From Playing It Safe to Building 'No Growth'...
Meet James Zhao — founder of No Growth, proving that action beats overthinking.
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re chatting with James Zhao — a former L’Oréal brand manager and Turo growth marketer who left the safety of corporate life to build his own creative agency, No Growth.
From learning Facebook Ads in his childhood bedroom to scaling a 19-person team in under two years, James opens up about early mistakes, landing his first clients, and why being “a little stupid” might be the ultimate founder superpower.
If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to trade stability for creative freedom — and build something real from scratch — this one’s for you.
Dive in below!
No Growth Quick Stats:
🗓️ Time in business: 2 years
👥 Headcount: 19
💰 Average Deal Size: $5-6K
📈 Best growth channel: Inbound from personal brand, LinkedIn and Instagram
🎯 Target margin: 35-40%
From L’Oréal to leading No Growth…
Prior to this, I was a brand manager at L'Oreal, doing traditional management-CPG stuff.
After that, I was an in house growth marketer at Turo — basically the Airbnb for cars — for two years.
Now, I run a creative agency called No Growth, a company I started with my fiancé Sally, and we basically do two things: we produce creatives, so concept, research, scripting, shooting, editing — everything in house.
Then we also do media buying on Meta, TikTok and Google.
A lot of the entrepreneurs I see online, they were the kids who sold lemonade and traded Pokémon cards for a profit…
I did none of that.
I was on the conventional path for most of my life, and in my 4th year of university, I had two options: I could go to L'Oreal, or I could work for a startup in Berlin. I was way more excited for the opportunity in Berlin, but I picked L'Oreal, because it was a safer bet. It’s also a Fortune 500 company, and I knew my parents would be really proud if I got a job there.
After working there for a little while, I started applying into tech.
I interviewed for The Hustle — a newsletter started by Sam Parr. I loved his podcast, and I thought he was such an interesting guy, which was incredible, because I actually got to speak to him over the phone during the interview.
Anyway, I was shitting bricks prepping for this interview, and because it was scheduled around Christmas, my fiancée and I actually had to pull over on the side of the road to do the interview, on our way to a holiday dinner.
It was over CarPlay, so she heard the whole thing.
I ended up getting an offer, but then I later got an offer at Turo, and I ended up taking the Turo offer — again, it was just a bit safer.
But jumping back to when I was at L’Oreal, I was a brand manager, which — if you studied marketing in business school — you know it’s one of the more prestigious jobs you can get in that space.
My parents were super proud, and my friends were really happy for me, but I just got burnt out.
Around then, one of my friends got on Dragons Den for her startup. Her product was this high-fiber, high-protein chocolate snack, and she actually got two Dragons to invest.
Afterwards, she called me up, and she was like, James, when I graduate, I want to go all in on my startup. You're my only friend in marketing. You run all these cool campaigns and you run all these cool ads. How do I go and get 10 customers?
I remember sitting there, and I was like, “I don't fucking know.”
At the time, I was managing a brand that was doing about $150 million a year, and it dawned on me: this brand has been around for like 80 years, and I’m the one managing the system?
I don’t know a fucking thing.
All at once, I realized my skillset was useless — nothing was tactical.
So I pivoted.
I Learned Facebook Ads and did a bunch of free work for my friend's company.
I was really lucky that I had a mentor, Quinton, who taught me Facebook ads, and I remember my firs time running an ad on Facebook.
It was about $13 that we spent to put it out and we got $36 a purchase….
That's like a 2.5x ROAS.
I woke up, checked my mobile app, saw it and I freaked out.
I thought it was the coolest thing ever—I had just turned a dollar into $2.50.
Even though I was essentially doing the same thing at L'Oreal, it felt completely different, because in this case, it was all me, and I got feedback instantly.
So I got hooked, and then used that experience to get into Turo.
Full disclosure: I was extremely under-qualified for that gig, but I put in an insane amount of effort during the application process.
But when I started working at Turo, that's where the golden handcuffs came.
Tech was booming around 2020, and Turo was growing really fast. When I joined, the company had like 10 to 15 people in Toronto, and by the time I left, it was like 50.
Really quickly, I got comfortable…
People were really nice, I enjoyed being there, honestly, but I just felt like I checked off the list of things that people expected of me, but hadn’t spent any time really thinking about what I actually wanted.
So I looked for ways to work through it.
I got a lot of perspective from a guy named Dr. K on YouTube — an ex-monk turned Harvard psychiatrist — who talks about finding purpose.
He went to India to train as a monk and planned to renounce normal life, but his master was like, you have nothing to renounce.
Go back to America, build a life for yourself.
Then you’ll have shit to renounce.
If you want to renounce it then, come back and I'll take you in.
