How Anthropic’s First Growth Marketer Builds with Claude | Austin Lau

Austin Lau was a non-technical marketer when he started experimenting with Claude to write custom Google Ads scripts, pasting in code, running it, and iterating through errors until it worked.

At the time, he had joined Anthropic as its first growth marketer. His experimentation reshaped how he thought about his own role and the future of marketing. He went from doing everything manually to building budget dashboards, daily briefings, and campaign automations, while developing a framework for what to automate and what to leave alone.

Austin explains why AI is turning marketers into builders, giving them the technical leverage to become Marketing Engineers, when to use Cowork versus Claude Code, and the “blast radius” test he runs before letting agents touch any live campaigns. 

We discuss:

• Why marketers are positioned to become Marketing Engineers
• The shift from managing campaigns to managing a fleet of agents
• The “blast radius” test he runs before automating anything
• Why you don’t need 50+ AI skills
• When a skill is actually worth building, and when it just adds noise
• Building a live budget dashboard inside Claude Cowork
• The Google Ads script that turned him from a marketer into a builder
• How to know when to reach for Claude Code versus Claude Cowork

Connect with Austin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinlau1/

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:
Austin’s Claude Cowork Guide: https://claude.com/blog/best-practices-for-getting-started-with-claude-cowork 

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.