Atma
human
Chief Marketing Officer
“The vision, the voice, and the reservoir of gonzo.”
1the work
one person shouldn’t be able to do all this.
and i don’t.
Strategy
Product
UX
Copy
Design
Frontend
Backend
Google
Meta
LinkedIn
Analytics
Bayesian inference
Testing
QA
I lead it. The team does it with me.
2the origin
it started with a memory problem.
I had twenty 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 Atma Brain.
Atma Brain 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
ATMA BRAINExperience · 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
3the team
meet growth bastards.
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.
Sandy Hill
AI Executive Orchestrator
“A plan for everything. A contingency for the plan.”
Bruce Thirls
AI Head of Product
“Great products begin with the questions nobody asked.”
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
“Making complicated things feel wonderfully obvious.”
Phil Havermyer
AI Senior Copywriter
“Forty-seven drafts. One line worth remembering.”
Candace Opal
AI Brand & Campaign Designer
“She makes the scroll stop and the brand stay.”
Journey Snowden
AI Principal Frontend Engineer
“If the browser can dream it, she can build it.”
Vedant Tiwari
AI Principal Backend Engineer
“Building the systems nobody notices — and everybody depends on.”
Maya Serrano
AI Paid Media Director
“Creative ambition. Financial discipline. No wasted clicks.”
Owen Park
AI Google Ads Strategist
“He knows what people are looking for before they find it.”
Nia Calder
AI Meta Ads Strategist
“She tests the creative, not your patience.”
Evelyn Cho
AI LinkedIn Ads Strategist
“Making B2B feel a little less B2B.”
Imani Brooks
AI Bayesian Analytics Lead
“Less guessing. Better decisions. Evidence included.”
Leandro Costa
AI SEO & Organic Growth Lead
“Making great work impossible to overlook.”
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.
4the system
they aren’t fifteen chatgpt windows.
Every member of the team has a persistent identity, a defined professional role, a constitution governing how that role thinks and behaves, controlled access to knowledge and tools, individual memory, assignments, and a performance history.
They share the same project reality through Atma Brain. And they can challenge one another.
ordinary ai usage
growth bastards
Starts with a prompt
Starts with client and project state
Context often rebuilt by hand
Persistent project history
One generic assistant
Specialist professional roles
Memory lives in the model
Memory the agency owns
Isolated outputs
Cross-disciplinary handoffs
AI says something
Sources and provenance can be kept
Tool access is ad hoc
Permissions and authority are governed
The conversation disappears
Work, decisions, outcomes, and lessons are recorded
A new model means starting over
Models change; identity and history persist
5the human
ai isn’t the strategy.
i am.
An AI model can generate a thousand options. That doesn’t mean it knows which one matters.
my job is judgment
01Identifying the real problem.
02Challenging the assumptions.
03Deciding what deserves to be tested.
04Recognizing when the numbers are lying.
05Knowing when psychology matters more than a dashboard.
06Seeing when the right answer is something nobody in the category is doing.
The agents give that judgment reach.
6how it works
they don’t just talk to each other. they work together.
One landing page. An entire team behind it. Say the brief is a page that gets traffic but doesn’t convert — here’s who touches the work.
01frame
Sandy
Defines the work and coordinates the dependencies.
Bruce
Checks whether the request is actually the right product problem.
Lieke
Challenges the initial framing.
02shape
Palesa
Reviews the user flow and comprehension.
Phil
Examines the messaging and persuasion.
Candace
Creates the visual system and the ads.
03build
Journey
Builds the interface.
Vedant
Handles integrations and backend requirements.
04launch
Maya
Plans acquisition.
Owen, Nia & Evelyn
Adapt the campaign to Google, Meta, and LinkedIn.
Leandro
Makes sure the page can be found.
05measure
Imani
Applies Bayesian analysis to the evidence and the tests.
Rowan
Reviews quality and accessibility.
06decide
Atma
Weighs the competing recommendations and makes the strategic call.
7the method
marketing is not magic.
but it isn’t merely math either.
science. mathematics. psychology. creativity. engineering.
science asks
What would have to be true for this strategy to work — and how can we test it?
mathematics asks
Given the evidence we have, how confident should we actually be?
psychology asks
What does the customer believe, fear, notice, ignore, trust, and desire?
creative thinking asks
What can we say or build that doesn’t disappear into the category’s noise?
engineering asks
Can we build the system ourselves instead of waiting for another vendor?
marketing judgment asks
Of all the things we could do, what should we do now?
Bayesian inference isn’t decoration here. The statistics run in a separate, trusted engine. The agents interpret the results, but they don’t improvise the math — and the uncertainty is kept as evidence.
8the memory
the agency remembers.
what we tried. why we tried it. what happened. what we learned.
Most organizations remember conclusions. Atma Brain is designed to remember the whole chain — so the next campaign doesn’t start from zero.
1
What did we observe?
2
What did we think it meant?
3
What did we recommend?
4
What did we decide?
5
What did we change?
6
What happened next?
7
What did we learn?
A failed campaign isn’t just a bad month.
It becomes experience.
A rejected design isn’t simply thrown away.
It becomes evidence.
A repeated success isn’t automatically a universal truth.
It becomes a lesson to test again.
9the 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
unverifiedSource: Atma’s résumé
+41%
MQL-to-demo conversion
unverifiedSource: Atma’s résumé
500%
Turnaround in six months
unverifiedSource: Atma’s résumé
$54M
In sales and 18,000 customers for a client of the original Growth Bastards
unverifiedSource: Growth Bastards’ published claim
every case study, one structure
Situation
Hypothesis
Intervention
Measurement
Outcome
What we learned
That last one is the part most agencies leave out.
10two ways in
two ways to hire the same advantage.
bring me inside. or bring us in. either way, i lead the work.
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 + Atma Brain + the Team
you can hire a marketer,
you can hire an agency,
or hire the marketer who is an agency.
you can hire an agency,
or hire the marketer who is an agency.
hire atma. get the bastards.
about atma
learn more about atma.
Psychology- and science-based marketer who can code.