Why We Built Ikigai

Something kept coming up in conversations over the past two years. Not one defining moment. More of a slow accumulation. Founders and marketing leads at good companies, real revenue, clear product-market fit, telling me some version of the same story: their marketing couldn't keep up with the rest of the business.

The details changed each time. A Series B SaaS company burning through its third agency in eighteen months. A travel brand whose paid media team couldn't make sense of the data their own tools were generating. A fintech where the Head of Marketing spent more time managing vendors than actually doing marketing. But the shape of the problem was always the same. A structural gap between what these companies needed and what anybody seemed able to deliver.

I watched this from a few different seats. Years on the agency side, then consulting, then working hands-on with AI tools as they matured. Every model had a ceiling. Agencies had the people but couldn't move fast enough. AI tools were quick but had no judgement. Consultancies produced sharp thinking and then handed you a deck. None of them were bad options. They just weren't built for a company that needs all three at once.

The pattern I kept seeing

The companies struggling hardest weren't the ones with bad products. They'd outgrown the marketing infrastructure around them. Product had scaled; marketing hadn't. They needed thinking and execution at the same time, and the available options forced them to pick.

Growth-stage companies sit in an awkward middle. Too sophisticated for templated agency playbooks. Too lean to staff a full in-house team across every channel. I kept hearing variations of "we know what we should be doing, we just can't do it fast enough." The frustrating part was that these people were right. They knew what to do. They just didn't have the operating model to do it at the speed their product required.

Why every option falls short

Traditional agencies are the default choice and the default disappointment. Senior strategists show up for the pitch; juniors run the account. Reporting is standardised rather than insightful. Strategy reviews happen quarterly when they should happen weekly. By the time the agency finishes onboarding, the growth window has often moved. I spent enough years on the agency side to know how the economics force this. The model is built to scale the agency's margin, not the client's growth.

Freelancers are a different trade-off. A strong freelance media buyer can genuinely outperform most agency teams on a single channel. The trouble starts when you need coordinated execution across paid, organic, content, and CRM. Now you're managing four to six people who don't talk to each other, and whose availability changes week to week.

Building in-house is the aspirational answer. It's also a £500K+ answer once you add a Head of Growth, a paid media specialist, a content strategist, and a marketing ops lead, before tools and ad spend. For a Series A company putting 20-30% of a round into marketing, the maths doesn't work. Even when the budget is there, the hiring timeline isn't.

AI tools promise scale without headcount. For first drafts and data processing, they deliver. But strategy doesn't come from a prompt. AI can generate a hundred ad variations in minutes. It can't tell you which positioning framework those variations should express. Without someone shaping the inputs, you get volume with no direction.

Then there are consulting firms. Rigour, yes. Execution, no. You get an audit, a deck, a list of things your already-stretched team is supposed to implement.

The hybrid model

I kept circling back to something that didn't quite exist. Not an agency, not a tool, not a consultancy. Something that could think and ship, and that used AI to move faster without gutting the judgement that makes marketing actually work.

I spent a while assuming someone else would build it. Nobody did. So I started.

I went looking for data to either validate or kill the idea. What I found: AI-generated content edited by humans hits an 80% first-page ranking success rate. Human-only content: 22%. AI-only: 57%. Companies that augment their teams with AI rather than replace them see 2.8x more pipeline than those going fully automated. The pattern was consistent. The best results don't come from choosing a side. They come from the workflow between human judgement and machine speed.

That's what Ikigai is built around. Strategists working alongside AI-enhanced systems. People bring pattern recognition, commercial judgement, creative direction. AI brings processing speed and the ability to test at a scale that manual work can't match. We treat every strategy, every campaign like software: structured, versioned, continuously improved.

What is AI-enhanced growth marketing? AI-enhanced growth marketing pairs human strategists with AI-powered workflows to accelerate execution without sacrificing strategic depth. Rather than replacing marketers with automation or using AI only for content generation, this model integrates AI across the full marketing stack: audience research, content production, campaign optimisation, performance analysis. Human expertise directs strategy, positioning, and creative judgement. AI handles data processing, variant testing, and pattern detection at scale. The result is faster iteration, more rigorous measurement, and performance gains that neither humans nor AI achieve alone.

Marketing as a system, not a service.

What we're building

Things are moving quickly. 69% of Google searches now end without a click. AI-referred sessions are up 527% year over year. The companies that figure this out early will have an advantage that compounds. Everyone else will spend more to catch up later.

Over the coming weeks, we'll publish the research and frameworks we've been developing. A guide to Answer Engine Optimisation, how to get cited by AI instead of just ranked by Google. An analysis of why creative quality now drives targeting precision on Meta and Google. A look at why the GTM Engineer is replacing the traditional SDR team. And a synthesis of ten bets worth making in 2026, drawing on McKinsey, Gartner, Bessemer, and about a hundred other sources.

Each piece is written to be useful on its own. If the only thing that comes from this blog is that a few marketing leads make better decisions with better information, I'll take that. But I also think the best way to show how we work is to do it where people can see.

Get in touch

If any of this sounds familiar, here's where to start.

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In Japanese, ikigai means "a reason for being." We named the company after that idea because growth marketing, when it's working, sits at the same intersection: what you're good at, what the market needs, and what actually moves the needle.