# Marketing without hiring anyone: an AI growth team for your shop or startup

> Marketing without hiring anyone: what an AI growth team is, and how a shop or a two-person startup gets one from its sales report or its code.

Canonical: https://www.runtheworld.ai/guides/marketing-without-hiring-anyone

Updated: 2026-11-05

## An AI growth team is a team, not a tool: one job per member, and you run it

An AI growth team is a group of AI agents built for one business, where every member has one job and a person runs the team. In Runner the seats are a chief executive, a scout, a lead for each channel, finance and trust.

The scout finds leads. Each channel lead drafts for its own channel. Leadership holds the team to the goal you set, and two advisors argue for more and for care. You approve the work, set the limits and can pause any member in one press.

## A shop starts from its sales report, with no website and no code

If you run a shop, a café or a restaurant, connect your POS or drop in the item sales report it already makes. Runner reads what sells and builds a team to match.

The report is read in your browser and only a summary leaves it: your totals and your best sellers' names, never a customer. The team then drafts the posts and customer emails that fit what sells this week.

## A two-person startup starts from its code

If you shipped an app and nobody on the team does marketing, connect your code. Runner reads it and builds the team in the background while you keep shipping.

With your code connected, the team names the exact change for your engineers when a play needs one, and can draft it as a pull request in your repository that you review, merge and deploy yourself.

- A waitlist and no marketer: pick sign-ups as the goal, and the scout and the channel leads work toward it.
- Paying customers already: pick paying customers as the goal, and the weekly review is about which channel brings them in.

## You set the goal, and Runner counts only what was recorded

Pick what the goal counts, like sign-ups or paying customers, and a date. The number is yours, and Runner counts only what was recorded, never what an agent says it did.

Every week the head of growth compares each lead's results with its share of the goal and suggests a change, like a bigger share for the channel that brought in the most. You approve the change.

## Your team drafts. You approve. Then it works inside your limits

Each lead writes drafts for its channel and puts them in your approvals, with the brief it was given beside each one. Approve an email, and Runner sends it, only to people who opted in to your emails.

The daily limits start at zero. Raise the email limit, and emails that pass every check go out on their own, up to that many a day. Anything that fails a check comes to you as an approval, with the reason.

Nothing goes out until you approve it or switch the team on, and then only inside the limits you set. One switch stops the whole team.

## What it runs on, and how you get one

Your team runs on the AI credits your plan includes, with nothing to set up, or on your own key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI or Ollama, where your vendor agreement and your rate limits apply.

Create your account, pick a plan and pay for it upfront. Your team is built once the plan is paid, from your sales report or your code.