Don't Feed The Algorithm: Issue 034

🐊 Editor's Note

Hey there,

Welcome back to another Don’t Feed The Algorithm, your weekly dispatch from Averi — where we explore the intersections of marketing, AI and the future of work.

There’s a moment every early-stage SaaS founder hits — right after the product works, but right before anyone knows it exists.

It’s the most fragile part of the journey. It’s also the most misunderstood.

Most founders think they need ads. Or PR. Or a giant launch.

But in 2026, the first 100 users won’t come from noise.

They’ll come from clarity.

Clarity about who you’re for. Clarity about what you believe. Clarity about the problems you can speak to better than anyone else.

This week’s feature is a field guide for that exact phase — the no-budget, no-team, no-distribution moment where momentum is built (or dies). It breaks down how early SaaS companies are using strategic content — not volume, strategy — to attract their first real users.

We paired it with two pieces that round out the full picture:

• A survival guide for solo founders who are trying to grow without burning themselves to ash

• And a look at the tectonic shift happening in B2B SaaS marketing — GEO, AI search, and LLM-driven distribution that’s already reshaping who wins page one

Together, they form one message:

You don’t need a big team to grow. You need leverage. You need focus. You need a system that compounds.

Or to put it more bluntly — you need a marketing engine that works even when you’re the whole marketing department.

Let’s build it.

— ZC & The Averi Team

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⚙️ Straight Outta Dev

Build Your GEO/LLM Search Optimized Content Engine in Q1 2026

Content is still the biggest growth lever for early-stage startups, 62% cheaper than traditional marketing, generating 3x more leads.

But the playbook has changed fast.

50% of B2B buyers now start in ChatGPT, not Google. AI-referred traffic is up 527% this year alone.

Averi built a GEO-optimized content engine that increased our organic & LLM referred traffic by 6000% in 6 months.

We want to do that for you - in one cohesive workflow. Built for startup speed & flexibility.

Which of our Beta options is more interesting to you?

Want to go deeper? We're looking for feedback and potential Beta Testers to get early access and shape the product. Grab 30 minutes here if that's you.

— Averi Team

📝 The Good Sh*t

How to Get Your First 100 SaaS Users with Content Marketing

There exists a peculiar mythology around early-stage customer acquisition…

That your first users must emerge from some mystical combination of virality, investor introductions, and sheer force of will.

Most seed-stage founders approach customer acquisition exactly backward, burning precious runway on paid channels before they've built the organic foundation that compounds over time.

Content marketing offers something paid acquisition cannot: ownership.

This isn't about choosing between speed and sustainability.

It's about recognizing that content becomes the compound interest of marketing, every piece you publish continues working while you sleep, turning strangers into users long after the initial effort is spent.

1. How to Do Marketing as a Solo Founder (Without Burning Out) → Read online

2. The Future of B2B SaaS Marketing: GEO, AI Search & LLM Optimization → Read online

🔥 In Case You Missed It…

• AI agents are now driving B2B marketing strategies — not just automating tasks — 2025 saw a major shift: AI agents moved from the margins of marketing stacks into the center. They’re now being used to architect campaigns, build content flows, and manage go-to-market workflows for B2B companies. → Read more

• The internet’s plumbing just broke again — Cloud reliability is becoming the new business risk — A major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in October reminded the world how fragile cloud-dependence can be. For marketers relying on AI tooling, CDNs, or cloud-hosted pipelines — this kind of event underlines why redundancy and multi-cloud strategy matters. → See what broke

• Retail is getting rewired for AI-assisted shopping — and gift-season just proved it — As consumers increasingly turn to AI search assistants to find gifts this holiday season, brands are scrambling to optimize for “AI-first shopping queries.” If your holiday marketing still looks like it did in 2020 — you might already be two waves behind. → How AI is changing holiday retail

• 78% of U.S. CEOs say AI will transform workplace efficiency and innovation in 2026 — According to a new study, nearly four out of five executives believe AI is no longer a fad but a critical lever for growth, efficiency and product evolution. That vote of confidence signals doubling down, not dialing back. → See the full report

• “Brand-context AI” becomes the new frontier — generic output won’t cut it anymore — As marketers adopt more AI tools to churn out content, a growing consensus has emerged: if you don’t feed context — brand history, values, voice — AI will spit out generic, forgettable output. Context-driven AI is starting to separate the winners from the rest. → Read why brand-context matters

🕵 Marketer’s Anonymous

We all know the industry loves to pretend it’s got it all figured out.

