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    Stop Calling Ad Buying "Growth." It’s Just Marketing

    Dian Paskalis
    Growth & Performance
    Stop Calling Ad Buying "Growth." It’s Just Marketing

    When capital was cheap, burning vouchers looked like strategy. Now that it isn't, we're finding out who actually understood what growth means.

    A startup exec I know has been trying to hire a senior Growth person for months. She's smart, her product has real traction, and she knows exactly what she needs: someone who obsesses over processes, activation rates, treats the funnel as an engineering problem, and can sit between teams: product, data, marketing, operations, without needing a translator.

    Instead, she keeps getting applications from digital marketers.

    Not bad ones. Polished CVs. ROAS numbers. Meta certified. Experience scaling app installs from 10K to 500K monthly downloads. Exactly the kind of resume that would have cleared interviews at any Jakarta startup between 2019 and 2022.

    The problem isn't the candidates. It's that the ecosystem taught them this was growth.

    The Discounts Bought More Than Users

    Between 2018 and 2022, Southeast Asia's tech ecosystem ran on cheap capital. At the peak, startups in the region raised over $21 billion in a single year. Interest rates were near zero. Investor mandates were simple: grow the user base, worry about economics later.

    In Indonesia, that translated into a specific pattern. You got users by subsidizing their first transaction - a GoFood voucher, a discounted first ride, a cashback on a first transfer. You measured success in downloads and monthly active users. You called the team running this "Growth."

    It worked, as long as the money kept flowing.

    The problem is what happened to the definition of growth in the process. An entire generation of practitioners was trained on a playbook that was less about creating a sustainable user base and more about renting one. The performance marketer became the default model for what a "growth hire" looked like. CAC became the north-star metric. ROAS became the language of success.

    The data tells the rest of the story. The average mobile app loses 71% of its users within 90 days. For apps that acquired users primarily through discount-driven campaigns - where the incentive was the deal, not the product - that churn curve is steeper. It's like filling a leaky bucket, over and over, at increasing cost.

    When the capital corrected, and it did, the bucket stopped getting filled. SEA startup funding fell 42% to a six-year low of $4.56 billion in 2024. The companies that had built real growth loops survived. The ones that had performance marketing but called "growth" did not.

    What "Growth" Actually Means

    The startup exec wasn't looking for someone to spend her ad budget more efficiently. She was looking for someone to answer a different question entirely.

    Not "How do we get more users?" but "Why are the users not converting, and how do we fix the product to change that?"

    This distinction is massive.

    A real Growth function owns the entire AARRR funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral. Performance marketing owns one slice of the first A. That's it. The rest, where most of the actual value is created or destroyed, is a product and data problem.

    On activation: A marketer sees a drop-off rate and asks for a better creative. A Growth Lead looks at session recordings and finds that 40% of users in Surabaya are abandoning the sign-up flow at the address field because they don't know their postal code. The fix isn't about creating new ad. It's an auto-complete feature tied to geolocation. One engineering sprint eliminates a conversion killer that no amount of ad spend could have solved.

    On distribution: Indonesia's infrastructure is fragmented. Payment methods differ across regions. Smartphone penetration, connectivity quality, and even UI familiarity vary dramatically between Jakarta and a Tier-3 city in East Kalimantan. A Growth Lead treats this fragmentation as a product challenge. If 30% of potential users in East Java can't complete a transaction because your payment gateway times out, spending more on East Java acquisition isn't the answer. The correct course of action should be: fix the plumbing, then turn on the tap.

    On customer insights: In most Indonesian startups, "customer insights" means feedback compiled by the CS team or a creative brief from an agency. A Growth Lead treats user behavior as raw data for experimentation - forming hypotheses, running tests, measuring with statistical rigor, and feeding findings back into the product roadmap. The question isn't "what do users say they want?" It's "where are they dropping off, and why?"

    The Org Chart Problem

    The confusion doesn't just come from bad hiring. It's built into the org chart. Most companies that say they have a "Growth team" have placed it under Marketing. The team reports to a CMO. Its KPIs are impressions, installs, and CAC. It has no say over the product backlog.

    This is not a growth function. It is still a marketing function, with a new name.

    Growth lives at the intersection of product, data, and distribution. If your growth lead can't file a ticket, can't query the data warehouse, and can't influence the roadmap - they're not doing growth. They're running campaigns.

    The cleanest signal: ask your "Growth Lead" what their first question would be on day one. If the answer is "What's the ad budget?" Hey, you've hired a marketer. If the answer is "Where's the data on our activation bottleneck?" Congrats, you've hired a growth person.

    What the Next Three Years Look Like

    The startups that come out of Indonesia's correction with defensible unit economics will have one thing in common: they built growth into the product rather than bolting marketing onto it.

    Referral loops that work because the product delivers enough value that users want to share it - not because there's a cash incentive to refer. Activation flows designed for a first-time smartphone user in Makassar, not a tech-savvy early adopter in Kemang. Retention driven by genuine habit formation, not re-engagement push notifications.

    The companies that don't make this shift will keep competing on ad spend. As capital continues to demand profitability over growth-at-all-costs, that's a losing position. You can't buy your way to sustainable unit economics. You can only build your way there.

    The discount era is over. The product-led growth era is what comes next. The only question is whether your definition of "growth" has caught up.

    Sources