OpenCMO

The open-source CMO. Growth playbooks from 16 experts who actually ran the numbers — Cursor, Notion, Linear, Deel, Canva, Lovable, Grammarly, Wispr Flow — packaged as an installable skill for your AI agent.

Covers the whole growth stack: paid ads (Google · Meta · LinkedIn)  ·  out-of-home  ·  SEO & programmatic SEO  ·  launches & Product Hunt  ·  pricing & monetization  ·  creator & influencer programs  ·  PLG→enterprise  ·  attribution & tracking  ·  growth engineering with agents

The experts

Sixteen people who ran growth at companies you know, each distilled from first-hand sources — podcast transcripts, bylined essays, their own posts. Every claim carries a link back to where they said it.

Why this exists

Ask any AI assistant "should we start running ads?" and you get a balanced, reasonable, useless answer.

Ask an agent with OpenCMO installed, and you get four experts who disagree:

Paid ads are just the demo — every area listed at the top gets the same treatment.

Real growth knowledge looks like this: conditional, contextual, and contradictory. Average the disagreements away and you get soup.

Three rules govern everything in here:

1. Named people, direct quotes. No anonymous "experts say." Every claim has a person, a date, and a link.
2. Conflicts stay visible. When experts disagree, we build a comparison table instead of picking a winner. The disagreement is the information.
3. Evidence gets graded. First-hand quote, media coverage, company self-report, or third-party estimate — every number is labeled. We also debunk: the file on Jasper exists mostly to show why the "Google penalized their AI content" story doesn't survive contact with the evidence.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/About-Intelligence/OpenCMO/main/install.sh | bash

Add -s -- --project to scope it to the current repo instead of your home directory. Re-run it any time to update. Prefer to see what you're running? Read the script or just git clone this repo into ~/.claude/skills/.

Then ask it real questions — "should we turn on Google Ads?", "how many Meta creatives per month at $100k?", "is a billboard worth it, and how would we attribute it?" — and it answers by citing specific people and the conditions they set, not by averaging advice into mush.

What's inside

open-cmo/
├── SKILL.md                     # entry point: expert index + scenario navigation
└── references/
    ├── experts/    16 experts          # theses, verbatim quotes, contrarian takes, conflicts
    ├── cases/       4 teardowns (10+ companies)  # PSEO canon, Canva deep-dive, OpenRouter, Jasper debunk
    ├── channels/    4 channels           # Google, Meta, LinkedIn, out-of-home
    ├── topics/      9 topics             # timing, creative, attribution, SEO, pricing, launches...
    └── guides/      4 guides             # growth 101, PLG→enterprise, meta-patterns, why experts disagree

The meta-patterns

The most useful file in the repo is deep-insights.md: eleven patterns you can only see with all the experts side by side, ending in decision tables — what works by company type, by stage, and the single variable that settles each famous expert fight. A sample of the patterns:

• The Amplifier Law. Every paid channel amplifies; none of them generate. The four "when to start ads" positions above are one answer wearing four hats.
• The Moat Migration Law. Content volume stopped being a moat. Proprietary data replaced it. Extractability — whether an AI can quote you — is replacing that.
• The Asymmetric Loss Function Law. Your strategy space is set by your downside risk, not by what's technically possible. This is why brands can't copy spammer tactics, in SEO, on Product Hunt, or with bought GitHub stars.
• Attribution Humility. Direct traffic is lagged paid spend. Self-reported attribution flatters. The goal of measurement isn't precision, it's preventing self-deception.

How this compares

Contributing

Found a good first-hand interview or teardown? See CONTRIBUTING.md for the evidence standards. The biggest gaps right now: enterprise B2B (CMO-level experts), consumer products, and non-US markets.

Roadmap

• [ ] More experts: Bill Macaitis (ex-Slack CMO), Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot), consumer growth leads
• [ ] Retention & lifecycle topic file
• [ ] MCP server so agents can query the library by expert × scenario
• [ ] Chinese translation

License

MIT for the repo structure and original analysis — see LICENSE.

Quotes belong to their original authors and publications. We quote briefly, for research and education, and link every source in full. If you're a rights holder and want something changed or removed, open an issue and we'll handle it quickly. Third-party traffic figures (Ahrefs, Semrush, SimilarWeb) are labeled as estimates and are not official company data.

Maintained by Soku, the agentic workspace for marketing teams. We built OpenCMO because our own agents needed it.