Community | University 

Aug 07, 2025

Hello, GrowthHackers! 

Welcome to your daily unfair advantage.

Every morning, we cut through the noise to bring you sharp insights, fast news, and fresh sparks to light up your brain and fuel your hustle. From scrappy hacks to big tech moves, AI shifts to culture flips—this is your intel to stay ahead, move fast, and break boring.

Think of it as your growth-fueled espresso shot.
Short. Smart. Addictive.

Let’s dive in.👇

Quick Hits

1. Causality Report: When Business Actions Leave a Digital Footprint
   (The smartest teams don’t just track—they trace cause and effect)

2. Google’s AI coding agent Jules is now out of beta
   (Code just met its co-pilot.)

3. Instagram’s Experimenting With a New Way to Highlight Your Interests 
   (Curation is the new creation)

The Growth joke of the day

Marketing plan, day 1: “Let’s go viral.”
Marketing plan, day 30: “Let’s fix the UTM link first.” 😅

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Why It Matters More Than You Think

  Not all search terms are created equal. And when it comes to analyzing brand awareness, the most useful lens is to split your keywords into branded and non-branded buckets.

• Google denies AI search features are killing website traffic

  Numerous studies indicate that the shift to AI search features and the use of AI chatbots are killing traffic to publishers’ sites. But Google on Wednesday denied that’s the case, at least in aggregate.

• TeaOnHer, Rival to Tea App, Leaks User Data and IDs

  TeaOnHer, a response app for men to the dating review app Tea, suffers severe data security flaws, revealing users’ personal data, emails, driver’s licenses, and admin credentials. This reveals lapses in digital platform security and growth-at-all-costs strategies that fail risk mitigation.

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  People

• Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert Urges Cybersecurity Field
  Ron Deibert warns the security industry about the U.S.'s descent into tech-fueled authoritarianism. He calls on the cybersecurity field to consider political instability and civil society insecurities as core security challenges and urges tech companies not to scale back their safety and threat intelligence teams.

Roxie’s 3-Minute News Bulletin

This week's 🙌 News Bulletin Roxie explores:
AI Reshapes Marketing Search Strategy and Innovation

Buckle up. 🚀

The future of growth is real-time, community-driven, and AI-native.
In this week’s GrowthRocks News Bulletin (Aug 6, 2025), AI isn’t just assisting marketers—it’s leading the strategy. From branded search hacks that beat old-school SEO, to building lead-gen tools without touching code (hello, vibe coding), we’re entering a new performance frontier.

Also inside: Claude 4.1 goes beast mode, Meta’s ad targeting gets sharper, Reddit becomes a search engine, and TikTok’s live-streaming powers its eCommerce push.

Bonus? Google’s NotebookLM just opened to Gen Z—AI learning is now classroom-ready.

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

• First impressions of Alexa+, Amazon’s upgraded, AI-powered digital assistant

  To find out whether Alexa is still the best smart assistant for my family, I’m going to test Amazon’s AI-powered devices, experiment with AI queries, and write out my thoughts in a multi-part series. With this series, I hope to offer consumers insights as to how well Alexa works in various real-world situations, not company demos.

• Google takes on ChatGPT’s Study Mode with new ‘Guided Learning’ tool in Gemini

  Google has launched "Guided Learning" in Gemini, a new multi-modal, interactive AI feature integrating video, quizzes, and diagrams to act as an advanced study tool. It aims to counter concerns that chatbots hinder learning by instead promoting understanding and critical thinking.

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

_{Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.}