9×90 Episode 18

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About this episode

In this exclusive 9×90™ episode, Adi Soozin and Brian Swichkow bring together their unmatched expertise in growth hacking, storytelling, and next-level innovation. Brian, hailed as one of the world’s most accomplished growth hackers, shares his extraordinary journey, from breaking digital barriers with Fortune 1000 campaigns to pioneering AI-driven ad strategies that redefine engagement.

Adi opens up about the pivotal role Brian played in shaping her career, crediting him for inspiring her to achieve record-breaking marketing feats and creating transformative software solutions. Their dynamic chemistry leads listeners through captivating rabbit holes—from Reddit ad exploits that led to life-changing moments to revolutionary zero-day growth hacks that left tech giants in awe.

Discover the art and science behind creating unconventional pathways to exponential growth, learn how Brian’s latest venture, Mythos, is rewriting the rules of digital advertising, and get a glimpse of how AI is reshaping how brands connect with audiences. Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or tech enthusiast, this episode is your ticket to the cutting edge of marketing innovation.

The Transcript

Adi Soozin: Hello everyone! Today’s episode is going to be very unique because Brian is one of the few people who can take my ADHD from zero to 100 in just four seconds flat. We will do our best to stay on script and discuss what we’ve planned for this episode, but I’m letting you know upfront—Brian is the kind of person who will lead us down 1,500 rabbit trails, probably in the next 30 minutes. I hope you enjoy the ride!

Before we dive into all that, let me tell you a little bit about Brian. Usually, you don’t get to hear much about who I hang out with, who my friends are, or who influences my worldview. But today, I’m having one of those people on the show.

Several years ago, I left California and moved to Florida. I absolutely hated it. In California, growth hackers were normal. I was loved, my work was easy, and my community understood what I did. In Florida, people were like, “What’s a growth hacker? You don’t belong here.” I had an existential crisis and decided I was going to quit being a growth hacker and switch to a different field.

Then I got a call from my randomly, suddenly adopted Jewish older brother, who told me, “No, you’re not quitting growth hacking. You’re going to do this.” He gave me a 45-minute pep talk and outlined what my career should look like over the next several years. He is one of the most accomplished growth hackers in the world, and he took the time out of his day to inspire and guide me.

Fast forward to today: I’ve broken multiple marketing records worldwide, been hired to write a marketing book, and developed marketing software. You can thank him for all of that because, without his pep talk, none of this would exist.

But he didn’t just save my career. He’s also next-level brilliant. Growth hacking has this concept called a zero-day growth exploit. It’s the crème de la crème for us marketing tech nerds—it’s both exciting and terrifying. It’s also the kind of thing that keeps legal departments at multi-billion-dollar tech companies up at night.

Brian is the guy who finds these incredible growth hacks. For example, he once discovered a way to hijack Facebook’s ad system using a loophole in their programming, allowing him to troll people in the most creative ways. If you’re not in the growth hacking world, that might sound like a foreign language. To put it simply: Brian is a genius at finding unconventional ways to deliver amazing organic reach.

He recently built software that can increase your return on ad spend by 3 to 4 times. Before that, he created an AI system that programmatically optimized ad copy for Fortune 1000 companies. That same system rewrote ad campaigns for four Super Bowl commercials in a single week. So, when you think I’m smart, Brian is like 15 levels beyond me.

He’s absolutely insane. I have a handful of people in my life like this where you’d think, “No one can be that smart.” Well, here they are. Brian is one of them. So, tell us—now you have a new company. What is it?

Brian Swichkow: Technically, it’s the same company…new entity, but still under Mythos. Previously, we were a growth agency, but we’ve shifted into building software to help with growth.

Adi Soozin: And you have a fully stacked team—your team is epic. I know who’s on it, but you have to tell everyone because investors will be drooling over this.

Brian Swichkow: It’s been a really fun journey. To give you a quick rundown, one of my advisors—whom I met through a friend—has an interesting backstory. A good friend of mine, who I originally met when I promoted my dating profile on Reddit, became a connection through Reddit’s internal agency. They called me and said, “Hey, as of today, you’re no longer allowed to do that—but also, hi!” That person eventually officiated my wedding.Through him, I met Nomadori, who built Reddit’s business development team, managed their M&A, and later did the same for Quora. He became an advisor of mine for about a year, and then he casually suggested, “I keep getting job offers I don’t want to take. How would you feel if I came on as co-founder?” I played it cool and said, “Yeah, that’d be great.” And that’s how we got started building our MVP.

