(2025-11-11) Ecosystem Is The Next Big Growth Channel
Ecosystem is the next big growth channel. Lenny Rachitsky says: Emily Kramer has identified a pattern in how top AI (and non-AI) startups are able to break through the noise and grow unlike at any other time in history. Once you see it, you immediately rethink your growth strategy. I did! After reading the first draft of this post, I got a whole new level of understanding for why my product pass has been such a success (fun fact: it doubled my growth, and is the most win-win-win idea I’ve ever concocted.
the B2B channels you’ve long relied on for growth are increasingly becoming less effective,
- Inbound: Search traffic is declining due to LLMs
- Outbound: With AI SDRs and easier access to contact data, everyone’s inboxes are overflowing.
- Product virality: We’re overwhelmed with new products
- Events: ...mixed quality has led to event fatigue
- Lifecycle emails: With inboxes saturated with cold outbound, even lifecycle emails focused on driving engagement and retention get tuned out.
how do you get your great product noticed?
The answer is ecosystem. Instead of going directly to your prospects, go through intermediaries who already have access and trust with your audience.
individual tactics within an ecosystem strategy: influencer and creator relationships, channel partnerships, developer relations, communities, product integrations, and customer marketing. But the growth unlock doesn’t come from any one of these activities on their own.
Instead, a flywheel emerges when you properly implement this overarching strategy: your ecosystem partners create and distribute content, you amplify and repurpose their efforts, together you drive greater reach and credibility
Ecosystem is a force multiplier and differentiator
The Postgres development platform and database became the default backend for vibe-coding products like Lovable. As these companies grew, so did Supabase.
In addition to these “integration” partners, Supabase’s open source community shared docs, tutorials, and videos, further driving growth and building credibility.
Supabase shows how to turn organic pull (GitHub stars, YC adoption, vibe-coding buzz) from developers into structured funnels, lifecycle paths, and monetization.”
Clay
Clay grows through close partnerships with “GTM engineer” power users—consultants, agencies, and in-house operators. These Clay creators make videos and tutorials that drive adoption and awareness.
Lovable helps builders quickly create apps that are naturally shareable—a classic driver of viral growth
But Lovable accelerates this virality through community-driven initiatives like hackathons and their Discord, which just surpassed 100,000 members.
Lovable’s investment in building a brand alongside their creators has catapulted them above the rest.
The goal is no longer to produce everything in-house but to empower creators to generate content about you, and then repurpose it across paid and organic.”
Gamma built an ecosystem of micro-influencers across TikTok, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn to show off presentations built with Gamma’s AI design tool.
Vercel’s huge developer community builds on Next.js (which Vercel leads work on), and those projects naturally scale into Vercel enterprise deals.
ElevenLabs turned users into contributors through its Voice Library. Voice actors upload voices and earn money when they’re used, which attracts more creators. (marketplace)
You’ll see ecosystem flywheels behind nearly every fast-growing AI startup, from Baseten’s strategic partnerships with cloud providers, to Midjourney embedding its product in Discord from day one, to Anthropic building MCP to make it easier for developers to connect tools
Why ecosystem works
I initially became obsessed with the power of ecosystems firsthand at Carta in 2018, where lawyers as channel partners drove massive growth, and at Astro in 2017, where building for the Slack.com platform led to Slack acquiring Astro, in its largest acquisition at the time
1. Your ecosystem makes every channel more effective
Ecosystem partners fuel inbound, add value and credibility to your outbound messages, accelerate product virality, make events more enticing, and ground lifecycle marketing in real use cases.
Example: HubSpot partnered with a bunch of marketing influencers to promote their new framework, “Loop Marketing,” when they announced it at their Inbound conference this year. This combination spurred lots of discussion, driving a bunch of organic Linkedin posts too. All of these efforts came together to make it feel like the Loop Marketing framework was everywhere that week
2. Your ecosystem knows how to speak to your audience (maybe better than you do)
AI has made it easy to pump out content, making it harder than ever for people to know who and what to trust. This means they are turning to voices they already value and respect (like Substack writers!).
You see this especially on LinkedIn, where individual people (employees, customers, or partners) perform much better than brands—eight times better from employees vs. brands, according to LinkedIn.
3. GTM teams are smaller now and need leverage
Your ecosystem is an accelerant for a lean team, like bringing on a contracted team of expert marketers
4. You have a ton of options within an ecosystem strategy
Ecosystems aren’t limited to products you integrate with or creators with big LinkedIn followings. And if one ecosystem partner starts showing diminishing returns, you aren’t out of luck. There’s a broad network of individuals and companies that can reach your audience.
How to implement an ecosystem strategy
Growth strategies are never one-size-fits-all, but most B2B startups today can grow faster with a well-designed ecosystem strategy.
The question isn’t if you should build an ecosystem strategy, it’s who your best partners are, how to activate them specifically, and how to reshape your team and process to prioritize that work.
1. Recognize that an ecosystem is not a side project
2. Map your ecosystem
3. Make the partnership worth it: look for win-win-wins
they must be a “win-win-win” for you, the partner, and the prospect, never one or two out of three.
Also, when choosing partners, remember that it’s not just about their audience size. Audience overlap matters too.
4. Start narrow, then expand
5. Remember: an ecosystem strategy only works when you’re leveraging multiple channels
think about using it to breathe new life into channels you’re already using.
Inbound: Use a community to get people excited to talk about your product. They may continue that conversation on other platforms, like Reddit, and that content has a higher chance of surfacing in an LLM than your own. Lenny had Ethan Smith, the CEO of Graphite, on his podcast talking about the Reddit LLM strategy.
Outbound: Boost a sponsored influencer post on LinkedIn as a Thought Leader Ad from your company, use engagement with the post as a “signal,” then connect and follow up in a DM.
Product virality: Drive product adoption by offering an educational course, then make sure students show off what they learn. AirOps does this with their three-week AI marketing course, and GC AI does this via Maven courses.
Events: Run programming in your trade-show booth with partners to get people to show up, without the gimmicks and throw-away-able swag.
Lifecycle: Instead of sharing generic use cases, highlight how top customers use the product through videos or educational events.
Don’t just build products, build ecosystems
The real differentiator now is how you stand out and build a moat in an AI-saturated world.
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