The 10X Growth Advisor: Impact, Hiring, SEO and the End of Search as We Know It

Levesque opens with a story from his early days at Facebook. Three months after joining, he presented a draft strategy at a semiannual product review, sat in a silent room for what felt like five minutes, and was then asked by Mark Zuckerberg when the team would start seeing results. He says that moment was his introduction to a culture built around a single magic word, impact.

He explains why he likes the word so much. It is vague enough to cover any work that serves the mission, but precise enough that you can tell whether you have it. He contrasts it with leaders who reward activity and hours worked; there is a correlation between working hard and impact, he concedes, but the outcome is what should be reviewed.

Lenny says impact is number one on a Post-it of themes he hears from successful companies. Levesque adds that in growth everything is measurable, so impact is easy to check. His team constantly reviews whether its strategy drives the top-level north star outcome, and organizes everything around that singular goal.

Levesque describes being recruited by Zuckerberg while living in Canada with strong personal reasons for staying. He draws three lessons from it. Zuckerberg involved the entire executive team rather than leaving it to recruiting, he made the process personal by bringing Levesque's wife into dinners and conversations, and he never let momentum die over seven months. Toby at Shopify did something similar, flying down with his wife for breakfast to review offers.

As a leader's career advances, he argues, hiring becomes the skill you must be world-class at, because your team's success depends on the quality of your hires. He built his own playbook in Ottawa, where there were few people to learn from and he had to reason from first principles. He splits it into finding, assessing and closing talent, and also keeps a blueprint listing his own quirks for new teammates.

When finding talent he looks for repeated signs of excellence, because past performance is the best predictor of future performance. One strong signal is when a candidate's former boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them. Others include founding something or winning an award, and he says you generally want the top 1% of candidates, so you should expect to see such signals.

On timing, Levesque says you should not focus too much on growth until you have product-market fit, meaning users love the product and it shows strong retention or a good loop. Growing a product that does not satisfy a need can do more harm than good, because people who have a bad first experience are unlikely to try again. He allows one exception: if you need real usage signal, test in a small, off-the-grid English-speaking market where you can contain the growth.

A great advisor understands not just what to do but why growth levers work, so he suggests asking probing questions to see whether someone is repeating a playbook or still learning. If you lack growth expertise yourself, he recommends asking a trusted advisor or friend to vet candidates, which costs them little effort. Lenny notes that this could work even with someone too busy to advise you full time.

Levesque argues that people talk about the 10X engineer but not the 10X growth person, even though the effect may be larger. Most companies, he says, got where they are by dominating one strong channel, so getting the loop right is crucial.

Levesque explains why a short conversation can be so valuable: understanding a channel takes years of exposure to many experiments, but communicating that insight can take seconds. He recalls spotting a design choice in a company's landing pages on the first day, suggesting a different approach, and hearing three weeks later that the change had a large impact. That is why advisor hourly rates can look absurd, Lenny observes, since one conversation crystallizes a decade of work.

He likes to advise purely for equity because it aligns incentives, and says he wants his impact to be so big that the next board deck needs a slide to explain it. He recommends vesting early and using a three-month cliff, so both sides can walk away if it is not working. The ideal engagement delivers value quickly, trains the team, and leaves the founder no longer dependent on the advisor.

On the same logic he says internal growth teams should be incentivized on outcomes rather than activities. He admits that keeping an advisor on as insurance can make sense, but that should be a choice, not a dependency. His general preference is to hire someone in-house and surround them with advisors, so the knowledge stays inside the company.

To find an advisor, Levesque suggests starting with your investors, since top VCs have strong networks, then asking other founders, and finally looking at companies that are world-class at the channel you want to grow. He got started as an advisor when a prominent VC introduced him to a portfolio company that needed SEO help; he helped pro bono in exchange for connections in the Valley. Lenny adds that people from companies like Pinterest, Canva and Miro come up often.

He says companies with lots of traffic are the growth gym where people put in the reps through experiments, and learning from failed tests is almost as valuable as from successes. He warns against hiring based only on a large following on Twitter or Substack, a mistake he admits making a few times. Lenny agrees that celebrity hires rarely turn out as amazing as they seem online.

