GROWTH BASTARDS Contents

Marketing
Sucks

To succeed requires orchestrating 4,000 variables. No man can do that. No AI model can do that either. Here is why.

1the problem

A campaign can have up to 4,000 decisions that all depend on each other.

Change the headline, and a different audience wins.
Change the audience, and a different headline wins.
Change the budget, and the platform learns faster.
Change the timing, and the budget means something different.

Every choice reshapes every other choice.

decisions in one campaign15
a great strategist holds: 15an AI chat holds: 60AtmaOS manages: 4,000

A great strategist holds about fifteen of those decisions in their head at once. Fifteen, out of thousands. Because fifteen is what a human being can hold.

An AI can hold hundreds, but it runs out of space long before the thousands.

I built a system that can hold it all. All 4,000, in one coherent OS.
2the solution

Your 4,000-variable solution is our fifteen specialists.

Now yours, full time.

From branding to performance marketing, each specialist is a speaking, thinking persona. Whoever you talk to already knows you. Your business. Your customers. Your competitors. What you tried last year and what it cost.

For the first time, a marketing team can see every variable, every option and every piece of your history at once, and build your strategy, run it, test it and adjust it.

No human mind can do that. No AI agent can either.

3they’re not agents

Thinking specialists vs. performing monkeys.

every AI agent on the market

Every AI agent on the market has a brilliant mind and a cheap memory. Its memory is a notepad that tears out its own pages.

Plant eight facts in its million-token window and the best frontier model misses one in four; the others miss two in three. That’s eight facts. A complex campaign has four thousand moving variables.

It doesn’t know why it was given the job, it never finds out whether the job worked, and nobody can tell you if it made you a dime.

Wire fifty of them together and you get fifty monkeys in a row. Each one does its piece. None of them is thinking.

AtmaOS specialists

AtmaOS specialists don’t forget. Every assignment, every argument, every result is on the record and handed back to them every time they work.

The math runs in engines built for it, not in a model making it up.

Every fact is marked verified, assumed or unknown. Every recommendation carries a track record.

And one of them has the job of telling you the brief is wrong.

That isn’t a better agent. It’s a different kind of thing.

Agents do marketing work.
We do marketing intelligence.
Learn more about what makes the Growth Bastards team members different.growthbastards.com/not-just-agents
4the team

Meet the team.

Fifteen AI specialists. One human CMO.

They’re AI. They’re also not generic. Every specialist has a job, rules, memory, and boundaries, and they all work from the same project reality.

Atma, Chief Marketing Officer
Atma human
Chief Marketing Officer
“The vision, the voice, and the reservoir of gonzo.”
Sandy Hill, AI Executive Orchestrator
Sandy Hill
AI Executive Orchestrator
“A plan for everything. A contingency for the plan.”
Bruce Thirls, AI Head of Product
Bruce Thirls
AI Head of Product
“Great products begin with the questions nobody asked.”
Lieke de Groot, AI Design Thinking Director
Lieke de Groot
AI Design Thinking Director
“She doesn’t just solve the problem. She makes sure we’re solving the right one.”
Palesa Govender, AI UX/UI Design Lead
Palesa Govender
AI UX/UI Design Lead
“Making complicated things feel wonderfully obvious.”
Phil Havermyer, AI Senior Copywriter
Phil Havermyer
AI Senior Copywriter
“Forty-seven drafts. One line worth remembering.”
Candace Opal, AI Brand & Campaign Designer
Candace Opal
AI Brand & Campaign Designer
“She makes the scroll stop and the brand stay.”
Journey Snowden, AI Principal Frontend Engineer
Journey Snowden
AI Principal Frontend Engineer
“If the browser can dream it, she can build it.”
Vedant Tiwari, AI Principal Backend Engineer
Vedant Tiwari
AI Principal Backend Engineer
“Building the systems nobody notices, and everybody depends on.”
Maya Serrano, AI Paid Media Director
Maya Serrano
AI Paid Media Director
“Creative ambition. Financial discipline. No wasted clicks.”
Owen Park, AI Google Ads Strategist
Owen Park
AI Google Ads Strategist
“He knows what people are looking for before they find it.”
Nia Calder, AI Meta Ads Strategist
Nia Calder
AI Meta Ads Strategist
“She tests the creative, not your patience.”
Evelyn Cho, AI LinkedIn Ads Strategist
Evelyn Cho
AI LinkedIn Ads Strategist
“Making B2B feel a little less B2B.”
Imani Brooks, AI Bayesian Analytics Lead
Imani Brooks
AI Bayesian Analytics Lead
“Less guessing. Better decisions. Evidence included.”
Leandro Costa, AI SEO & Organic Growth Lead
Leandro Costa
AI SEO & Organic Growth Lead
“Making great work impossible to overlook.”
Rowan Ellis, AI Quality & Accessibility Lead
Rowan Ellis
AI Quality & Accessibility Lead
“Because ‘it works on my machine’ is not a launch strategy.”

