Community | University 

Aug 19, 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. Google Expands iOS App Marketing Capabilities
   (User acquisition just got a boost.)

2. JSON Files: What They Are and Why Your AI Video Needs Them
   (Growth today = data packaged for machines, not just humans.)

3. ‘Job hugging’ has replaced job-hopping
   (Build a culture worth hugging.)

The Growth joke of the day

What’s a startup founder’s favorite workout?
Cash flow. 💸🏃‍♂️

What's New in Growth Hacking/Growth Marketing?

Strategies

• AI-powered stuffed animals are coming for your kids

  That’s how the companies selling these AI-powered kiddie companions are marketing them, but The New York Times’ Amanda Hess has some reservations

• Hank Green’s Focus Friend app is climbing the App Store charts — and it’s extremely cute

  Hank Green’s productivity app "Focus Friend" leverages gamification and habit-building using a cute bean character to encourage users to stay off distractions.

• Voice Search Registration for Business Owners

  Clarifies voice search optimization (not registration) is what matters. Describes how to improve local SEO and AI visibility for discovery by voice assistants like Siri and ChatGPT.

• Nvidia’s app gets global DLSS override and more control panel features

  You won’t need to switch to Nvidia’s older control panel app as much anymore.

  ____________________________________________________________

  People

• How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO

  Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that fits into a similar “second brain” space to Notion. But Obsidian differentiates itself with a really unusual approach to its business. It still wants to be your entire personal knowledge base — to hold all your notes, links, files, and other information — but it works in a very different way.

• Duolingo CEO says controversial AI memo was misunderstood

  While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an “AI-first company,” he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he “did not give enough context.”

Start Here. Learn Together. Grow Always.

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like Growth Hacking.

Discover our courses designed for doers, builders, and growth-minded teams.

Learn from real-world experiments and proven frameworks Start your journey—grow faster, together.🤘

What's New in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Perplexity now supports live earnings call transcripts for Indian stocks

  Perplexity adds live transcript and scheduling features for earnings calls of Indian stocks, enhancing its Finance dashboard and research capabilities.

• AI Systems Often Prefer AI-Written Content, Study Finds

  Study shows LLMs tend to choose AI-written content over human-written in tests across products, papers, and movie summaries, indicating possible bias and visibility implications for digital content.

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.}