(2026-01-13) Verna Growth Is Now A Trust Problem

Elena Verna: Growth Is Now a Trust Problem. All of us are fighting a war on three fronts (thanks to AI). Customer product expectations are higher than ever. Distribution channels are collapsing. And everyone - big incumbents, new startups, even your own customers with vibecoding - are coming for your value prop. How are you supposed to grow in this new landscape?

there’s a new playbook that I’m seeing emerge, and it’s all built around one simple concept: Trust.

Andrew Chen pointed out that every marketing channel sucks right now, almost a year ago. But it’s getting worse. You’re probably starting to see all of your channels get to be more expensive or less efficient, or both.

What’s Not Working Anymore

SEO and organic search. The obvious thing is that AI slop has reduced the barrier-to-entry for creating the content that SEO depends on.

Paid search (SEM). This is the same thing as SEO, but the economics are more obvious: With the total number of searches not growing, the cost of placing your ads on those searches skyrockets as competition increases. Everyone’s bidding on the same keywords

Corporate social media. Social platforms are increasingly hostile toward corporate accounts and external links.

What’s Working Now

Employee-led social. When founders and employees share their thinking, their failures, their roadmap publicly, it demonstrates transparency and accountability. (building in public)

Influencer and creator partnerships.

The key is finding partners whose audience genuinely matches your ICP and who will actually use and believe in what you’ve built.

Community-driven growth. Your users become your distribution channel, but only if you build the infrastructure for it. Your product has to create stories worth sharing. But also give them a place to show their work, staff it so questions actually get answered, and let users teach each other.

Product-led brand.

Brand is a product job, now. Every interaction, every feature, every detail either builds or reduces trust. The product itself has to demonstrate that you care about the user’s problem and will keep solving it better than anyone else.

You may have noticed that a lot of these channels feed into the same thing… building word of mouth.

super difficult to manufacture. It has to be woven into everything you are doing, how you are building, in your cultural values. And it’s not something you can do with a clever viral marketing campaign - that might get people to talk about your ads or your content, but if you want people discussing your product, you need to WOW them. And that comes from product, which is also your retention engine.

Trust-based Retention

the arrival of AI is ruining retention for traditional SaaS businesses.

it’s all about your value prop.
At the end of the day, every company has to answer this critical question: ‘Why you? Why should users use (or keep using) your product? The answer always comes down to one of three options: You are…

• Cheaper
• More efficient (faster at solving the problem than alternatives)
• More effective (able to produce a better outcome)

The problem for SaaS companies is that most of them were built around #1 or #2. In fact, out of all the growth workshops I’ve done with software companies, 9 out of 10 times, they say that ‘why’ is: ‘time to value vs. the manual approach.’
And now, that’s a major problem: AI is faster than any traditional tech hard-coded software product.

Plus, even if your value prop does fall into the ‘More effective’ category, you’re at risk if that functionality is not utilized enough.

When all the capabilities get commoditized, users will stick with the products they trust.

More specifically, this kind of trust is confidence that this product and team will continue to deliver better outcomes over time. This depends on their belief that you genuinely care about their problem and will keep iterating to solve it better than anyone else.

Transparent roadmap sharing. Not the sanitized public roadmap that commits to nothing. I mean real visibility into what you’re building and why. When customers see you’re thinking three steps ahead on their actual problems.

Responsive iteration based on feedback. Speed matters, but it has to be in the right direction.

Amazing user experience / ‘WOW’ moments. I’m not talking about looking pretty. I mean showing through the product experience that you care about how people actually work.

Thoughtful lifecycle comms. Every email, update, and push notification is either building trust or reducing it. Are you creating value with your updates, or just bombarding people?

Monetization aligned with outcomes. Getting paid only when your customer succeeds is more than a pricing strategy. It’s a retention moat. (who does this?)

Trust is the Main Lever Behind Growth

Acquire through trust. Retain through trust. These aren’t separate strategies - they’re the same system playing out at different moments in the user journey.

Honestly, there aren’t that many products I actually trust. For me its Lovable, Miro, Whisperflow, Spotify, Granola, Oura, Stripe, Tesla, Netflix, Arc, Superhuman, Substack, ChatGPT among a few others. They’ve never let me down.

And what does this mean operationally?

Build this into your org structure & values. Product, marketing, and customer success can’t operate in silos

Optimize for velocity. Trust-based growth requires speed - both in how fast you ship and how fast you respond. Tighten the feedback loop between customer input and shipped features

Learn to build in public. You’ve got to share your work as you go - a steady rhythm of progress, ideas, wins (and fails!), over time.