So he goes back to America,
goes to med school at 30,
ends up training at Harvard,
becomes a really great psychiatrist,
and starts working with investment bankers and CEOs.
And then he realized, nobody is helping this generation — the internet generation.
So, as I discovered him, I went through therapy, and what I discovered was there were two things that really made me leap into entrepreneurship…
One, I want to be at the top 1% of my field…
When you’re in a corporate environment, it's really difficult to do that.
In my day-to-day, I was getting really good at managing stakeholders, Google Slides, and performance reviews, but I wasn’t getting better as a marketer, per se.
The second thing was just looking ahead 10 or 15 years.
When I have kids, I really want to be a great dad, and I want to have a ton of time to spend with them. I just didn't see that from working in a corporate job. I looked at my brother in law, who’s in his 40s, owns a business, and plays tennis with his daughter at 3pm in the summer.
That's the life I want.
So, I remember I went to this Candlelight Fever concert, and it was a string quartet playing Joe Hisaishi, who’s the composer for a lot of Studio Ghibli films.
I was just there getting lost in music and I thought, if that's the life I want in 10 years with my family, then I have to start now.
I walked out of that concert, I told Sally, my fiancé, that I was gonna quit my job on Monday.
And I did.
On getting the first 10 customers…
I was freelancing on the side for the entire two years I was at Turo. It was never serious, but I had one to two clients consistently towards the end of 2022.
All of a sudden, I started getting these inbound requests, and I signed three new clients. At that point, I was making $6,000 a month on top of my day job.
At the same time, my day job was draining me so much, so I just wasn't hustling that hard, until I gave my resignation in October. My last day was December, though, which turned out to be wild, because a ton of layoffs started happening that month.
I lost half of my clients after that. Which was crazy.
For a while, I had operated under the assumption that everything was going to be fine, and it’d all work out, and then I just had this moment where I realized if I didn’t do something to get more clients, I was gonna be fucked.
So, I put a lot of thought into how I was going to stand out, and looked at what other agencies did.
The first thing is that a lot of them charge a percentage of your ad spend, which means their compensation isn’t actually correlated with your results. I thought that was bullshit.
The second thing was sometimes agencies charge really high retainers — which, to be fair, I am one of those agencies now — but I noticed that agencies charged really high retainers without any sort of guarantee.
At the time, I thought that was bullshit too, so I was like, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and decided to charge a percentage of the revenue I generated for the clients, meaning if they didn’t grow, I wasn't going to get paid.
So, I called my company No Growth — which is a stupid name — but it stuck around and people liked it, and I like it now too. ne
The first iteration of my website literally said “No growth, no pay.”
The first week of January, I made a LinkedIn post saying all the usual stuff — I quit my job, and I’m launching my new business, yada yada yada — and I literally got like 14 calls booked that week.
I went from like two to 10 clients within that first like month and a half.
Early lessons…
It was stupid to do revenue and profit sharing…
You attract clients that can't pay, so you're just doing work for free.
I had a couple clients where I couldn't get them enough results, and my invoice was like a hundred dollars at the end of the month.
After that, I had to approach them and be like, I love working with you. I think you guys have a huge potential. Can we shift to retainer so that we can keep going?
And luckily they were happy to do it.
I think it was a great way to solve the cold start problem…
I needed to get customers ASAP, and nobody knew me, so it was a great way of getting case studies and referrals.
There's beauty in being stupid.
I think my friends who are incredibly intelligent usually have a really hard time going all in and starting a business. They’ll think up an idea and then find 20 things that could go wrong with it, and get paralyzed.
When I think of an idea, I'm like, fuck it, let's just do it and we'll see what happens. If it goes wrong, we can always pivot.
Unexpected challenges…
Around April that first year, we had these vacations pre booked — ones from before I quit my job. We had to work remotely both times, and it was awful.
I’d believed in the whole ‘digital nomad’ thing for a while, but it was way more than I bargained for. It was stressful, tiring, and anxiety inducing.
I don't regret it, but I realized the sacrifice that I needed to make was to hunker down and work until I can afford to take vacation.
The second thing was around hiring. I didn't know what I expected, but having someone full-time where their livelihood is based on you and you have to manage your growth and all that stuff is a huge responsibility, and we definitely had a mental roadblock there for a little while.
Luckily, once we hired our first employee, I actually found it easier to scale because they could help train the second person we hired, and so on.
One of the things I’m also working through now is reconciling how my impact is starting to diminish, because we have so many more people on staff.
But my responsibility is to be a leader and to help my team grow, so I’m doing that as best I can.
Leadership & growth…
I was really fortunate enough to hire our head of accounts this year. He takes care of parts of sales, account management, and client relationships. He's amazing.