For people who want to become growth advisors, Levesque recommends thinking like an investor, since time is limited and equity only pays off if the company exits. He keeps a spreadsheet of criteria to evaluate companies, goes in expecting a ten-year commitment, and asks for a long tail on options so they do not expire before an exit.

Levesque believes there is an SEO play in almost any company, because Google is a huge funnel of existing demand. He divides sites into two categories. Small sites with a dozen or so pages need to optimize those pages and build a content strategy. Sites with thousands to millions of pages, such as user-generated content sites like Tripadvisor and Pinterest or marketplaces like Thumbtack, have a large optimization surface and can see huge impact quickly.

He cites LinkedIn as a viral loop feeding an SEO loop, since each new member creates an indexed profile page. Even content-led sites can grow through SEO, he says, but you have to write the high-quality answers yourself. Entire industries are built on single keywords, and in travel, he recalls, companies were bought and sold based on one keyword ranking.

His own startup TravelPod, a travel blogging site he sold to Tripadvisor, taught him the lesson. A competitor with a worse product was ten times bigger, and he realized that he needed to understand growth levers. The number one keyword in the space was Travel Blog, and he thinks they ranked second for a long time. Levesque lists other channels, including social, influencers, viral loops and partnerships, and defines growth as whatever it takes to move the needle.

Levesque says that seeing Google's AI box of answers at Google I/O, he immediately knew what was coming. He has seen it before in travel, where Google added flight and hotel search, which is good for users and search engines but harder on publishers. If the answer appears at the top, many queries that now send clicks to organic links will be answered directly.

He breaks keywords into transactional, navigational and informational and thinks the informational group is most at risk. He expects either that traffic shifts to paid or that those keywords simply get far fewer clicks, with the change playing out over the next 12 to 24 months if history repeats. He adds that ChatGPT now handles about half of his daily searches.

Rather than worry, he is excited by a platform shift after a long time, and says the new game is learning how to optimize and get listed. He describes optimizing as teaching the AI what you do and why you are the best at it. Shopify has a shopping engine called shop.ai that he likes, and he ultimately concludes this may be the biggest change since the inception of Google.

Asked how to staff SEO, Levesque says agencies and pure advisors struggle without internal talent at the center. His ranking is first an amazing in-house SEO person, second a relentless doer such as an engineer surrounded by advisors, and third an agency. Agencies work with multiple companies, which makes it hard to get the same impact.

On timelines, he says existing content that already ranks reasonably can see lifts of hundreds of percent quickly, sometimes on day one. Building new content takes longer because Google must build trust, show it to users and collect feedback. His rule of thumb is three to 12 months, and he thinks that if there is no impact within 12 months, something is wrong.

Asked what drove his career, Levesque points to loving the work, working hard and having impact, but picks self-reflection above all. He has had coaches throughout his career and now reflects each morning for an hour on what is going well, what is not, and why. He wakes at 5:00, exercises, stretches, meditates and does a cold plunge, a routine he calls his bootloader, inspired in part by the book Spark on the neuroscience of exercise.

He tracks areas of his life on a red, yellow and green dashboard: friend, husband, dad and leader. Six months earlier he asked each of his two sons what he could do more or less of to be a better dad, and one answered that he wanted more time together. Since then he has had a one-on-one outing every two weeks with each boy, chosen by them, which shows how he turns feedback into a repeatable habit.

Levesque hosts what he calls Guild Nights, dinners at his home for five or six interesting people around a shared topic such as consumer products, SEO or growth leadership. He started them in Ottawa and says they are the bright spot of his month and helpful for recruiting and back-channel references. His tips are to keep groups to six to eight, host at home, order in food, and run from about 6:00 to 9:00 or 10:00.

In the lightning round he recommends Spark, Smart Brevity and Cialdini's Influence, and his favorite interview question is "Teach me something about growth that I don't already know." He says he buys much of his shopping through shop.ai, and shares cold-plunge advice, saying that he does five minutes at about 53 degrees after easing in from 60.

His product-process tip is that not everything needs an experiment, since experiments cost time. His team now sometimes just ships changes it believes are better, using pre-post comparisons or holdouts to avoid major damage, because speed can outweigh the cost of testing. Levesque ends by saying Shopify is always hiring top talent, and he can be found at luclevesque.com.