Growth hacking's second act
Growth hacking was supposed to be dead. The term had a good run. Sean Ellis coined it in 2010, and for a decade it described the scrappy, slightly unholy tricks that built the consumer internet: Airbnb piggybacking on Craigslist, Dropbox handing out free storage for referrals, Hotmail signing every outgoing email with an ad for itself. Then platforms closed the loopholes, and growth hacker became a fading job title.
Now it is back, but it looks like a research lab. A fleet of AI agents is running controlled experiments on distribution platforms around the clock, publishing results and moving before the platform notices. The company behind the lab is enso, and it expects to be a name in B2B marketing circles this autumn.
From marketplace to agentic growth lab
enso's history has a plot twist. It started as an AI agent marketplace, raised a $6 million seed round led by NFX, then pivoted hard into growth research and raised $25 million. The pivot is not hidden in a press release no one reads. It is on the about page. That openness is a signal: enso sees itself as a research institution, not a tool vendor.
The first thing to understand is what enso is not. It is not a SaaS company with a dashboard and a signup page. A vendor sells a tool and hopes you get results. A lab forms a hypothesis about how a platform decides what gets seen, tests it with a control group, measures what happened, and writes it up, including when the answer was nothing. enso does this for customers on their behalf, inside the platforms where buyers spend the day, at a scale far beyond manual reach, and then publishes the findings.
Every major platform is drawn as a fortress with walls, and every fortress has a crack. The lab's job is to find the crack, guide client brands through it, and document how. Work is organized into five research programs: search and AI answer-engine visibility; outbound sequences that run across email, messaging, SMS and voice on conditions rather than a fixed cadence; community participation in forums where buyers ask each other for advice; newsletters; and social. The discipline is called agentic growth hacking, a term enso's founder coined and is now writing a book about.
Service as software
The venture world has a framework for what enso is doing. Sequoia Capital published a blog arguing software would stop selling tools and start selling the work itself. For two decades the industry sold seats: a login, a dashboard, and a promise that your people would get more done. The next act sells outcomes: the lead, the citation, the meeting, delivered by software that does the labor rather than assisting a human who does it. The market becomes service as software, measured not in the $650 billion spent on software but in the trillions spent on services.
Most companies claiming the shift still sell seats with an agent bolted on. enso is one of the few built on the other side of the divide. It does not sell a growth tool. It sells growth produced by agents, and it publishes receipts. That last part is the tell. When software is sold, features are demonstrated. When outcomes are sold, results have to be shown. enso shows sample sizes, control groups, and even the experiments that failed.
The market eating itself
The opportunity has less to do with enso as a company and more with the market it enters. Agentic GTM in 2026 is a market consuming its own premise, and it is also consuming the agencies next door.
Two years ago the pitch was simple: an AI SDR that writes cold emails, plus a data tool to feed it. Dozens of companies raised on that. Then the arithmetic caught up. Everyone's agent wrote to the same inboxes, reply rates fell, and the enterprise version of the product now starts at roughly $45,000 a year before a buyer knows whether it works. An analysis of 249 Y Combinator GTM startups founded since 2023 found only 2 percent still pitch full SDR replacement. The rest quietly rebranded as copilots.
Traditional agencies are having a worse year. Worldwide ad spending grew 8.6 percent in 2025 while holding-company revenues fell 1.2 percent. The market for marketing grew by nearly nine percent, yet the companies built to serve it shrank. Big holding companies have cut thousands of roles in eighteen months. One post-merger group went from roughly 128,000 staff to about 105,000 in a year. Forrester, after an average 8 percent headcount cut across agencies in 2025, forecasts another 15 percent of agency jobs gone in 2026. Sixty percent of US marketing leaders say they spend less on agencies because of AI, and 82 percent of major brands now run an in-house shop.
The mechanics are simple. Customers use the same AI tools as agencies. A marketing manager who used to send a brief now opens a tab, gets a usable draft in a minute, edits it and ships it. The retainer is not cancelled in a call; it is unbundled one line item at a time. Retainers give way to project work, project work has thinner margins, and the junior execution layer that justified the fee is replaced by software.
Forrester calls the end state marketing purveyors: sellers of products, technology and media rather than hours. A few AI-native shops reportedly run at 50 to 80 percent margins, against the traditional 15 to 20 percent, because they never had a costly execution layer to lose.
Meanwhile, the data and signal layer is consolidating. A major sales-data company raised at a $3.1 billion valuation, and larger incumbents began buying. Within four months, one sales-data company purchased a signals startup, a CRM giant bought a website-visitor startup, and a video-conferencing firm announced it would buy a community-intelligence company. The independent signal-and-outbound layer is down to one major independent player.