We had another advisor that our advisory board brought on—Neil. He’s been a senior lead engineer for Tapjoy. He was also the second engineer to start building Reddit’s ad platform, then went to Google, then to Facebook, and then back to Google before eventually joining us as our CTO. I joke that if you become an advisor for our company, you’ll end up as an employee soon.

It’s been surreal because I’ve always thought of myself as just a nerd hanging out in the back room of someone’s property, doing internet stuff. Now, real adults actually want to work with us, which has been awesome.

Adi Soozin: Yeah, that’s crazy. How old is your company now?

Brian Swichkow: This legal entity is two years old, but the agency that preceded it has been going for about 10 years.

Adi Soozin: You kind of touched on the agency earlier, but wait—okay, ADHD moment! Can you tell people the story of when you hacked Reddit’s ad system to meet your wife? I feel like that needs to be shared so people can understand how next-level your growth-hacking brain is.

Brian Swichkow: Sure. For me, a lot of the things I’ve done that people think are brilliant just feel like a series of logical conclusions. This particular event happened in 2018.

At the time, I had a client with a mobile app, and I’d been doing a lot of bug reports using a new iOS feature: the ability to screen record. One evening, after finishing work, I was at my kitchen table, alone, having smoked a joint, swiping through a dating app. I got to the screen that said, “You’ve used up your free likes. Now you have to pay.”

A few things collided in that moment. Just two days earlier, I’d hung out with my friend Ali Spagnola, who’s this incredible, multifaceted person who teaches people how to live more outrageously. During our conversation, I asked her, “How do you define art?” She said, “Art is art if you say it’s art.”

So now, two days later, I run out of likes on the dating app, and I think, “I’m not going to pay for this. I’m an artist.” That thought inspired me to scroll through my profile and record a video of it. My next idea was, “This is a video I can use as an ad.”

Between my kitchen table and my computer, I texted Ali: “If I advertise my dating profile with a Reddit ad, that’s art, right?” She replied, “Absolutely.” So, I jumped onto my computer and created the ad. The ad copy was: “Recently single, currently stoned, promoting my dating profile with Reddit ads. Makes sense. Comments unlock.”

It essentially hacked Reddit’s system because no one had ever used creative content on the platform in that way before. There was no reasonable, trackable point of conversion for the ad—it was purely about promoting the content.

Adi Soozin: Wow.

Brian Swichkow: What I learned was that my cost-per-click (CPC) was stupidly low because people weren’t clicking on the ad—they were watching the video and commenting. Fast forward to now, the software we’ve built is essentially an evolution of that.

We created a system that enables brands to deploy multi-agent AI workflows in the comments under any ad. It can respond to comments in a way that mimics how a salesperson would adapt to a customer’s needs in real life. For example, if someone comments, “I don’t want a minivan; I want a sports car,” the AI can engage them conversationally and guide them toward a solution.

The system also has the ability to engage playfully with trolls or work toward a specific objective, whether it’s conversion or something else. The logical progression from 2018 to now is this: “How can we get free clicks by driving engagement in the comments? Let’s do that.”

Adi Soozin: I love that it can engage with people who are being trollish.

Adi Soozin: As a high-IQ person, do you feel like there are so few people in the world who’ll sit down and actually engage in fun mental games with you? It’s rare, right?

Brian Swichkow: Yeah.

There’s a meme I love, and I sent it to my wife. It says, “Me, being ADHD, starting an argument for the dopamine, but not realizing the other person is ADHD.” The image shows two people hitting a ball back and forth endlessly. That pretty much sums up my wife’s and my relationship.

Adi Soozin: Yeah, I know a few people where it’s not really an argument. We’ll have this fun little diatribe of sarcastic comments going back and forth rapidly. But there are so few people who can do that, so I love that you’ve created AI to engage with us in that way. That’s awesome. My God.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah.

Before the 2018 ad with my dating profile, I had created something called Brianbot. Funny enough, the first phone number I gave my wife when we met was actually Brianbot’s number.

