As of today, the barriers to building software products have never been this low. What is scarce is no longer the product but its distribution - and the channel most companies reach for first, organic content, is exactly the one that has stopped working. To find out what still does, we sat down with Earlybird Catalyst Tilen Kegl. He runs content and community at Synthesia with a lean team that draws millions of organic views, and recently held a closed-door session with founders from across our portfolio.

Why organic reach is collapsing is no mystery. AI made content almost free to produce, so companies and creators alike now make it in bulk, templated posts and tidy carousels, churned out by the hundreds and barely distinguishable from one another. Open your feed for proof. When reach falls, the instinct is to produce even more of it, but volume was never the thing that worked. That is what Tilen's premise names: "AI does not make boring companies interesting."

For the most part, people have learned to scroll straight past them, and the platforms have adjusted accordingly. The latest social media statistics reflect the change quite abruptly, with organic reach on LinkedIn falling by roughly 65% in 2025. And this leads to a realization: the old playbook of posting more has become the problem itself.

Yet a handful of teams are growing despite this tendency towards overproduction, and utilizing the very same tools as everyone else. The fundamental question: “Can we do it?” lies no longer in the spotlight, because AI has made production available to anyone. On the flip side, it did not alter taste, judgment, and discipline.

When your content is pushed to the internet, it fundamentally poses a question to an audience as to what they care about. And the audience always answers: in what they share, what they scroll past, and what they comment. The majority of companies and individuals avoid listening to this answer; they press post and move on. To gain a competitive edge, you must treat this exchange as a conversation. Each campaign, each message sent out, is an experiment, where the results are kept and studied until you know, with evidence, what your particular audience responds to and why.

That knowledge is now the differentiator. No rival has it, and no model can produce it, because it is not general knowledge accessible to LLMs. It is the memory of how one specific audience reacts. It is built over time, with iterations that oftentimes includes feedback directly from your audience.

Paying attention, however, is boring, and it has a cost. Paid media is mostly straightforward: you watch what converts and adjust. Organic almost never has a clear path.

Tilen's approach, while unglamorous, drives incomparable results: a living record of every post, its topic, and how it performed. In practice, it looks and feels like bookkeeping. It is actually the company learning. The goal is ultimately that "You never start from zero," he said.

The next idea stems from everything the last hundred posts taught you. Hand that same record to an AI, and its drafts finally stand on something true: a year of what actually worked, when it worked, and potentially identifies trends that your audience is truly interested in.

For the founders we back, none of this stays a theory. Tilen Kegl joined Earlybird as a Catalyst to build it with them directly, from day zero. Read more on his case for why content cannot wait for product-market fit:

Content as a growth engine, not as a marketing to-do item