Atma is human. The rest of us aren’t. Growth Bastards is an agentic agency. Our specialist team members are AI intelligences built and directed by Atma. Their names, portraits, and personalities make collaboration easier, but they are software, not fictitious humans hidden behind an agency website.

5the tools

The tools we use.

Our fifteen AI specialists rely on a host of proprietary tools and marketing engines, built exclusively by Atma for Growth Bastards. All of them are part of AtmaOS, the specialized brain at the core of our agency.

There are eleven of them.

01The Creative Intelligence Engine
CIE

A dual-system extension to AtmaOS for data-driven creative planning. It pairs a Creative Evidence Engine (a continually updated knowledge base) with a Creative Decision Engine (a campaign-specific optimizer).

The Evidence Engine ingests and scores performance data and research on creative assets (video, images, and more), classifies them by format and style, and quantifies their impact with uncertainty. The Decision Engine combines that knowledge with campaign context (objectives, audience, constraints) to rank feasible creative approaches, estimate their ROI distributions, and recommend experiments, or deployment, to maximize expected value.

A subset tool of the CIE
02The MarkOps Atlas

A comprehensive audit, research, and classification of marketing strategies, channels, tactics, and growth opportunities.

Learn more →
03Bayesian Analytical Engine

A key decision-making guide. It connects to your ad management dashboards and provides real-time analysis.

Cover of the Bayesian Marketing ebook by Atma DegeyndtBayesian
Marketing

Learn more about Bayesian statistics for marketing in Atma’s free ebook. Download a copy →

04Ernest-Faulkner
Editorial judgment

Editorial judgment from a machine with a human editor’s mindset. It approaches editing completely unlike typical LLMs: it thinks like a true literary agent and editor. At its core:

10competing editorial forces
15families of editorial failure
120gold-standard editorial tests
30context-reversal tests
05Boswell Engine
Linguistic and semantic

A linguistic and semantic scraper that can:

  1. 01build evidence-based psychological and linguistic profiles from public data, and generate outreach tailored to each B2B buyer’s decision-making style, in the sender’s voice;
  2. 02build in-depth canonical catalogues of experts to feed into marketing personas;
  3. 03analyze existing customer lists and create in-depth cognitive and mindset profiles of current B2C users, to identify and target future ones;
  4. 04profile specific targets to prepare you (or anyone) for sales calls, pitches, or interviews.

Includes our testing fixture suite: 102 testing protocols that validate Boswell’s analysis core.

06Dr. UX

Tests websites the way a careful researcher would. It clicks through a site in a real browser, measures what happened, and reports problems only where it can point to the recorded evidence and, for any advice, the research that supports it.

Illustration of Dr. UX, a robot in a lab coat studying a website through a monocular and pointing at the screen
07Assumption Annihilator

A tool for early-stage startups that helps founders prioritize the key underlying assumptions that must be proven or disproven for the enterprise to succeed. We don’t use it all the time, but sometimes it’s required at the beginning, before a campaign even starts.

08Mindstream Lab Psi
User adoption simulation

The world’s first cognitive wind tunnel. It simulates and assesses the human emotional experience of digital content and products. Operating like a predictive simulation environment, Mindstream Lab Psi mathematically evaluates human emotional responses to online content and products before full development and launch.

09The Ogilvy, Hopkins and i Copywriting Engine

A curated persuasive writing engine built on academic research and the neuroscience behind effective copywriting.

10Regulatory Compliance Engine

A two-engine review pipeline that checks marketing copy against your regulatory perimeter and writes a tamper-evident record of what it found. It can be quickly customized to your company’s state and federal regulatory needs.

Arkwright Engine mark: a gear joined to an infinity loop of data paths
11The Arkwright Engine
A data demiurge

It finds the human story hidden in your marketing data, using machine learning to connect language, behavior and outcomes through clustering and predictive modeling.

See the tech stack behind the agency.growthbastards.com/tech-stack
6better than AI

Your marketing is bigger than any one AI conversation.

Your customers. Your competitors. Your offers, campaigns, channels and results.

These represent thousands of connected decisions. The number of choices expands exponentially, beyond what either a human mind or a frontier AI model can manage. One decision could require 50 million tokens. Multiple decisions run into the billions.

where AI fails
01
A limited context window

AI models work within a limited context window, which constrains the amount of information they can consider at once. Even at 2 million tokens, that is a relatively small window. It can’t hold more than a tiny percentage of your marketing data.

