Back to all sessionsAbout this session Key takeaways
Inside the Lab: How Anthropic Thinks About Growth Marketing
Austin Lau, Anthropic's founding growth marketer, on what marketers should actually be doing with AI today and where the real ceiling is.
How Anthropic thinks about distribution when the category is being invented in real time, matching the right AI approach to growth opportunities, and the skill sets required to win today.
- 01The gap between "I wish this existed" and "I built this" is smaller than people realize. Austin had never written a line of code (he had to Google how to open Terminal on Mac) and used Claude Code to build a Figma plugin that turned a repetitive 30-minute task into 30 seconds. The unlock isn't coding skill. It's the ability to clearly explain your problem and what you want to solve.
- 02Build for one. Buy for many. Austin's buy-versus-build framework: build when it's bespoke, you can't find anything that solves the specific use case, and only a few people will use it. Buy when it's one-to-many infrastructure with real maintenance dependencies (CRM, calendar, docs). Don't try to replicate mature SaaS tools internally just because models can write code. The ROI math fails once you factor in tech debt and ongoing upkeep.
- 03Don't one-shot. Break it down like an engineering sprint. Austin's biggest early mistake was asking Claude to build everything in one prompt and waiting 45 minutes for something that didn't even open. Treat agent building like product development: digestible pieces, prove the bones first, iterate from there. The two dimensions worth asking before you build: what can Claude do better than me, and what can Claude do faster than me? Ideal builds clear both.
- 04At Anthropic, hiring is craft-first and AI-pilled second. They still want SEO specialists who eat, sleep, and breathe SEO first principles. The new question on top is whether the candidate is actively experimenting with AI beyond "Claude, write me ten headlines." Day one for the new SEO hire: don't ship 10,000 pages of AI slop. Audit the site, find the JavaScript bloat, fix the sitemap. Use Claude to supplement what you can't do quickly or aren't yet an expert in.
- 05Encode tribal knowledge into skills before you scale anything else. Austin's biggest "wish we'd started earlier" was turning subject matter expertise into shareable skills, rather than relying on shadowing and tribal knowledge. Even at Anthropic, sharing skills team-to-team is still a gap (they use GitHub as a hacky workaround for non-technical folks). His shoutout to AirOps: tools that help spread something like a global brand tone skill, without forcing every marketer to learn GitHub, are the unlock.