Brianbot managed an event I hosted every two weeks. It started as a mixer but eventually turned into what we called a “three-hour Burning Man” happening biweekly. Brianbot handled everything for the event.

Adi Soozin: Yeah?

Brian Swichkow: If someone texted, “Hey, I can’t find parking,” Brianbot would help them. People would often come up to me during the event and say, “I was texting with you earlier,” and I’d respond, “Cool. Was I helpful?” They’d say, “Yeah.” And I’d go, “Great! I mean, it was me… kind of.”

Brianbot was essentially an extension of me. It made people realize how personable AI can be when designed with a specific focus.

In the context of Reddit ads and advertising today, most ads are just push messaging—blasting the same message across multiple channels with no engagement. We started theorizing that we’re moving from an attention economy to an engagement economy, where you build systems that actually interact with the old methods and provide meaningful engagement. Whether it’s being personable to boost brand perception or persuasive to drive conversions, engagement is the key.

The dating profile ad in 2018 led me to build a system for email automation. It could programmatically send thousands of customized emails, complete with personalized responses.

Adi Soozin: That’s pure brilliance.

Adi Soozin: Seriously, how much content do we create to make people feel like they have a relationship with us? And now you’ve built a system that deepens that feeling of connection by actively conversing with them. That’s wild. It’s rare someone gets me to say “Wow,” but here we are.

Brian Swichkow: The system could even handle responses. When Gnome came on as a co-founder, literally on his first day, he said, “Hey, I know you’ve been focusing on email, but we should use this for that other thing you’ve been talking about—dropping bots into the comments of ads.”

At the time, I thought it was risky. I knew it was a great growth hack, but I figured the legal teams at these platforms would shut us down. It felt like a zero-day exploit—something you use sparingly because the more people who use it, the quicker it gets shut down.

Brian Swichkow: There was even an agency that built its entire brand on zero-day exploits. They got so big, with over 100,000 growth hacker followers, that every time they shared an exploit, it was patched the next day.

Adi Soozin: Wow.

Brian Swichkow: I kept the comment bot idea in my back pocket because I didn’t think it would work at scale. But Gnome disagreed. I told him to go talk to people and see what they thought.

Three days later, he came back and said, “I spoke to the head of BD at [insert major social platform], and they lost their minds. They think this is the next generation of ad units and want to talk.”

That’s how it’s been ever since. It’s been hard to keep up, but the concept resonated because it boosts platform usage, increases session time, and…

Adi Soozin: …increases ad buys for advertisers, which is their ultimate goal.

Brian Swichkow: Exactly. If you can increase value for advertisers, you increase the dollars spent on advertising.

Adi Soozin: For those unfamiliar with zero-day growth exploits, they’re essentially marketing tactics that hyper-nerdy marketers like Brian and me discover on platforms. When we implement them, a company can see exponential growth—like 1,000x overnight.

People ask, “What are you doing?” and you’re like, “I can’t tell you because if I do, the platform will shut it down.” I used to do a lot of them on Instagram, which is why I now have five locked accounts. Every time they caught on to a zero-day exploit I was using…

Brian Swichkow: Yep. I’m going to say something that I don’t think I’ve said to you before, and…

Adi Soozin: They lock the account. Okay.

Brian Swichkow: …and because of Google’s video recording, I’m going to shut up so that it switches over to your reaction to what I’m about to say. Did you know that you could, for example, take the advertising policies published by each individual platform or their terms of service, throw them into ChatGPT, and then ask it questions about how to work around those rules?

Adi Soozin: No. My God. My God, that is amazing.

Brian Swichkow: So, the core premise of this is very simple, and…

Adi Soozin: So you have ChatGPT coming up with zero-day growth exploits for you? My God. Wait, hold on.

Brian Swichkow: One of my favorite books of all time is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. The title of the book explains two different types of games.

Adi Soozin: This right now! Finite and infinite. Yes. Yep.

Brian Swichkow: There are finite games, which are played for the purpose of winning, and there are infinite games, which are played for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are very much rule-based.

Brian Swichkow: And the thing about finite games is that when you create a rule, inherently, you need to make exceptions to that rule. Because as soon as you make a rule, people can find a way around it, and then you inherently have to make more rules. Governments and financial systems are finite games. Advertising policies are finite games.