But here?

We tell the truth.

Every week, we’re asking you to share how things really work behind the scenes. Because getting better starts with getting honest.

Don’t worry, it’s a safe space.

Drop your vote.

Welcome to the circle. 🫡

📺 The Algorithm Could Never

McDonald’s — “Grandma’s McFlurry”

McDonald’s could’ve launched its new McFlurry flavor with flashy graphics, influencers, or a TikTok challenge.

Instead, they told a story.

A simple one. A human one.

A granddaughter trying to convince her grandmother to try something new.

The hesitation, the tenderness, the shared bite, the smile that says more than the script ever could.

The entire commercial feels like a memory someone let you borrow.

Why We Love It:

• Because it’s built on micro-moments — the nervous eye glance, the soft laugh, the way grandma adjusts her glasses before taking a bite. AI can render faces. It can’t notice moments like these.

• Because the story isn’t “about” the product — it’s about connection. The McFlurry is the bridge between generations, not the hero. AI can optimize for product placement… but it can’t write a story where the product isn’t the point.

• Because it understands emotional specificity — the ad taps into a universal feeling (introducing someone you care about to something you love). That universality comes from specificity — which AI still can’t originate.

• Because the pacing is human, not algorithmic — no jump-cuts, no overstimulation, no hyper-optimized attention hacks. Just a slow, warm moment that stays with you.

Taste > Templates.

Always.

Want to see more of the best marketed companies on the planet? 👇

🗓️ Make Friends

• Lenovo Tech World 2026 (as part of CES) | Las Vegas, NV | | January, 6 | → Register

• TiE Global Summit (TGS 2026) | Jaipur, India | | January, 4-6 | → Register

• International Conference on Virtual Multidisciplinary Research (ICVMR-IIRD) | Chicago, IL | | January, 1-2 | → Register

• AI for Strategic Communications (2-Part Virtual Series) | Virtual | January, 21-22, 2026 | → Register

• Digital Marketing 2026: Staying Ahead in the Age of AI | Virtual Webinar | January, 15, 2026 | → Register

🦄 Averi Stories & Startup Spotlight

Tavus: The AI Video Platform Turning Customer Engagement Into Personalized At Scale

Most brands know video converts — but producing it at scale is expensive, slow, and impossible to personalize for every customer. Tavus changes that, enabling marketers to generate thousands of personalized videos from a single recording.

The Backstory: Founded by a team who saw how much lift personalized outreach and onboarding videos created, Tavus was born from a simple insight: authenticity scales if you decouple the message from the manual recording. Early adopters in SaaS and ecommerce used Tavus to replace one-to-one outreach with AI-powered video that still feels human.

Key Innovation: Tavus clones your voice, tone, and delivery style — then dynamically generates personalized videos for each viewer with their name, company, use case, and context woven into the script. The result: hyper-relevant, human-feeling messages that boost conversions, onboarding completion, and customer retention without burning bandwidth.

💡Ask Averi

AI + Human Marketing Tip

Strategy You Can Steal

The “Insight-First” Content Engine

If you want content that actually lands — not just fills a calendar — steal this workflow top SaaS teams are using inside Averi:

Step 1: Load Inputs Into Averi

Drop in customer calls, Slack threads, support tickets, objections, and your recent wins.

Ask: “What themes, frustrations, and opportunities do you see across this dataset?”

