The Growth Maze vs The Idea Maze

Why the next wave of AI will shift the race towards distribution and growth

AI products are going through a phase shift
The AI boom has driven a tremendous amount of infrastructure to be created in recent years, massively opening up the group of product builders can create new AI products. As thousands of new venture-backed AI startups emerge, the insights required to build a new product will shift. Fast-following and copycatting will become the norm, as defensibility is chipped away with time — this is what happened in web and mobile, and AI products will experience the same pressures.

Recent years have been dominated by solving the Idea Maze, figuring out all the correct turns (and avoiding mistakes) needed to pick the best idea. But in future years simply picking the “best idea” will not be enough, but one will also need to figure out how to distribute them too. This is the the Growth Maze, the long series of decisions needed to pick the correct initial target audience and launch strategy, then the experimentation to slowly scale growth and modify the product over time to accommodate the strategy, and ultimately getting to a large-scale distribution strategy to reach the mainstream.

But to introduce the Growth Maze, we must first discuss the Idea Maze.

The Idea Maze
The Idea Maze is one of my favorite concepts about startups that has stood the test of time, and it comes from my friend Balaji Srinivasan (ex-a16z and Coinbase CTO). He wrote about this concept many years back in his lecture notes about entrepreneurship, and started with this diagram:

Further, he defines defines it quite simply:

[A] good founder doesn’t just have an idea, s/he has a bird’s eye view of the idea maze. Most of the time, end-users only see the solid path through the maze taken by one company. They don’t see the paths not taken by that company, and certainly don’t think much about all the dead companies that fell into various pits before reaching the customer. The maze is a reasonably good analogy. […]

A good idea means a bird’s eye view of the idea maze, understanding all the permutations of the idea and the branching of the decision tree, gaming things out to the end of each scenario. Anyone can point out the entrance to the maze, but few can think through all the branches. If you can verbally and then graphically diagram a complex decision tree with many alternatives, explaining why your particular plan to navigate the maze is superior to the ten past companies that fell into pits and twenty current competitors lost in the maze, you’ll have gone a long way towards proving that you actually have a good idea that others did not and do not have. This is where the historical perspective and market research is key; a strong new plan for navigating the idea maze usually requires an obsession with the market, a unique insight from deep thought that others did not see, a hidden door.

In other words, people often fall in love with their particular product idea and run full speed at executing it, without understanding the history of the category, context of other failed attempts, etc. These might be important clues that might explain why this particular idea hasn’t yet been built, and the dangers posed along the way.

If you can’t see the maze, how can you possibly solve it? More likely you’ll simply repeat the mistakes of others.

By the way, in my day-to-day role working at a16z, this is one of the key things I try to assess: What is the founder’s mastery of their corner of the idea maze? I ask them a few simple questions: “why choose X feature instead of Y? Why start at X instead of Y?” and “why do you think X didn’t work as a product? how do you think X product is doing in the market?” When you meet a founder who has deep observations about every turn and corner of the Idea Maze, these prompt an absolutely terrific conversation. It’s often the strongest sign that someone is an expert in their space, and they will teach you more in an hour than you might learn in months. On the other hand, it only takes a short amount of time to realize when someone is early in their thinking.

Because I don’t spend all my time in their corner of the maze, if they aren’t teaching me anything new, then that usually means they are either too early or too incapable. After all, they should be the expert, and should have spent months/years immersed in their problem. They should be teaching me with every sentence out of their mouth. (Of course, funny enough, there is always a counterpoint to all of this. The world is constantly changing, and sometimes it takes a beginner’s mind to try something once again in a new era. This is the advantage of youth — sometimes Kozmo.com fails, but Doordash succeeds, and same for Pets.com/Chewy, Friendster/Facebook, etc. You often have young entrepreneurs trying paths in the maze in new, novel ways that seem wrong to “experienced” people, and sometimes they succeed!)

For the Idea Maze in the context of AI, we are seeing the transition from one type of maze to another. The past few years have been been maze is focused on the continual technology breakthroughs we continue to see every few months, but which might get slower and less accessible, as it is quickly becoming the realm of very large, well-financed scaled enterprises (not startups) and AI PhDs. But the coming years are all about all the Idea Mazes capturing a wide variety of product categories where lines are being redrawn. Previous Idea Mazes that had been marked solved, like search engines, CRM, or email clients, might be reinvented as new doors are unlocked by AI. New categories are being formed from scratch today — although there isn’t yet a multi-billion dollar virtual companion that poses as your spouse, surely we will get one of those in the coming years (!!!). This is part of why AI is so exciting as a new, general purpose computing technology — it ought to reinvigorate broad classes of products, the same way that mobile and Internet did in prior generations.