What I'm aiming to figure out now is key man risk stuff. It's a double edged sword, because I have a personal brand, a lot of leads come in through me, and I do want to grow a bigger personal brand. But we need to develop a system that can help us get new clients without relying on me.
I see this a lot with a lot of companies — they always suck at the opposite thing of what they're amazing at.
I know agencies who have zero inbound, but they're outbound machines.
And then we literally do zero outbound and everything's inbound.
We definitely suck at cold emails.
Like, I literally don't know how to do it because I don't need to. But still, it’s something we’re not good at.
I want us to be more well rounded and to tap into things that work instead of just sticking to what we know.
What works (and doesn’t) in paid media…
I’ll preface by saying that I'm lucky that I'm operating in the creative and video production space…
When you're in a space that not a lot of people love to get into — like ours — there's 100 million media buying agencies, but there's 100x fewer creative agencies because it's so hard to operationalize.
The flip side of that is just by doing the hard thing well you end up being at the top 20% of your field, which is really great. And a lot of it really just comes down to doing the basics.
There's no secret, there's no hack.
It's just like fundamentals: getting good shots, shooting in good lighting, screening for talent properly…
The people that shoot your ads — we call them UGC actors — aren’t typically working with agencies on a full-time basis. They work with plenty of clients themselves, so you're just one of many agencies that work with them, and some of them are kind of sloppy, or unreliable, so, we started having one on one calls with every one of them before we ever started to work together just to develop a relationship.
That ended up working way better because we can count on them much more.
In terms of other high level stuff, I think a lot of I think some brands are still tied up by perfectionism.
A lot of companies really want their content to feel and look branded, but ultimately, you need to hack attention.
When you publish an ad, you're not competing against your competitors ads, you're committing against cute cat videos too, right?
You really have to blend in and not make your ads look like ads, which is why UGC works so well.
The reality of video retention is that at around three seconds, you'll only have about 30 to 40% of people stay — if your ad is amazing.
If your ad is still good at 15 seconds, only about 10 to 15% of people will stay.
Then at the 100% mark, which is all the way at the end, 1.5 to 3% on average will stay if the ad is good enough.
It sounds bad, but if you think about 3% of thousands or hundreds of thousands impressions — that's a lot of people. And that 3% are the ones that are most likely to buy your product.
I have a lot of brands who care about the length for no reason. They say that they need to get the brand name in the first second. And what I tell them is that there is no ad that is too long, only an ad that is too boring.
Clients are always looking for performance, but they’re clouded by their preconceived notions about advertising.
Another thing I’ll say is that you need to be someone that understands social media — which is another way of saying that you need to consume a lot of social media. You need to have TikTok and IG on your phone. You need to scroll with the intention of researching and seeing what's working.
A lot of our meme ads are just pure white — because that’s what a lot of the memes that go around look like. Those ads work really well, believe it or not, and a huge part of that comes from staying keyed into trends.
The last thing we do really well is research.
There's a saying out there: the best copywriters don't really write. They listen.
If we take the language that your customers use on Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and you repeat it back to them, it's going to resonate.
Navigating a changing industry…
I'm not sure if this is a fact, or if this is just my personal opinion, but there aren’t a lot of businesses out there that truly care about leveling up their craft and getting better at what they do, so if we ourselves do that, then we're just getting ahead automatically, regardless of industry changes.
Change is also good in client-based work. If you land a massive client, but you're stagnant at what you do, your relationship is going to decay, and someone like me is going to have a chance to get that client. So it can work in your favour.
Keep in mind, I haven't hit any rock bottoms yet. I haven't had moments of desperation, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know how to feel if all of a sudden I lost 80% of my clients because of some massive industry shift. I guess I’m just optimistic.
There's a content creator called Mino. He teaches people how to make content and personal branding stuff.
Last year he started this Instagram content series called Road to 100k. In it, he talks about how he went from making 10k a month and feeling awesome to making 50k a month and feeling shit.
I can kind of relate to that.
Back when I was making less, things were simpler and there was less to stress about.
Anyway, one of the things he talked about this year was trying to pursue a feeling instead of a number. No stress, being happy, and sacrificing profit margin to get there. That’s been super inspirational. It’s something I want, but I can’t lie, it’s hard to prioritize.
At the very least, I don’t want to get too caught up in the numbers. If we do that, then we run the risk of scaling too fast, and then self-destructing. I'm more worried about us destroying ourselves than the industry doing it in the future. But maybe that’s because I try not to read into that stuff too much.
I just put my head down and just do my thing.
Future goals…
I’m pretty bad at setting concrete goals, but I want to grow as much as possible while making sure that we still enjoy the day to day.
