channels don’t die. They evolve.

Our job is to evolve faster than the rest.

Things change. Platforms shift.

 What worked last year might not hit today.

But just because it didn’t work for someone else doesn’t mean it won’t work for you.

I know companies and agencies are crushing it using some of the exact channels listed above.

 Learn and experiment properly and ignore the noise

Co-founder @Restartt | Venture Builder | 1x Exit | Marketer

I will get you 30 leads in 90 days, or you don't pay

Is the fastest way to bankruptcy for a small agency or a freelancer

You are not going to attract the top 5% of the clients this way 

If you don't have the case studies, go and do free work instead of building your business on offers such as ' I will get you x leads in y days or refund"

Plus, most people are selling guarantees on things that they don't even have control over 

I will rank your top keyword #1 in 90 days or money back - it's a great example

Interesting trend I am seeing here about B2B companies

Most founders are willing to spend 100k on one-off events such as exhibitions, trade shows, PR, etc...

They are not willing to spend 10% of that amount on building a real distribution.

Most of them don't understand that they need a compounding distribution channel.

When they do understand the importance, it's usually 3 months before their banks hit $)

Distribution is important, as building a great product or you are just building something for you and your close circle.

"Search is dead."

I've heard this at least 37 times in the last 6 months.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite companies is getting 29 leads in a day from AI search engines

Google: #1 lead source AI Search Engines: #3 lead source

Search isn't dead.

It's evolving. And most companies are looking in completely the wrong direction.

While everyone's chasing the next shiny object, testing new ad platforms, spinning up podcasts, sending trillions of emails with horrible front end offers 

We've been experimenting relentlessly with how AI engines surface content.

And here's the truth: we don't have all the answers.

Nobody does. This space is too new. The algorithms are black boxes. What works today might not work tomorrow.

But we're testing. We're tracking. 

We're learning what moves the needle.

Writing good content? Optimizing for entities? Topical authority? Building presence on YT, Reddit, Linkedin ? 

We're treating this like every other channel. Run experiments. Measure everything. Double down on what shows early signals.

And the results are real.

We've been deliberately creating content designed for how modern search works, both traditional engines and AI ones.

Not because we cracked some secret code. Because we're showing up, testing hypotheses, and adapting faster than most.

Here's what most founders miss:

When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X," there's a selection process happening. When they use Perplexity to compare solutions, something is determining which companies get mentioned.

We don't control it. But we can influence it.

The same way early SEO pioneers figured out what Google rewarded before anyone wrote the playbook.

The narrative that search is over is one of the most expensive lies in marketing right now.

What's actually happening: search is fragmenting across engines. Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, they're all answering queries differently, but they're all still search.

The companies writing off organic search are about to get buried by the ones experimenting with where it's going.

We're not claiming we have it figured out.

We're claiming we're in the arena, testing, while others are on the sidelines debating whether it matters.

Search isn't dead. Your strategy might be.

Your competitor just taught ChatGPT what to say about you.

And you weren't even in the room.

Here's what happened:

Last week, a prospect searched "best email marketing tools" in ChatGPT. Your product didn't show up. Your competitor's did.

Not because their product is better.

Because they own the pages about their category and competitor review content. You didn't.

I see this constantly with early stage B2B SaaS. They spend six figures on ads and PR, then wonder why AI is recommending their competitors.

The answer is brutal: you left the door open.

LLMs are scraping everything right now. Every product page. Every comparison chart. Every "X vs Y" article on your site (or your competitor's site).

If you're not publishing this content, you're not in the conversation.

Here's what you should do:

Write a "best [category] tools" article

Create comparison pages for every competitor. 

Don't forget to add three-way comparisons, too

Done? Go and turn these into videos and publish on YT as well.

Because if you don't explain what you do and how you are different than competitors, someone else will write that and control the narrative.

It's about being present when the buying decision happens.

My clients start seeing traffic from AI sources within weeks. Not months. Weeks.

The best part? Your competitors probably aren't doing this yet. They're still waiting for someone to write about them.

Control your narrative, or watch someone else write it for you.

AI marketing agents generating $1mil +  per year 

Are created by people who have never seen a mil

Is it just me or everyone else is also seeing million dollar generating ai agent giveaway posts too ?

I watched a $50M company disappear from AI search in 90 days.

Not because they got penalized. Not because their SEO team quit.

They just hit pause.

Three months later, their biggest competitor owned every ChatGPT answer in their category.

The company that paused? They're still trying to catch up.

And here's the part that keeps me up at night:

They thought pausing was the safe move. Budget cuts. Uncertain ROI. Let's wait and see.

But in AI search, there is no neutral.

Every day you're not feeding the machine, your competitor is.

Every article they publish trains ChatGPT to recognize THEM as the authority.

Every brand mention compounds their lead.

Every Reddit thread you miss is an opportunity for a competitor

And the gap doesn't just grow. It accelerates.

Because freshness wins now.  And whoever shows up consistently becomes the default answer.

Your buyers only used Google to start their searches, not that they are switching to LLMs

And if you're not in that conversation, you don't exist.

Standing still isn't playing it safe. It's surrender.

The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets.

They're the ones who understood 6 months ago that AI search isn't coming.

It's already here.

We analyzed 174 SaaS companies to see how they run thought leader ads

Here are some of our findings

1) Are companies using TL ads?

68% did and 32% didn’t run TL ads, specifically featuring C-Suite execs

2) How many companies feature their employees in TL ads?

65% did and 35% didn’t run TL ads featuring company employees

3) How many companies feature their community in TL ads?

66.5% did and 33.5% didn’t run Community TL ads featuring a creator or an influencer.

Bottom line: Interest in TL ads is high among the 170 B2B SaaS companies we analyzed.

Still, ~33.5% of brands are missing out on the benefits TL ads can offer.