Step 2: Identify the Real POV

Once Averi surfaces patterns, ask: “What’s the most interesting or contrarian insight hiding in here?”

This extracts taste, not templates.

Step 3: Build the Narrative Spine

Ask Averi to turn the insight into:

• A sharp thesis

• Supporting proof points

• A tension arc (what’s broken → what’s emerging → what’s next)

Step 4: Move to /create Mode

Turn that spine into a LinkedIn post, newsletter opener, landing page hook, or sales narrative — with your voice layered on top.

This workflow turns your raw inputs into authority-led content that stands out in a sea of AI sameness — without ever starting from a blank page.

Taste on top.

AI underneath.

Momentum by default.

— Averi

💼 Don’t Let AI Replace You

• OpenAI

  Position: Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer – San Francisco, CA

  A full-stack engineer role on the ChatGPT Growth team building marketing/infrastructure systems for paid acquisition, attribution, and experiment pipelines.  → Apply Now

• OpenAI

  Position: Data Engineer, Marketing – San Francisco, CA

  Leads building pipelines and core marketing datasets (spend, CAC, ROI, etc) powering growth and GTM strategy.  → Apply Now

• OpenAI

  Position: Product Marketing Manager, ChatGPT Consumer – San Francisco, CA

  Strategy & messaging for ChatGPT’s consumer product: go-to-market planning, positioning, adoption.  → Apply Now

• Carbon Robotics

  Position: Field Marketing Manager — Remote / USA 

  Details: Carbon Robotics is hiring a Field Marketing Manager to lead regional events and campaigns for its AI-driven robotics hardware offerings — a good fit for someone with both tech curiosity and marketing chops.→ Apply Now

• OpenAI

  Position: Product Marketing Manager, Developer Platform – San Francisco, CA

  GTM for OpenAI’s API/developer platform: launch planning, narrative development, driving adoption.  → Apply Now

• OpenAI

  Position: Growth – Performance Marketing & Growth Optimizations – New York City, NY

  Full-funnel growth role (paid acquisition, optimization, AI-driven workflows) for ChatGPT’s expansion.  → Apply Now

• Profound

  Position: AI Marketing Engineer

  Location: Remote / USA

  Profound is hiring someone to build marketing workflows and automation systems that help enterprise marketers optimize their AI visibility. → Apply Now

• C3 AI

  Position: Multiple roles (Enterprise AI Applications)

  Location: Redwood City, CA / USA

  C3 AI is looking for engineers and technologists to build and deploy enterprise AI solutions—including marketing & analytics‐adjacent work. → Apply Now

• Liftoff

  Position: Digital & Content Marketing Strategist – Remote

  Location: USA (Remote)

  Liftoff is seeking a strategist to oversee global content strategy, optimize AI-driven content discoverability, and manage digital campaigns. → Apply Now

• Nasuni

  Position: Manager, Content Marketing – Hybrid (Boston, MA)

  Location: Boston, MA / USA

  Nasuni is recruiting a senior level content marketing manager with experience in AI, big data and cloud infrastructure to lead editorial & creative operations. → Apply Now

• Hiya

  Position: Senior Product Marketing Manager, SMB Audience + Digital Growth

  Location: Seattle, WA / USA (Hybrid)

  Hiya is looking for a product marketing leader to manage go-to-market strategy and growth with a strong digital/AI-driven orientation. → Apply Now

Looking to fill an open role on your marketing team? Averi can help!

We have access to the best marketers in the world at our fingertips.

Fill out the form below and we’ll work with you to find great candidates for your roles.

Did You Know? —  Teams that publish one high-quality, POV-driven piece per week generate 3.5× more inbound leads than teams posting random content daily — not because of volume, but because consistency compounds authority.

In content, cadence beats chaos.

Til next time,

DFTA

If this hits home, we’d love it if you shared it. Send it to a friend, a teammate, or that one person who’s always drowning in a Google Doc.

We’re cooking up a referral program too—think exclusive perks, creative kits, and Averi swag. Stay tuned.