Brian Swichkow: So, if you look at the legal documentation provided by any platform as the rules of their finite game and then start asking questions about what rules don’t exist yet—that’s where your zero-day exploits are.

Adi Soozin: And that’s why three different legal policies have been made about you specifically at two of the largest social media platforms on the planet.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. The one that I really like is the Facebook one.

Brian Swichkow: Not only was there a bullet point made because of me on Facebook, but they lied about creating it. They lied about knowing I was doing what I was doing.

Brian Swichkow: They lied about how many people were still using it, and then they lied about fixing it. Someone actually wrote an article about this—I’ll have to go dig it up. The article showed this pattern of behavior over six years where Facebook had been lying about people exploiting this loophole. But yeah, it’s difficult to fix some of these things. Inherently, until enough people are using them loudly or in a way that undermines those platforms’ revenue in a substantial way, why free up the engineering resources?

Adi Soozin: Okay, yeah.

Adi Soozin: There were eight different social media platforms where I was invited in as an early-stage user. I knew it was bots engaging with my accounts, and I was fine with that because it made my social media look so much more important because it would get 20,000 likes, and it was all bots liking the accounts. But it was the platform’s bots liking them.

Brian Swichkow: Yep. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: So, then I would post there more often. People would ask, “Where are you posting?” I’d say, “I’m only posting to this channel.” Then people would flood into that channel. So yeah, I’m sorry if you’re not in the marketing nerd world—we just really deep dive. It makes sense why they don’t patch certain zero-day growth exploits.

Brian Swichkow: Companies are people too. At the end of the day, if you’re a small startup working with a multi-billion-dollar company, the bigger they get, the more decisions are made by committees and teams. There are some things they move fast on, but inherently, it’s difficult to move quickly on certain things, especially from an engineering capacity.

I’ve seen large platforms try to take down software companies publishing tools that enable zero-day exploits. More often than not, they take them down legally, not technically.

Adi Soozin: Yeah. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: I’ve seen that. So, how long did it take to grow this current business into what it is today with this whole programmatically optimized ads?

Brian Swichkow: I don’t even know how to answer that. Legal formation was about two years ago. Gnome knows everybody in the business. So Gnome made some calls. We were struggling to scale. We thought, “All right, cool. Let’s get 100 users. That’ll be $500k ARR. We’ll do a pre-seed, then our seed, and go from there.”

Brian Swichkow: Very quickly, because of the people Gnome was talking to, they said, “Hey, we have 2,000 customers that get a billion visitors per month collectively, and we want to deploy in this additional surface area.” We quickly realized we needed to: (A) raise more money, (B) scale faster, and (C) build a system capable of handling 10,000 companies making AI workflows instead of 1,000 people. It’s been challenging, but mainly because everything is just coming to us, and we can’t keep up—which is great but also frustrating.

Adi Soozin: You hit product-market fit. That’s the thing about growth hacking. People are like, “Can you grow us by 10%?” Here’s the thing: we focus on organic marketing which means we look for where the water is, and then the monsoon just comes. There’s no turning it off. It’s just…

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. It’s the tip of the iceberg, knowing where to put the “X,” if you’re familiar with that metaphor. It’s a lot of testing before you find the thing that’s obvious in hindsight.

Adi Soozin: Got it. With my software company, I was saying, “It’s a marketing recommendation engine,” and people’s eyes would glaze over. Then I switched it to, “How junior marketers think they know it all and are total liabilities?” They’d say, “Yeah, absolutely.”

Adi Soozin: And I’d say, “Imagine putting them in front of a platform where they say six things about the business, pick a marketing goal, and it tells them exactly what to do. Then it gives them a guide with real-world examples on how to do it. Suddenly, your junior marketer is performing like a mid-level marketer with four years of experience.” They’d be like, “What? My God!” Immediately it clicked. But when I tried explaining it as a recommendation engine, their eyes glazed over.

Brian Swichkow: You follow that logic down in every capacity.

Brian Swichkow: We had this trend where we were closing sales six minutes into calls. Weirdly, it was always six minutes. By the end, they’d say, “Can you send us a contract?” Cool. Then we’d either chat for a few more minutes because we knew them or just end the call and send the contract.