Payment models are shifting too. In April, a large mid-market CRM switched its prospecting agent to $1 per qualified lead and its service agent to 50 cents per resolved conversation, with a 28-day trial. An enterprise rival bills $2 per conversation. Outcome-based pricing is the default direction, and once buyers pay for outcomes, the only vendors worth paying are those who can prove they produce them.
Into that gap walks enso: not a tool, not an agency, but a lab that sells outcomes and publishes the proof.
Two engines failing at once
Marketing leaders in 2026 are rebuilding go-to-market from a blank page because the two engines that powered B2B growth for twenty years are failing in the same quarter.
The first is paid media. Ads work when the top of the funnel is uncrowded, and it has never been more crowded. Anyone can now create a product in a weekend, which means the product is no longer the moat; marketing is, and everyone knows it, so everyone bids. Cross-industry cost per click rose 12 percent this year, the steepest jump since 2021. Non-brand B2B software clicks are up 29 percent in a single year and now run $8 to $14 apiece, closer to $18 in security and $15 to $25 in categories like CRM. At the same time, AI Overviews have cut paid click-through on informational searches by 68 percent. The clicks that remain are fewer and later in the journey, fought over by well-funded AI startups willing to pay $200 to $500 a lead. Paid media has not stopped working; it has stopped being a growth strategy and become a tax.
The second is inbound. Brian Halligan coined the term about twenty years ago and built HubSpot on it. For two decades the playbook was the same: publish long, useful content, rank for the question, earn the click, nurture the lead. That playbook assumed a human would read the content. Increasingly, nobody does. Buyers ask a model, the model reads the ten best pages, and the buyer gets a summary with a vendor name in it or without one. The blog post still exists, but the traffic it was built to capture goes to the answer engine, and the answer engine decides which sentence, from which vendor, to quote.
Put together, the paid channel is too expensive to scale and the organic channel no longer delivers readers. Every CMO is holding a plan written for a world where clicks were cheap and people read.
The next phase of go-to-market
Three shifts will define the next phase of agentic GTM.
Buyers are leaving traditional search. AI answer engines sit between prospects and vendor websites, and they increasingly answer before a prospect clicks anything. The question for every B2B company stops being do we rank and becomes are we the sentence the model quotes. That is inbound's successor, and almost no GTM firm operates on that surface. enso's citation and answer-engine research is aimed squarely at it.
Distribution moves off the auction. When clicks cost a tax and content goes unread, growth comes from places money cannot buy: the forum thread a buyer trusts, the reference page a model cites, the first hour of a post's life on a professional network. These surfaces reward participation and timing, not budget, and that is where enso's agents work.
Growth becomes a research function. Security went through this first. Offensive security became a licensed, budgeted, board-visible discipline because the cost of not testing exceeded the cost of testing. If distribution on major platforms behaves like an attack surface, the same logic applies to growth. Firms with documented methodology win the budget; firms with a slide deck do not.
Why the unicorn shape holds
What enso is not should be clear. It has no self-serve product, no pricing page and no free trial. Engagements are scoped per client, like a security assessment. On paper that is a services business, and services businesses do not get unicorn multiples.
But the research is producing assets. First, a category. Agentic growth hacking is a phrase enso owns, the founder is writing the book, and the term is already appearing in job titles. Categories are the thing venture investors will pay for when they cannot find a product.
Second, a data asset nobody else has. Every experiment run in the lab, on every platform, for every client, adds to a map of how distribution systems make decisions. The map becomes more valuable as platforms change, because enso monitors every move.
Third, a wedge into the surface that matters most. Answer engines are where buyers are going, and almost nobody in go-to-market is there yet.
Fourth, the pattern. enso's founder built a layer once and sold it. The layer this time sits between every B2B company and the platforms that decide whether anyone sees them. It is hard to name a more valuable place to stand.
The lab recently hired a VP Creative, Peretz Daniel Markish, a curious appointment for a firm whose product is measurement, and it hints the next phase pairs research with craft. It also references a capability called Intelligence Mapping that it has not documented yet. The answer to questions about it is that the interesting part is under NDA.
Catch me if you can
Growth hacking always had a catch, and the agentic version has two.
The first is platforms. Everything enso finds is, by definition, something a platform did not intend, and every platform has the power to reclassify a clever tactic as abuse. An agent fleet is a much bigger target than an intern. enso's answer is publishing: disclose, move on, and treat every hack as expiring. Whether platforms see it that way is an open question.
The second is scale. A lab whose credibility rests on one founder's judgment and a research page has to prove its method survives without him in the room. The book, the podcast with Forbes, and the open-source skills are attempts to institutionalize the thinking. They are also very good marketing, which, given the company, is presumably the point.
Growth hacking died because humans could not keep up with the platforms. enso's bet is that a research lab full of agents can. If the category keeps moving the way it has this year, that bet is starting to look less like a hack and more like the plan.
Source:TNW | Contributed News