Here’s the thing:

People trust people.

This is the main reason why Thought Leader ads work.

It’s also why ~68% of SaaS companies we reviewed use TL ads in some form.

If you’re running LinkedIn ads, TL ads should be part of your mix.

If you’re not, you’re handing reach and visibility to your competitors.

Your competitors are guessing AI search prompts. You could just ask.

Here is how 👇

No tool is going to hand you the exact prompts your customers are typing into search.

But you can figure it out without paying for a single piece of software.

Looking back, my best keyword ideas did not come from keyword research tools. 

They came from customer interviews and simply asking, “How did you find us?”

Right now, everyone is trying to hack their way into uncovering the most valuable LLM search prompts.

Go back to the fundamentals.

Here is what I tell my own companies:

 1️⃣ Ask every new customer if they found you through an AI search engine.
 2️⃣ If yes, ask exactly how their search started.
 3️⃣ Repeat this for your last 100 prospects.

You will start spotting patterns and those patterns are your high intent prompts.

Once you have that list, track your visibility for those prompts and work to win those spots.

This is how I am doing it. You should try it before your competitors figure it out.

Your competitors are getting cited by AI search. You're not. 

Here are my learnings from the last 3 SaaS case studies we got:

1. Identify high-intent prompts

Find which prompts you should fight for. You need to pick your battles by identifying prompts with high intent. You can ask your most recent customers if they found you through LLM search, and if so, what were the prompts they used? This is going to give you a good set of questions to go after

Pro Tip: Make sure that you are going after grounded prompts, not ungrounded. If AI is not citing any sources to respond to your question, you can't really do much to influence it. You need to go after prompts where AI is sourcing that information from external sources

2. Make sure your site has clear messaging.
If you can't understand what your product does and explain it properly on your website, how do you think AI can read it? Make sure that you have clear messaging explaining what you are doing. the persona you are going after, problem you are solving, etc (Most of you don't have this part nailed)

3. Owned Content

You should have content for each prompt you are trying to win. LLMs still source data from SERPS, so it's important that you are getting visibility here. A big part of your strategy will be about owned content, and the other part is about getting visibility on other sources

4. Identify the most cited sources and try to get visibility

Use one of the AEO tools to identify which sources are getting cited most often in your niche. We use our own internal tool for this, but you can use any/Set clear goals to get your brand mentioned on those top domains and pages. But don’t stop there-expand the list and look for more places to get featured.

5. Content freshness is more important than ever

LLMs put heavy emphasis on content freshness. I used to run content updated every quarter, but now I am doing it more often. Some of our content is getting refreshed monthly

6. Good content and information gain score

Writing great content is still important. Make sure that your page has more information than any other page out there. Also, make sure that your writing is no fluff and NLP-friendly. Longer content is not better content!

7. Research content still works

Statistics articles used to be good for passive link building. Now they also work well for getting AI visibility. Most of my clients get big chunk of their AI traffic from statistics articles. I don't have 1000 clients to get a decent sample size, but I still wanted share that it's working for the small sample size.

8. Be active on UGC platforms.

Engage in real conversations on Reddit and Quora. These sites are AI favorites for citations. Never spam-add real value.

9. Invest in YT.

Perplexity loves citing YT. Make sure to invest in video. Start by mapping your features to JTBD. Create "how-to " videos around the features of your product. Embed the videos into articles and share on social media

Most growth advice you see online will not work for you 

I know it because I lived it 

Every day, I see posts about how companies like Stripe, Notion, Figma, or Credit Karma "cracked the code" on growth.

If you are a marketer at an early stage startup, I know that your founder is forwarding these messages to you and asking you to pull the same plays.

Here's the problem:

These companies had massive advantages that most of us will never have.

Unlimited budgets
Viral products
Huge team
.
Of course, their marketing worked.

Marketing is easy when you're already winning and working for a giant.

Try running those same campaigns with a $10k-$20k monthly budget and zero brand recognition.

I will tell you what happens...

You will fail

Don't get me wrong.

We can learn from the big players.

Some tactics do translate.

But most of their "secrets" only work when you already have their advantages.

My message to early-stage startup founders:

Stop forwarding the playbooks from unicorns and make your one-man marketing team run the same playbook.

Let them create their own plays and display their creativity

From invisible to closing their first client from ChatGPT

It only took 32 days, and here is what we did in 4 weeks:

WEEK 1: IDENTIFY LOW-HANGING FRUITS

First, we identified the high-intent prompts that we should go after. We found several Reddit threads being cited. We created content on these threads and pushed our comments up for more visibility.

We initially started with 4 Reddit threads.

WEEK 2:UPDATE EXISTING PAGES

We updated some of the BOFU pages to make sure that the content is optimized for Google and AI search engines.

Pages were terribly structured, so we did rewrites first ( if the team is reading, sorry, but you know I mentioned this before we started to work )

After the rewrite, our updates were focused on:

- Adding data and statistics

- Query fan-out optimization 

- Entity optimization under every H2 

- Adding fresh information (recency is very important for AI)

- Tables for product comparison

WEEK 3: 5 HIGH INTENT PAGES

2 alternative pages against their top competitors ( we like to start with vanilla alternatives content, and we verticalize the alternatives articles by creating them for each persona)

2 three-way comparison articles

We also did a competitor pricing review article ( this one actually landed us a demo with a big enterprise co. They did not book a demo, but we identified the visitor and reached out )

WEEK 4: OFF-SITE MENTIONS

- We worked on repurposing our 2 pieces of BOFU content and uploaded them to YouTube. 

- Secured 3 mentions where LLMs were citing the source

- Added 4 more Reddit mentions

-----

If you have questions or need help, my DMs are open

Or if you have any questions, please mention in the comments so that I can create content :)

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