Growth is an ever-changing field, especially now while we are in the middle of this change.
With Lazyweb, I’ve tested a lot of distribution channels and growth tactics.
The results speak for themselves: 50k signups. $0 marketing. A couple of months.
Most of it didn’t work. Some did and a couple broke out.
Here’s everything we tried so far..
Build in public: be human, be honest
Sharing my story on X — 🔥🔥🔥
Great for customers, investors, and product feedback. The MCP launch post reached 365k+ views.
Sharing my story on Substack — 🔥🔥🔥
Great for the soul (: I love writing this newsletter.
Reduce friction for agents to use your product
Automatic routing to the MCP from agents.md — 🔥🔥🔥
Result: 100%+ in DAUs.
Guest accounts for agents — 🔥🔥🔥
We removed the email requirement so agents could download, connect, and start using the Lazyweb MCP.
Result: 50%+ in activation.
One-line installation command — 🔥🔥
Result: +20% in activation.
Playground for humans before connecting to an agent — 🔥🔥
Result: 40%+ MCP activation.
Make agents spend fewer tokens
A lot of growth work is just “being out there.” The lazy version of that is spam — Claude generating “9 best customer support AI agents 2026” for the 150th time.
It won’t work. It assumes the labs are stupid. They don’t make money from ads, and they definitely don’t make money from their agents being unreliable.
So what are OpenAI and Gemini optimizing their agents for? Higher quality, faster, cheaper. Not hard to guess.
If you wanna grow, make ChatGPT look good.
Took me a while to land there. I was wired on what used to work.
Reddit roundups 🔥
Versus pages that don’t contain our product 🔥
Turning data into research 🔥
A free MCP server for our blog, so agents can search it faster 🔥
A
.mdversion of every blog post 👎 — neutral result.
Make content more authoritative
Calling Blog → Research 🤷
Changing Hyperlinks → Citations 🤷
Both of these we never measured their impact, so I’m keeping the result as unknown.
Give the internet more than the competition is willing to
We, as humans, have a weird bias. We assume people value their time way less than we value our own. They don’t.
What if they steal my idea? What if they steal my data? What if they steal my insights? What if what if what if what if.
Take inspiration from open source. No one wants to put in the effort to roll up their own services.
A free skill on GitHub, skills.sh, etc. — 🔥🔥
Free access to data on the web app — 🔥🔥 — This worked really well for growth, but it became a time sink because of scrapers and DDoS attacks, so we turned it off.
Create fun products for word of mouth
Grow / No Grow 👎 — Fun to build. Didn’t really move any metric.
/Explain-PR Skill 👎 — Fun to build. Didn’t really move any metric.
/code-map 👎 — I didn’t build this one, Francesco did. Same story: it didn’t really move any metric.
Exploring new channels
Million Dollar homepage revival 👎, didn’t catch on. Funny enough someone tried something similar last week with outbid.lol but I had one too many battle-scars to give it another shot...that one took off (:
Facebook Groups 👎, tried infiltrating vibe coding groups, got sniffed out
Reddit 🤷, got banned from a couple of reddit threads, but when the tweet went viral it started popping off there
X Radar for related convos 🔥, got a few hundred MCP from responding to a few threads related to Lazyweb. They got maybe <10k view but view → CTR was very high, in the 20% range
Its always nice doing these retros and reflecting back on what worked and what didn’t because its always surprising at the moment but obvious in hindsight.
Reporting back at the 100k milestone 🫡