Brian Swichkow: But then we’d notice three months later they’d want to convert at a different platform. We ran paid pilots on Reddit, and everybody wanted to shift into Facebook. They’d say, “If you can make this work on Facebook, we have a much bigger budget.”

Adi Soozin: My gosh.

Brian Swichkow: Facebook’s ad system is different. It wasn’t just the ad system—it was also the API approval. We had to get approved on Facebook’s API, which we did. It’s more about relationships and business politics than engineering sometimes, but that’s how some businesses work.

Adi Soozin: The higher up you get in the business world, it’s all relationships. It’s wild.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. Yep.

Adi Soozin: I remember when I was younger, I’d sit for 12 hours at the computer implementing all these things. Now it’s like, “No, I have four key relationship meetings today.” That’s it.

Brian Swichkow: Earlier this week, an investor friend introduced me to another investor friend. This guy had started and exited two companies, was an early engineer at Facebook, and was super accomplished. I was grateful to get time with him. We were just chatting about problems we’re facing, meeting with the intention to connect again later.

Brian Swichkow: As we were leaving, I heard my name called. I turned and saw someone I knew but didn’t recognize right away because we were in a completely different context. It was the head of Porsche Ventures. He introduced me to his buddy, who heads another major venture fund.

Brian Swichkow: So, I introduced them to the guy I had just met, saying, “He’s exited two companies, was a staff engineer, blah blah blah.” They nerded out. I said, “He’s the head of Porsche Ventures, and he’s the head of this.” And the guy goes, “I drive a Porsche.” They hardcore nerded out about Porsches for a hot minute.

Brian Swichkow: I just thought, “Wow, that’s all I need to do—just set these two on a date, and I’ll follow up later.”

Brian Swichkow: And now I’m stuck between these two. It was wild to think I could be a bridge just because of relationships.

Adi Soozin: You knew what to do with the moment. Not many people can. It’s about leveraging what’s in front of you to create maximum value for everyone involved. That’s how I always think about it.

Brian Swichkow: I mean, I’m in a private members’ car club with the head of Porsche Ventures. I’ve been in that car club for three years. It’s like my go-to workspace when I’m out of the house. There are people I go on motorcycle rides with. It’s a chill group of people who all share a common passion for cars.

Adi Soozin: Yeah. Heat.

Brian Swichkow: I show up on a motorcycle; other people show up in quarter-million-dollar cars. And despite that, it’s a relatively chill group. It was funny because, at one point, we pitched Porsche Ventures. We didn’t fit their thesis, but we had a meeting with them and went out to lunch. Gnome and I hadn’t prepped for this, but Gnome kept saying, “Porsh Ventures.” Every time he said that, I’d immediately follow with, “Porsche Ventures.”

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: I couldn’t get him to stop saying “Porsh.” It’s Porsche! And I was like, “They’re never going to invest if you keep saying it wrong.” It’s just the kind of thing you laugh at later. But it’s also about relationship building. If people want to hang out with you, they’ll make a call for you. A lot of the relationships I’ve built started six or seven years ago with the idea that maybe one day I’d call and ask for a favor. When I eventually do, six or eight years later, they’re like, “Absolutely.”

Adi Soozin: Yeah. You called me the other day, and you were like, “I’ve done this thing with affiliate marketing.” And I said, “I’ll hook you up with the top-tier affiliate account we have.” Other people are begging for that, and I’m like, “Who are you?”

Brian Swichkow: Yep. Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: I always laugh when people ask me for LinkedIn introductions. It’s like, “Hi, nice to talk to you. I haven’t spoken to you in five years, and now you want me to introduce you to one of the most prominent investors I know?” Does that work for you?

Adi Soozin: No. No.

Adi Soozin: I’ve had people approach me, and you know how my family has been investing in real estate for five generations. Some people, new to the U.S. or the real estate market, are like, “I want to invest with you.” And I’m like, “I’ve known you for five minutes. I’ll have to know you for one to three years before I let you near anything I’m touching.”

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. Investments are relationships. Whether you’re taking money from venture capitalists or investing in something else, you’re communicating with these people constantly. Especially if it’s an LLC—that’s a partnership, which is a whole different ballgame relationally. Even with a C-Corp, if it’s a SAFE note and they don’t have voting shares, it’s still a relationship. They can either support you or make your life difficult.

