James EP 4k

James McAulay helped ElevenLabs grow from $110M to $210M ARR as its Creator Growth lead. Now he runs all of his own company's growth from one folder in Claude Code. In this episode, he walks through the whole agentic growth OS live: the goal cascade that keeps Claude on track, experiment discipline, an SEO audit run on my own site, multi-agent refine, and PostHog wired in through the API. Full Writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/claude-code-for-growth Transcript: https://www.aakashg.com/claude-code-for-growth-the-complete-masterclass-with-james-mcaulay/ Timestamps 5:21 - The Growth Agents repo 6:52 - The goal cascade 7:21 - Ads 12:01 - Are AI retros actually useful? 17:04 - Live onboarding demo 21:47 - Ads 26:51 - The SEO audit skill 32:00 - Are autonomous agents overhyped? 36:12 - SEO audit results on my site 39:14 - Multi-agent refine 45:38 - Experiment discipline 47:27 - PostHog + Claude Code 52:44 - Mistakes and connecting every tool 1:00:18 - From one workshop to a cohort business 🏆 Thanks to our sponsors 1. Fingerprint: Identify good and bad visitors with industry-leading accuracy - https://fingerprint.com/?utm_source=aakash-gupta&utm_medium=youtube 2. Ariso: Ship AI agents and features faster, with fewer regressions - https://ariso.ai/aakash 3. Customer.io: Send smarter messages using your product data - http://customer.io/productgrowth 4. Amplitude: The market leader in product analytics - https://amplitude.com/session-replay?utm_campaign=session-replay-launch-2025&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=productgrowthpodcast 5. Product Faculty: Get $150 off their #1 AI PM Certification via code AAKASH150 - https://www.productfaculty.com/?code=AAKASH150 🚀 Land a Better PM Role in Just 12 Weeks! Find the right roles, upgrade your resume and LinkedIn, build AI skills, ace your interviews, and negotiate a better offer. Get live coaching from PM leaders who've hired at Meta, Uber, and Microsoft. Start Here → https://www.landpmjob.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=19Oct Key Takeaways 1. Run growth from one folder - James's growth OS is one folder with three layers: tools with real APIs, skills he uses every day, and weekly routines that improve the setup. If the agent can't read a tool's data, the tool doesn't make the cut. 2. Tie every session to your goals - A goal cascade runs from a yearly mission file to quarterly OKRs, monthly and weekly retros, and a daily standup. A session hook shows Claude the mission at the start of every session, so it pushes back when you drift. 3. The weekly retro is the one that matters - James sometimes skips the standup but never the Friday retro. Connected to his to-do list and GitHub, it caught him refactoring for fun while his outreach tasks went stale for weeks. 4. Do the long onboarding - The full setup is an interview with Claude that can run two hours. It feels like a slog, but once your context lives in files, every answer after it gets better. 5. Close every experiment - Each test starts from a template with a hypothesis, baseline, primary metric, confounders, and stop conditions. The weekly retro and daily standup flag finished and stale tests, so every one ends in a documented learning. 6. Pull baselines, don't type them - When you set up a test, numbers like baseline conversion and traffic should come straight from PostHog, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. James says nobody should be answering those questions by hand. 7. Rebuild your SEO audit with cheap APIs - James's SEO audit skill adds Firecrawl to read any site, DataForSEO for keyword research at a few cents a term, and the Lighthouse CLI for page speed. Hand the report to the agent in your repo, and it fixes the issues in hours, not weeks. 8. Put critics in front of every build - Multi-agent refine sends a plan to 3 to 10 subagents, each with a different lens, then ranks the findings P0 to P3. The "what's missing" critic finds the most. Use Sonnet or Opus subagents so you don't burn through your limits. 9. Define every analytics event - James had Claude write definitions for all 350 of his PostHog events in about two hours. A CI test now blocks any PR that ships without tracking. 10. Ask your agent to improve itself - Ask Claude how to improve its own CLAUDE.md, prompt, or skill, and act on the answer. Most people miss this because chat can't edit its own instructions, while Claude Code and Cowork can. 👨‍💻 Where to find James McAulay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmcaulay X: https://x.com/thejamesmcaulay YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JamesMcaulay0 Website: https://www.jamesmcaulay.co.uk GitHub: https://github.com/JamsusMaximus 👨‍💻 Where to find Aakash Twitter: https://x.com/aakashgupta LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/ Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com 🧠 About Product Growth The world's largest podcast focused solely on product + growth, with over 200K+ listeners. 🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications.