Adomas Šulcas on Why Startups Fail at Communication — and How Philosophy Can Fix It

Guest: Adomas Šulcas, Cofounder and Chief Operating Officer at Growth Bite

Host: Dom Urniezius, Startup Sales Talks podcast

Startups spend endless hours tweaking landing pages, buying tools, launching experiments and rewriting their strategy every few weeks. Yet the thing that quietly decides whether they grow or stall is much simpler.

How clearly they communicate.

For Adomas Šulcas, cofounder of Growth Bite, this is not a marketing slogan. It is the result of years spent studying philosophy, writing professionally, and helping SaaS companies scale with SEO and content that actually works.

The unusual path that shaped a communicator

Most agency founders come from agency worlds. Adomas didn’t.

He worked in HR, then sales, then poker, then B2B tech. He studied philosophy the entire way. And somewhere between analyzing arguments and grinding online poker, he built the habits that today make Growth Bite a very different kind of marketing partner.

Philosophy gave him structure. Poker gave him pattern recognition. Tech gave him context. Combine them, and you get someone who thinks about communication like a system, not a task.

Why founders keep getting communication wrong

Spend enough time with early-stage teams and you start to see the same patterns repeat.

They chase channels instead of clarity

Startups read one LinkedIn post and decide they “need SEO”, or “need TikTok”, or “need a podcast”. The choice is rarely wrong — but the reasoning usually is.

Channels don’t save a startup with fuzzy messaging. They amplify what is already clear, or expose what is not.

They talk about their product instead of the problem

Founders love their product. That affection leaks into every headline, every ad, every email.

But users don’t buy “cool”. They buy relief. They buy solved pain. They buy progress.

The better a founder gets at naming the problem, the faster their growth curve starts behaving like a curve instead of a flat line.

They underestimate how long good communication takes

Everyone wants signal in week 2. Everyone gets frustrated in week 6. And everyone considers pivoting in week 10.

But clarity is built the way strength is built — steadily, with boring repetitions, over long enough timelines to actually work.

Adomas says it plainly: the average strategy executed consistently outperforms the perfect strategy you reset every 8 weeks.

Philosophy’s surprising advantage in business

Philosophy does not give you tactics. It gives you thinking tools.

Tool 1: Generating alternatives instead of fixating on one idea

Non-philosophers often stop at the first solution. Philosophers rarely stop at the fifth.

When you train your mind to produce alternatives, you naturally avoid false urgency and bad decisions. In marketing and GTM this means:

• You don’t assume SEO is the answer
• You don’t assume outbound is the answer
• You explore versions, run small tests, and choose with intention

It sounds simple. It saves companies years.

Tool 2: Arguing your ideas, not asserting them

The ability to explain not only what you think — but why — is a superpower inside any team.

Bring reasons. Bring tradeoffs. Bring context.

The moment you do that consistently, your communication moves from noise to signal.

The new rules of SEO founders actually need to know

Forget the noise. Here is the signal.

1. SEO is not dead

SEO still outperforms AI search by tens of multiples for most companies. What has decreased is mostly informational traffic that rarely converts anyway.

2. AI depends on search, not replaces it

Large models often fetch results from the web because storing everything inside is too expensive and fragile. This means search engines remain the backbone of the internet.

3. AI-first optimisation is real — but dangerous

Some hacks that influence G-E-O visibility (like aggressively repeating the query) will tank your Google rankings. Startups cannot afford that tradeoff.

4. Foundations still matter

Before chasing clever ideas, startups must nail the boring steps:

keyword mapping, intent validation, usable structure, load speed, internal linking, topical depth.

The unsexy parts are what drive the compounding.

When to use SEO vs. when to ignore it

Adomas uses one mental model founders should steal immediately.

The larger and more complex your buyer, the less SEO drives the sale.

Selling to consumers

SEO works. Paid search works. Social works.

Selling to SMB

SEO still strong, social depends on platform.

Selling to enterprise

SEO is support. Deals happen through outbound, events, partnerships.

Selling to 10 companies on the planet

You don’t need SEO. You need relationships and presence.

Without this lens, startups overspend on channels that cannot move their market.

How to create content that actually cuts through?

This is where Adomas’ perspective becomes ruthless.

1. Start with the boring content

Every company wants “original insights”. But most skip the basics their buyers search every day.

Write the obvious content first. Win the simple searches. Build your library.

2. Use AI as a helper, not a ghostwriter

AI is great for:

• Idea sparks
• Outline shaping
• Technical fact-checking
• Rewriting for clarity

AI is terrible for:

• Full-article generation
• Original thinking
• Brand voice
• Risk-free SEO

Copy-pasting AI into a blog is the fastest way to nuke an entire domain.

3. Respect platform culture

Reddit is not LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is not X.

X is not YouTube.

Repurpose, yes — but adapt tone and expectations. Every platform has its own language.

The simplest communication hack for any startup team

Adomas shares a surprisingly practical trick:

Learn from developers.

Specifically — learn from bug reports.

A good bug report explains:

• What you tried?
• What you expected?
• What happened?
• What help you need?

Sending Slack messages structured that way removes 90 percent of confusion from internal communication.

The long game founders keep ignoring

Great communication is not about hacks.

It is built on:

• Clarity
• Consistency
• Boring repetition
• Accurate thinking
• A willingness to learn publicly

Founders love speed. But the companies that break through are the ones that can stay in the game long enough for clarity to compound.

As Adomas puts it:

“You build great things by doing the hard and boring stuff long enough for it to matter.”

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