Scaling Emotion: An Interview with Isaac Tebbs on Growth, Virality, and Why People Care

Business Outstanders recently sat down with growth strategist and serial entrepreneur Isaac Tebbs to explore how his early start in crypto marketing evolved into a career scaling everything from consumer fintech brands to B2B infrastructure platforms. Isaac shared how those first ventures—fueled by instinct, hustle, and a deep sense of curiosity—still inform how he builds for virality, trust, and long-term impact today.

As growth marketing matures from a numbers game into a battle for attention, emotion, and trust, the playbook is shifting. Startups no longer win on ad spend alone, they now win by building movements, capturing moments, and creating products people want to talk about. Nowhere is that shift more visible than in fintech, where the lines between brand, product, and community are increasingly blurred.

Few growth leaders have navigated that evolution as nimbly and as impactfully as Isaac Tebbs. From building viral campaigns around debit cards and airline trivia games to landing infrastructure deals with PayPal and Amex, his path spans consumer hype cycles and enterprise trust-building alike. He’s the founder of CryptoBoost, Head of Growth at Knot, and the former growth lead behind Millions, a gamified fintech app that scaled to tens of thousands of users and millions of social followers in a matter of months.

We Interviewed Isaac to explore how his early start in crypto marketing evolved into a career scaling brands across sectors—and how emotional clarity, not just clever tactics, continues to shape his approach to growth.

Q) Isaac, you started young-like, really young. Walk us through the early stages.

I got the entrepreneurial bug early. I was running bake sales at age eight so I could save up for a dirt bike. In middle school, I moved online to helping small businesses grow their Facebook pages before I even had my own credit card. By high school, I was co-founding a sock subscription startup called Lettersox. We were scrappy, but we got to $5,000 in monthly revenue and even won a pitch competition. That was my first real taste of building something from scratch band it gave me confidence that I could figure things out without waiting for permission.

I founded CryptoBoost at 17, right after high school. It was 2017, crypto was exploding, and I saw a wide open space to bring real marketing strategy to a chaotic new industry. Over time, we worked with projects behind half of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap - over $200 billion combined during the bull run. That was surreal. But I also started to feel a pull toward products that created tangible user value, not just hype. That shift took me to Millions, then to launching GlareSquare, and now to my work at Knot, each step pushing me to solve harder problems with more impact.

Q) You’ve launched and scaled companies across radically different models - from crypto alt coins to B2B APIs. What’s the through-line that connects it all?

I think the through-line is emotional clarity, figuring out what people feel when they encounter your product or brand. Whether it's a crypto community or a Fortune 500 finance exec, you’re still talking to a human being. You need to earn their trust, get their attention, and give them a reason to care.

At Millions, we built an incredibly sticky brand by speaking with our users instead of at them. Everything was native to the platform and we turned down traditional ad spend in favor of just giving money directly to our followers. That approach helped us scale to 40,000+ cardholders in a few months. At Knot, the audience is totally different - banking leaders, compliance teams - but the core principle still applies. Our partners trust us because we solve real problems and communicate transparently. Emotion still drives decision-making, even when the stakes are technical.

So while the tools and timelines might change, I’ve always approached growth as a combination of empathy, experimentation, and ruthless clarity. That’s what connects it all.

Q) What’s the secret to making people care, online and offline?

You have to surprise them. It sounds simple, but in a world overloaded with content and messaging, the only things that break through are the ones that make people feel something. Love, laughter, curiosity, and even outrage. Real virality starts when a campaign triggers an authentic emotional reaction.

At GlareSquare, we built a guerrilla campaign around a lifestyle brand where we never acknowledged our involvement. We just planted the logo in unexpected places. The internet took care of the rest: speculating, sharing, discussing. That ambiguity created intrigue, and intrigue creates traction.

Even at Millions, one of our most viral videos happened by accident. We were on a Delta flight, came up with a trivia game on the spot, and gave away $5 per correct answer. That TikTok hit 60 million views. It didn’t feel like a stunt. It felt like something you’d want to show your friends. That’s the moment you know you’ve made people care.

Q) You’ve built brands that go viral and products that stick. How do you balance emotion with execution?

It starts with having a deep respect for both. A lot of campaigns die because they focus on emotion without a system, or the system without a story. You need both. You can make someone laugh on TikTok, but if there's no product scaffolding behind that moment, it’s just a laugh. And on the flip side, you can have a brilliant infrastructure product, but if no one feels compelled to try it, it doesn’t matter.

That balance really came into play at Knot. We’re dealing with complex infrastructure, automating how your card gets updated across 50+ services. Not exactly TikTok material. But it matters. So we built clarity into our messaging, built trust through our partnerships, and never tried to be louder than we needed to be. The emotion there was relief; people don’t want to think about this stuff. They just want it to work.

Execution also means being willing to test fast, fail fast, and scale what works. At GlareSquare, we don’t do drawn-out planning cycles. We drop in, test assumptions, read sentiment in real time, and adjust instantly. Emotion gives us a starting point. Execution gets us to results.

Q) In your eyes, what separates great growth leaders from the rest?

Curiosity, first and foremost. The best growth leaders I know ask better questions. They want to know how people think, what they click, what they almost clicked. They treat marketing less like a funnel and more like a living organism. And they’re not afraid to be wrong.

Second, they’re comfortable in ambiguity. Growth isn’t a fixed playbook it’s jazz. You have to riff, respond, improvise. That’s why I love early-stage environments. There’s no map. You have to make your own path.

And finally, they care. Not just about metrics, but about the user, the brand, the team. The ones who make a real impact are the ones who bring empathy to everything from onboarding flows to TikTok captions. That’s what builds real loyalty, and that’s what lasts.

From crypto bull runs to consumer virality to fintech infrastructure, Isaac’s journey spans industries but never strays from its emotional core. Whether he’s launching a guerrilla campaign or building a B2B growth engine, his north star is always the same: understand people, earn their trust, and give them a reason to care. In an industry often driven by metrics, Isaac reminds us that the most powerful growth still starts with human connection.