Brian Swichkow: If you take $10,000 from multiple people, and that’s a lot of money to them, you’re going to get a lot of phone calls. That’s a distraction. It’s a lot to manage, so don’t do it unless you’re prepared. Understand the relationships you’re buying into, whether they’re with clients, investors, or others.

Adi Soozin: That’s one thing that’s easier in commercial real estate compared to startups. In startups, early investment ticket sizes are smaller, so you often get high-maintenance investors. In commercial real estate, we can set a minimum buy-in at $100,000 or a quarter-million. Even then, some people come in thinking they’ll own you or cut others out of the deal. I showed the deck to one person, and he said, “I want to get rid of half the team.”

Adi Soozin: I asked, “Who’s going to do their jobs?” He said, “You are.” I said, “I don’t know how to do their jobs—that’s why they’re on the team.” So, no.

Brian Swichkow: We’re giving people new ways to engage.

Adi Soozin: I’m not getting rid of people we need. I don’t have all these accreditations. I’m not a finance person.

Adi Soozin: Anyway, for people thinking about working with you at the most basic level, especially non-marketers, what does your company do for them?

Brian Swichkow: A lot of advertising is failing. It’s more expensive and less effective. We’re creating a system that integrates with existing systems. We’re not building a new social platform with better ads or directing people to a better landing page. Instead, we’re creating something that interfaces with what’s already working.

Brian Swichkow: For example, if you create an ad campaign and give us the URLs, we can deploy AI agents into the comments of those ads. One fun thing—this is salacious—is if you bid CPC (cost per click) on any campaign, platforms like Reddit and Facebook let you add clickable links in the comments. If someone clicks on those links, it’s not part of your ad unit. You don’t get billed.

Adi Soozin: Oh my God.

Brian Swichkow: I found that loophole while promoting my dating profile on Reddit Ads. It wasn’t through ChatGPT. When I realized I was getting 10-cent CPC, even Reddit’s internal team was surprised. To date, that’s the lowest CPC I’ve ever seen.

Brian Swichkow: We recently ran a campaign with AI and got a 24-cent CPC, which is still ridiculously low. The higher the engagement in the comments, the cheaper the CPC and the higher the CTR (click-through rate).

Adi Soozin: Just to clarify: CTR is click-through rate—how many people saw the ad and clicked to the landing page. CPC is cost per click—how much you pay per click. ROAS (return on ad spend) is your ROI on the money spent on ads.

Brian Swichkow: Exactly.

Adi Soozin: Advertising constantly changes, but you always find the next loophole. That’s what growth hacking is. It’s not just using tactics; it’s obsessively looking for the next opportunity. Even if someone invests today and Reddit’s algorithm changes tomorrow, your company will keep adapting because you’ve spent decades finding and leveraging loopholes for your clients.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: Growth hacking is a way of thinking. It’s about asking, “What do I have that others don’t? What are they not seeing?” It’s about finding 10x opportunities while running consistent campaigns.

Brian Swichkow: I have a lot of ideas that never make it to execution. I keep them on sticky notes on the wall behind me.

Adi Soozin: Can you pan your camera for a second? The audience doesn’t know what you’re referring to, but I do. That’s his external brain. He had to repaint the wall to make it work in his new house.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah, yeah. The other place—I think it’s a third the size of the old wall—but the old wall had something like 2,000 stickies when we moved.

Brian Swichkow: I’ve slowly been kind of reorienting. But yeah, I mean, all of these are ordered based on: How much of this is a revenue opportunity? How much of this is difficult? Cool, let’s do it later. Rice scoring is something I use a lot. You measure everything based on impact, confidence, and effort. It’s a really easy way to prioritize—massive effort versus massive impact.

Adi Soozin: Yeah, yeah.

Brian Swichkow: It’s like, Okay, let’s do this when we have the time, or If it’s a small effort but provides a good bump, do it now. So, it’s a lot of ideation and evaluation. The ability to look at something critically, even when you’re personally invested, is key. Like, I think this would be really cool, but we shouldn’t do this right now.

Brian Swichkow: And that thought process—I think the more at-bats you get, the better you get at it. I don’t think there’s any kind of “natural growth hacker.” A lot of the people I see who are really solid thinkers—kind of more on the “why” side of growth hacking—don’t always understand business dynamics. They don’t understand team structure. So, a lot of times, they won’t understand how to pitch, or they’ll do something that creates legal repercussions.

Brian Swichkow: I’ve only had one cease-and-desist…

Adi Soozin: We all did when we were younger.

Adi Soozin: We all had one early in our growth-hacking careers.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. I saw an opportunity—someone pissed me off because they refused to pay a commission they’d promised. I implied something that resulted in a cease-and-desist because I wanted one. I framed it intentionally. But that’s actually the only legal action ever taken against me.

Adi Soozin: No, you had Facebook and…

Adi Soozin: Another organization that we won’t name.

Brian Swichkow: Reddit made rules because of me too! But I didn’t break any rules. I told them where rules should exist.

Adi Soozin: You created the need for the rules. Okay, yeah.

Brian Swichkow: You can’t get legal recourse for breaking something that didn’t exist. If I did it after that, they could ban my account. Reasonably speaking, they just disapproved my ads. But that’s the thing—you retry, reformat, and retry.

Adi Soozin: How many customers do you currently have? You said somewhere around 2,000 or something?

Brian Swichkow: No, we’ve only been doing paid pilots. We’re in the process of raising, building our team, and rebuilding our system so we can handle more than what our current paid pilot system allows.

Brian Swichkow: We have a lot of people at the gates, just pounding our doors down to scale, and that’s what we’re trying to meet.

Adi Soozin: Okay. So, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you if they want to become a client or an investor? And are you accepting more investors?

Brian Swichkow: Yes, yes, and yes—to all three questions.

Brian Swichkow: Consulting, growth hacking… B-R-I-A-N at B-B-O-T.

Adi Soozin: We don’t want to put your email out.

Adi Soozin: We don’t want to share it on 36 platforms.

Brian Swichkow: I mean…

Adi Soozin: You’ll get so many trolls. Okay.

Brian Swichkow: “At brian.bot” implies there’s an AI managing my emails. I’m fine with that. That was the whole premise. Like, why should human me answer the same question all the time?

Brian Swichkow: My wife has been reacting—she’s at the end of her entertainment capacity—because I may or may not have enabled ChatGPT to manage my iMessages. That’s another story.

Brian Swichkow:

Adi Soozin: I gave five assistants access to my iMessage. So many friends got upset because they thought they were talking to me, but they were talking to an employee. I did that with all my messaging. A lot of people were upset.

Brian Swichkow: I think people get more upset when they realize. More often than not, when I respond to an email, people are like, “That’s the bot talking.” And I’m like, “No, the prior email that you thought was the human—that was the bot.”

Brian Swichkow: I use a lot of linguistic tools to be more efficient when I’m communicating. For example, I use “Let’s make space to sync up.” It’s deliberately vague—very safe language. I don’t want to imply urgency, assume what we’ll do, or convey any agenda. It’s very much, When you’re ready, let’s make space for this.

Adi Soozin: Yeah, whi—

Brian Swichkow: Those linguistic tools are effective, but they pale compared to an AI agent that takes its time with great nuance to show it understands you. If I’m responding to 20 messages quickly, I’ll be efficient. AI takes its sweet time with every single one.

Adi Soozin: How did you set up ChatGPT to… what just happened?

Brian Swichkow: My chair broke. I have different sitting apparatuses that move me around. I sit on a ball half the day.

Brian Swichkow: To answer your question: Apple Shortcuts. I’ll tell you more later.

Adi Soozin: Of course, you’d do it that way. My shortcuts are advanced compared to my peers who aren’t tech-savvy, but if you touched my computer for 10 minutes, it’d warp into the 31st century with automations!

Brian Swichkow: The same growth-hacker mentality doesn’t turn off at home. We have HomeKit throughout the house. I set up commands like Tell the house we need to call the cleaner. It redirects the request, translates it (our cleaner only speaks Spanish, and my Spanish is poor), and sends it.

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: That modality of thinking just doesn’t turn off. I automate personal stuff for fun—it’s good cognitive practice. Recently, I used Apple Shortcuts to automate personal texts, then realized, What if I incorporated ChatGPT?

Brian Swichkow: Here’s the thing: after the last election, there are divided opinions and difficult conversations at Thanksgiving tables. How can we support that? The issue with Apple Shortcuts and ChatGPT is the inability to pass large amounts of context.