The Growth Maze
Now let me introduce a new term: The Growth Maze, a complementary concept. It is a complex series of path-dependent series of decisions with an infinite number of choices, capturing how a new product eventually reaches its mainstream market.

The maze includes decisions like these, about product growth:

• the potential starting points: The initial audience has a huge effect on where you eventually go. Where will your product find its initial customers? (college launches? telling your friends? posting on Reddit?). Their feedback will affect both the product you build, as well as downstream decisions

• dilemmas throughout: At each turn of the Growth Maze you have big decisions: Go enterprise, or try to grow bottoms-up/PLG? Hire an expert in SEM or try an agency to launch via social media? Go with a high price point to power the economics for ads, or go freemium and try to go viral? Some decisions are reversible, but many aren’t — if you launch as one thing, it may be hard to scrub the internet of all these mentions if you change your mind

• timing: How long to stick to one strategy before jumping to another? Launching college-by-college is a time-honored way to get 10,000s of users, but not millions. Starting bottoms-up is great, but when do you eventually layer on the enterprise features and GTM?

• dead-ends, shortcuts, hidden paths, and trap doors: In your product category there may be many prior attempts that teach you about directions you could take. Let’s say you’re building an AI companion app. You might have the context to recognize the similarities of your category to dating sim games, and that’s a hidden door taking you to another maze. Or you might know that Character.ai got a ton of top-of-funnel downloads, but you might have ideas on how to improve retention.

• context dependence: Of course, every product’s path is different. You might know your UX is not great — not that useful, not that retentive — but is very viral and brings in a young userbase. This might take you down a different path than a product geared at prosumers/serious users

Unlike the Idea Maze, which you traverse by adding and removing features, the Growth Maze is traversed by iterating on new go-to-market initiatives and making decisions about the above. You might target new audiences. Or the choices might involve hiring, or length partnership discussions, or a combination of product iteration with growth intentionality.

The ultimate goal of the Growth Maze is to reach the nirvana channels (haha) — the scaled, cost-effective growth strategies that ultimately propel the product to hundreds of millions of users and revenue. Solving the Growth Maze might require precisely timed choices, jumped from one part to another, and a good dose of luck too. The Idea Maze and the Growth Maze might be interlinked — perhaps you need the idea to build an AI-first wedge app that launches to a limited but highly engaged set of users, and then in a later stage, expanding the feature set to a full suite while leveraging the initial network to grow more mainstream. Perhaps the Idea Maze and the Growth Maze are yin and yang, two sides of a coin.

The new AI Growth Maze that will be unlocked
Solving the Growth Maze might be very different in the pre-AI age versus in the coming waves of AI innovation. We all know that AI will reinvent marketing, and as such, we might see brand new branches in the Growth Maze that have never been encountered before:

• should we hire the traditional branding agency, or just ask our new brand/marketing fine-tuned AI agents pick our logo, positioning, and otherwise?

• do we grow our sales team, and prospect the old-fashioned way, or use the new top-of-funnel agentic AI sales product that does outbound for us?

• are we betting on SEM/SEO, and our customers finding us via search engines? Or do experiment with the (inevitable) hyperlinked ad units that are embedded in LLM responses and AI companion products?

• do we position ourselves as AI, or handcrafted and anti-AI?

• … and much more

It may be that the role of a marketer will change dramatically. Rather than supervising the constant iteration of campaigns, instead they will define overall strategy and let agentic marketers figure out how to generate thousands of variations of short form video creatives, and who to target amongst many thousands of audience segments. Perhaps marketers in 2030 will end up looking more from the birds eye view of the Growth Maze than how we work today, optimizing individual experiments by moving buttons around and rewriting the headlines of landing pages.

Which maze is more important?
In the early part of a new technology S-curve, the product experience is defined by the magical feeling created by the early generations of the technology. Remember the moment when you first used mobile Safari to browse the internet? How about the first time you ever uploaded a photo into a website, and you created your first social network profile? And then saw a feed of your friends’ posts? These are magical because of the “it works” feature, the fact that they can function at all. It is in these moments that systematic navigation of the Idea Maze is incredibly important. The dead ends haven’t all been mapped out, which means the maze hasn’t yet been solved. Opportunity is still there!

It is in the mid/late parts of the S-curve that simply working is not enough. When you try your 5th messaging app, the magic has worn off. After a few years of “mobile-first startups” we just dropped the mobile-first moniker and went back to calling them startups. It’s at this moment that the Idea Maze is more carefully mapped out, the trap doors have all been marked and closed, and people aren’t exploring quite as aggressively as before. This is where innovation often happens via the Growth Maze, when great distribution can couple with “good enough” product to win. And a good product with great distribution, with a few more versions, can become the best product in the market. That’s when both mazes need to be solved, and I think we’re about to see this dual race of Idea + Growth kick off, in the AI market.