Currently, I have hobbies and I have time for other things. I don't dread tomorrow and I enjoy today. That's how I want everybody in my company to feel.
Obviously, if the business grows, that’d be preferable. But if the company grows 50 versus 100 next year, it's not going to change anybody's life — myself included.
Something I'm really proud of right now is that we have 100% retention. Nobody has quit.
I know it's unrealistic to keep that forever because some people will just quit for random reasons, but ideally I want to keep that up as long as possible.
When I was at my old jobs, I always felt that when people left, the cost of them leaving was so massive. Productivity and morale always took a hit.
I don’t want that to happen here, especially because as a service based agency, your people are your product. So if my people are doing good, that's what really matters.
Right now, our biggest challenge is systems.
The biggest way that elite systems would play in our agency is helping us level up our craft.
What I'm working on right now is a system that has historical data on the creatives that we've done or that we've seen — something with really actionable data.
Hypothetically, if we had that bank, whenever we do creative research, we could add to it. Then over time, we’d have a reliable source of information to direct future work. Say we get a new client in a certain niche, that bank would be this thing that we could reference to understand the highest performing content in that niche.
That would make life so easy, but we currently don't have a system like that. And that’s just one of 10 other possible systems that we could build to level up the effectiveness of our team and the quality of our work.
Proudest moments…
I remember the April when we were gonna leave on vacation to Turkey.
That was the same trip that I proposed to Sally, and it was right before the trip we wrapped up that month's finances and were making more money than before. W
We quit our jobs and that was four months into the business.
And we screamed and celebrated that shit. And I called my mom and it was awesome.
That was huge because our goal was just to make as much money as before while doing our own thing.
We did that in four months. That was awesome.
I think another really big moment was each of the big hires: my creative director, my head of accounts, and my lead video editor. Those were such massive wins.
Hiring is so hard, so it literally feels like I'm winning a lottery ticket every time we have a big hire and it fundamentally changes the business.
Another big win was me speaking at this conference this past September. It was called the Ecom North Summit. It was in downtown Toronto and had about 700 D2C brands there.
I was one of the speakers because I had this bargain with the founder of the conference. I made ads for them and in exchange, they gave me a keynote and booth. That talk went really well. I pulled like two all nighters that week to prep it. I was insanely stressed but pulled it off.
I went back to my booth and then I had like literally a lineup for the next two hours of people wanting to talk to us. It was insane.
I remember the director and CEO of Mastermind Toys lined up to talk to me. I didn't know who they were at first, I just assumed they were representing some small business. But they came and talked to me and we closed them a month later.
That was such a good feeling, knowing I delivered a great speech, and then just like being on the red carpet for the next two hours, people lining up to come talk to me. It just felt really great.
And then the last piece is probably my content journey. That thing as a whole was huge.
It's kind of like a hack, because if you have good content, and you tell stories, it just opens up so many doors. People don't know what you're capable of if you’re not sharing it.
I started posting YouTube videos back in 2012 when I was in middle school. I grew up on YouTube, so making content was always something I wanted to do.
And this year, probably for the 20th time, I decided to try it again, and it caught some traction. It just felt surreal.
A lot of things in life feel impossible. Starting a business, making content and actually getting followers and views. This year, I checked off a lot of those boxes that felt impossible.
On shiny object syndrome…
SaaS is super hot right now. Agencies, not so much. DTC used to be super hot. Nowadays, it's SaaS or AI.
As a consequence, you’ve always got this feeling that the grass is greener on the other side. So much of entrepreneurship culture revolves around going to work on something big. And it's really easy to be like,
Is the thing I’m doing the right thing?
Should I be building this?
Should I shut down the agency and do SaaS or E Comm?
I thought about that a lot last year.
I was really confused and lost and I didn't know what to do — even though things were going well. Then, once I went to Ecom North, things changed. It catalyzed our business even more, and it also gave me the opportunity to join them as a co-founder.
I got close with Nick, who's the original founder of Ecom north and this company called Stallion, and part of that is because of this retreat that I hosted with Tuan called Build and Chill.
It’s a founder's retreat. Four days, three nights, with the intention of just building genuine friendships.
It sounds a bit corny, but I feel like as a founder, you eventually distance yourself from your core friends — the people who you met in University or high school — because they can’t relate to you as much. And even when you go to founder events, most of the time, the people you become friends with aren’t real friends, they're value exchange friends.
What I was looking for were friends first who happened to be founders.
So, after joining Ecom North as a co-founder, that gave me clarity around what I was doing and how it was worthwhile.
And so now for the next three to five years, I'm like locked in. I'm not really looking around at other opportunities.
This is my hand and I'm playing it.
That’s it for this issue!
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Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry