Claude Code for Growth: Complete Masterclass with James McAulay

James McAulay (0:00)

AI has just completely unlocked what growth people can do. We no longer need to wait for engineers to build growth experiments. You can simply ship to production with permission from your engineers yourself. We're seeing these full-stack growth hires achieve incredible amounts as a single person in a startup. I guess you could call this, like, yeah, an agentic growth operating system. You could use this if you were a full-stack growth person, first growth hire. If you're going to be doing work inside of Claude, I think this operating system will help you get better growth results. It's my take on how to work with Claude as a growth person.

Aakash Gupta (0:33)

Meet James McAulay, who helped ElevenLabs double from 100 million to 200 million ARR in nine months and helped AI startups like Jack and Jill and Wonder Studios with their growth.

James McAulay (0:43)

When I was at ElevenLabs in 2025, we were definitely ahead of the curve with AI. But actually, our launch processes were mostly custom GPTs. That's because skills hadn't been formalized across the AI ecosystem.

Aakash Gupta (0:54)

How the hell did you scale up this business to 100K revenue in just four months?

James McAulay (0:58)

So my first startup was a marketplace. It actually took us six years to reach 100,000 pounds of monthly revenue. My current business hit that goal in 95 days. I haven't hired a single full-time employee.

Aakash Gupta (1:10)

So you've taught over 400 people now. What do most people get wrong as they're learning this stuff?

Before we get into today's show, please take a second to check that you're subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. If you want access to all of my favorite AI tools, I've gotten them to give you an entire year of their paid plans. Check out bundle.akashg.com for an entire year of bolt.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise, and Mobin. Now, into today's show.

We've been talking a lot about how you use Claude Code for product work. But what about all the important growth work? SEO, ads, product marketing, these are really important skills. If you are on a growth team, you might have been wondering, how do I apply everything in this channel? If you are a PM at a startup who has to handle growth work, you might have been wondering, how do I apply this to my growth work? Today, I've brought in an expert, somebody who's not only grown his own business to $100,000 monthly revenue, but he has helped grow other companies. James, welcome to the show.

James McAulay (2:24)

Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

Aakash Gupta (2:26)

How do people know what they're going to see right now actually works?

James McAulay (2:31)

Yeah. In a nutshell, I ran my own company as CEO for 10 years, and I was responsible for growth there as the CEO is. Then after we were required, joined ElevenLabs and spent a year at ElevenLabs. For me, that was a master class in growth, one of the fastest growing AI companies in history.

I learned a hell of a lot while I was there. After I left, I spent a month going deep on Claude Code. I did some growth consulting for a few other AI companies, and now I'm running my own business teaching people how to use AI agents to grow faster. I think my track record checks out, and I think I've seen enough companies, and I've seen a company like ElevenLabs from the inside to hopefully know what I'm talking about.

Aakash Gupta (3:15)

What are we going to learn today?

James McAulay (3:16)

I'm going to show you the system I use to run my business. Twelve months ago, I was still using Claude Chat, like a lot of people. But today, I run everything inside the terminal. And I'm going to walk you through the system that I'm using. I'm going to show you some skills. I'm going to show you some tools that I use, some growth experiment discipline for anyone to kind of approach growth in a rigorous way.

And also the system I use for making sure that I'm actually working towards what really matters. I think with AI, it's possible to get distracted. It's possible to go down rabbit holes, build anything. But I've sort of deliberately engineered this whole harness so that I'm constantly kept on track. And Claude, or any agent that drops in here, is sort of laser focused on the growth goals. So I've been using Claude Code for this. And if you go into the link at the bottom of this video, there's going to be like a way to download this. It will be a GitHub repo.