Brian Swichkow: Our system manages context better. By the end of the day, we’ll deploy an API via Apple Shortcuts. For example, if I get a message from someone I believe is in a cult, I could use clinically validated case studies to train the response.

Brian Swichkow: The API drafts a reply, throws it into my iMessage drafts, and asks, Do you want to send this? Initially, I was just messing around. Then I realized: ChatGPT is good, but I want to respond with books of context.

Adi Soozin: My God. All right, the best way to contact you is via the AI email.

Brian Swichkow: Yep. Bbots is the website. Brian.bot is the associated email.

Adi Soozin: What’s the minimum investment size?

Brian Swichkow: We’re open to most amounts right now. We’re looking for a lead investor, but we haven’t found anyone we’re happy to jump on with yet.

Adi Soozin: The lead investor is like someone you’re married to.

Brian Swichkow: Mhm, yeah.

Adi Soozin: In commercial real estate, you’ll oversell the round.

Brian Swichkow: That’s true. We have a lot of follow-on commitments—people saying, “I’m totally in, but I want to put in less money as a follow-on.” So essentially, we have the entire round filled from the back.

Brian Swichkow: But all of those are contingent on a strong, notable lead. Yeah, yep.

Adi Soozin: So you’ll do it by 200% because half the people are going to be slow, and if they’re slow, you’re like, “Sorry, closed. Next time, be faster.”

Brian Swichkow: Yeah, yeah. We’ve done that. Honestly, the election kind of messed things up for us. We didn’t really foresee how much the market was going to just be in this kind of, like, “Let’s wait and see.”

Adi Soozin: My God.

Brian Swichkow: Everyone just wanted to wait and see. Simplistically, they didn’t know what rules they’d be playing by for the next four years. We got a lot of pushback from people wanting to talk to us after the election. Now that the election has happened…

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: The investment markets are definitely starting to unlock, but we’re telling our story in this new economy.

Adi Soozin: We had the same thing. A lot of people were like, “I want to wait until the election happens to see before I cut a check.”

Brian Swichkow: Mhm, yeah.

Adi Soozin: And then, as soon as we got the results, people started messaging, “Hey, okay, send this over. Let me see this.”

Brian Swichkow: Yep.

Adi Soozin: They want to know what they’re going to be working with. They like to assess risk and prepare themselves. I mean, that’s why they’re investors.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah.

Adi Soozin: They know the best way to grow their money based on external factors.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah, everybody has their own thesis.

Adi Soozin: Anyway, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, everyone, for—

Brian Swichkow: Thank you, Adi. Thanks for having me.

Adi Soozin: Are you kidding? Of course. My God, I feel like this was fun.

Brian Swichkow: Yeah. I have the questions right next to your face. I tried to keep them in context and not purposefully distract you, which I was doing right before.

Adi Soozin: My God. No. Okay. You guys didn’t get to see it that much—

Brian Swichkow:

Adi Soozin: But Brian does this thing where we play infinite games. We could jump on a call with one goal, but both of us love playing the infinite game so much that we keep pulling each other further down random rabbit holes of side conversations for no reason—just because it’s an infinite game.

Brian Swichkow: It’s how our brains work.

Adi Soozin: Yes, yes.

Brian Swichkow: My wife does this thing that I’ve been using a lot.

Adi Soozin: What is that?

Brian Swichkow: We call it a consensual non sequitur, where she’ll just radically change the conversation without saying, “Hey, can I change the topic?”

Adi Soozin: Okay.

Brian Swichkow: Our ADD functions differently, and it’s comical. I have a really fun time connecting with people in business and outside of business who are somewhere on the spectrum and authentically like, “This is me, this is my brain, this is how it works.” Even when someone’s brain works similarly but in a different dimension, you learn so much, connect so much, and do so much.

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: We work with a lot of large companies, and often the person isn’t really there—the bureaucracy is. You have to empathize with the person and understand how they feel about their own bureaucracy. I always try to give people points of human connection to make their day a little less bland.

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Brian Swichkow: Everybody’s on their journey.

Adi Soozin: That’s to say the least.

Brian Swichkow: Thank you so much again.

Adi Soozin: Take care, everyone. Bye.

This transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.

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