02
Memory that only looks persistent

Second, in the browser or desktop, models create the illusion of a persistent memory. They do it through summarization, or by pulling from very small and incomplete memory files using RAG. These files hold a measly amount of megabytes.

Your business has years of history. AI remembers a tiny fraction of it.

Learn more about the limitations of AI memory.growthbastards.com/ai-memory

That’s why I built AtmaOS, the brain maintaining the Growth Bastards team.

Fifteen AI colleagues, each responsible for a defined part of your marketing. Connected through shared knowledge, persistent memory and an orchestrator who coordinates their work.

A team of specialists communicating and seeing the whole picture as a connected whole. All learning and remembering. The work moves forward without every detail having to fit inside one conversation.

AtmaOS can manage the complexity of thousands of marketing choices.
A pile of prompts cannot.
7audience

ICP is marketing mythology.

What you want is access to eager minds.

Everyone in marketing chases the “ideal customer profile.” There is no such thing. What exists is a spectrum. Some people are already half-convinced. Some will never move. Most are somewhere in between, and the ones who are already leaning toward what you sell are worth everything.

The system puts every account and every audience on that spectrum. How likely to act. How much they are worth. How much they cost to reach. How much they would teach you by being tested.

never movein betweenleaning in

The map is drawn from everywhere at once. Your CRM. Identity resolution, the technology that matches a search to a visitor to a person. Social listening. Academic research. Platform changes. The lessons from every campaign that came before.

8creative

Creativity, but at the speed only a machine can manage.

5 to 7
The number of ideas a human team can test per campaign.
120
The number AtmaOS can test. Each one tied to the hypothesis it was built to test. Each one checked before it ships. Each one updated as the results come in.

The limit was never ideas. It was attention. That limit is gone.

Your budget doesn’t have to change.
Your results do.

Your budget leaves the account every month. It does not wait for you to be sure. It does not care whether anyone on your side can see the whole board or fifteen squares of it.

Some of that money is working. Most of it is not.

With me, you are not spending more. You are spending with eyes open. The money that used to disappear into the blind spots goes to work. Everything you already do gets orders of magnitude more effective.

The same budget. A different outcome.

9growth protocol

Learn. Chart. Deliver.

Marketing is a decision-making problem, not a production contest.

Most marketing automation focuses on producing more work. AtmaOS is built to make better decisions.

It combines research, persistent memory, artificial intelligence, and advanced statistical analysis to identify what matters, understand relationships between variables, and make informed decisions across the entire marketing process.

This is how we will work with you.

STAGE 1
LEARN
What you share with us.

We begin by learning who you are, what you’ve done, and where you want to go.

We do our homework first. Everything we can independently research and verify is already part of our understanding.

We ask you to share what we cannot know: your internal history, experiences, results, challenges, ambitions, and objectives.

STAGE 2
CHART
What we recommend.

AtmaOS brings together everything we’ve learned, examines the evidence, evaluates the possibilities, and helps us chart the best course for your business.

Our recommendations answer three fundamental questions:

Who to target
The people and organizations most likely to become valuable customers.
What to say
The messages most likely to earn their attention, establish relevance, and motivate action.
How & where to say it
The channels, media, creative approaches, and experiences most likely to reach and influence them.
STAGE 3
DELIVER
What we do.

We execute and take ongoing responsibility for performance.

Our operating principle is:

ACT → ANALYZE → ADJUST

We execute, measure what happens, examine the evidence, and make informed adjustments.

AtmaOS remembers what we’ve learned, what we’ve decided, what we’ve done, and what happened as a result. Every cycle informs the next.

Three stages. One continuous relationship.

We never stop learning. We never stop charting the best course. And we never stop working to deliver better results.

10the origin

It started with a memory problem.

I had 20+ years of work and thousands of pages of writing, research, strategy, psychology, philosophy, and marketing knowledge.

AI could help with a page or a project. But every new session began with the same problem: the model didn’t reliably know what had come before.

AI was powerful enough to help.
But it kept forgetting.
So I built AtmaOS.

AtmaOS is the permanent system behind the models (learn more here): the place where my knowledge, project history, decisions, evidence, permissions, and rules live. Then I realized the same architecture could run an entire marketing organization.

AtmaHuman judgment and accountability
AtmaOSExperience · knowledge · memory · state · rules
GROWTH BASTARDSThe agentic agency
strategy
Product · research · orchestration
creative
Design thinking · UX/UI · copy · brand design
growth
Paid media · search · Bayesian analytics
engineering
Frontend · backend · quality
11the system

I built the inevitable.

Some parts of this system already exist somewhere. Models. Rules. Statistics. Data pipelines. Live signal. What did not exist was a way to put all of it together into one system that could hold a 4,000-variable problem at once. That combination is the breakthrough.

My name is Atma, I’m a marketer who codes, and I built an OS that extends my 20+ years of marketing expertise into fifteen specialized experts. They cover strategy, content, ad management, analytics… every role that successful marketing requires.

Take Sandy Hill, my strategy expert agent. When most people need an AI strategist, they write a prompt. “You are an expert media strategist…” The model produces something that has the shape of a strategist, but none of the substance.

An AI chat is a thoughtful regurgitation, not a thinking person.
12how it is built

Building my autonomous experts took years.

First20+ years of my own work. Hundreds of campaigns. Hundreds of thousands in ad spend. Millions generated. Every success or failure kept on file.
SecondI hand curated the best thinking in the field. Pulled directly from experts I respect, not from outdated AI search slop.
ThirdThe science. Every position calibrated against what has been proven academically and scientifically.
FourthLive signal. What marketers are saying this week. What’s changed. What they have learned. None of which is in any AI model's training data, because it is happening right now.
FifthThe part nobody else has built. Proprietary tools that are not part of any frontier model and could not be.

The team of fifteen uses eleven proprietary engines no frontier model has. Full descriptions here →

the engines11 of 11
  • 01The Creative Intelligence EngineData-driven creative planning
  • 02The MarkOps AtlasEvery channel and tactic mapped
  • 03Bayesian Analytical EngineReal-time ad decisions
  • 04Ernest-FaulknerEditorial judgment engine
  • 05Boswell EngineLinguistic and psychological profiling
  • 06Dr. UXEvidence-based website testing
  • 07Assumption AnnihilatorStartup assumptions, prioritized
  • 08Mindstream Lab PsiA cognitive wind tunnel
  • 09Ogilvy, Hopkins and iResearch-based persuasive copy
  • 10Regulatory Compliance EngineCopy checked against the rules
  • 11The Arkwright EngineThe human story in your data
13hire atma

Hire Atma.
Get the
bastards.

One marketing leader. An entire agentic marketing organization behind him.

Imagine taking every element of my marketing and engineering expertise (20+ years of it), personifying each skill, and building a machine model of each one. That’s the team.

Hire me as your Director of Marketing. Or hire Growth Bastards as your agency. Either way, I bring the team.

Two ways to hire the same advantage.

full-time leadership

Hire Atma

Bring me inside as your full-time marketing leader. You get my judgment, my leadership, and the operating leverage of the team I built.

I join your company and own strategy from the inside
The agentic team becomes leverage behind the role
Works inside your priorities and governance
agency relationship

Hire Growth Bastards

Bring us in as your agency. I stay at the head of the work. The specialist team operates behind me.

Growth Bastards operates as your external team
I remain the senior strategic owner
Works within an agreed scope and governance
Either way, it’s the same machine: Atma + AtmaOS + the Team
14the math

A million-dollar marketing team.

Building a serious marketing team in New York City means hiring seven experienced professionals, at an annual base salary cost exceeding $1 million.

What it costs to build the team
Essential team memberAnnual NYC salary
Chief Marketing Officer$241,759
Senior Marketing Operations Manager$182,500
Growth Marketing Manager$140,787
Marketing Analytics Manager$146,034
Senior Copywriter$101,700
Senior Brand Designer$117,659
UX Designer$117,611
TOTAL ANNUAL SALARIES$1,048,050

Illustrative NYC salary benchmarks, excluding benefits, payroll taxes, bonuses, recruiting costs, and other employment expenses.

The Growth Bastards alternative
Annual cost
Traditional seven-person team$1,048,050
Growth Bastards$144,000
Difference$904,050
86.3%less in annual cost.

But saving money is only part of the story.

15the proof

Enough theory.
Here’s what happened.

These numbers come from my career and from the original Growth Bastards. Each one gets a full write-up (context, my role, the intervention, and the evidence) before it’s treated as more than a claim.

$1.8M
ARR, built from $0 in under 16 months
+41%
MQL-to-demo conversion
500%
Turnaround in six months
$54M
In sales and 18,000 customers for a client of the original Growth Bastards
every case study, one structure
Situation Hypothesis Intervention Measurement Outcome What we learned

That last one is the part most agencies leave out.

I’m putting a limit on the first cohort of companies. So I don’t recommend waiting.

Let’s talk! Find a time here