In July 2025, Perplexity did something most founders would call reckless. It gave a free year of its Pro plan, normally around US$200, to every one of Airtel's 360 million customers in India.

Over the next seven months, Perplexity's Indian downloads hit 56 million. That's more than nine times the previous seven months. When the offer closed, downloads crashed by 90%. Most people would stop the story there and call it a failed giveaway.

TechCrunch's follow-up in August 2026 tells a different story. Monthly active users were still five times higher than before the deal. And Perplexity's paid revenue in India was up about 60% after the free period ended.

Perplexity didn't buy attention. It borrowed distribution from a company that already had it.

I run iPrima Media, an AI-powered growth agency in Johor Bahru. We've worked with more than 1,500 businesses since 2012, and the question I hear most is some version of "how do we get customers without burning money on ads?" This article is my answer, told through six digital-native brands that found growth in places most marketers ignore.

(If you read my last piece on stunts versus flywheels, these are six completely different companies and a different lesson.)

Paid ads are more crowded than ever. AI has made ad creative cheap for everyone, which means your competitors can flood the same feeds you're in. When everyone can produce more, the scarce thing isn't content. It's access to people who trust someone.

The six brands below each found a different source of that access:

Let's go through them.

The play. Instead of fighting for downloads one ad click at a time, Perplexity bundled its product into a telco relationship that already reached hundreds of millions of people. Airtel got a premium perk to offer its customers. Perplexity got distribution it could never have bought.

The numbers (TechCrunch):

The honest caveat. Most of the free users left. The ones who stayed became a much bigger paying base than Perplexity had before.

How to copy it in Malaysia. Look for partners who already hold your customer's attention and would love an extra perk to give them: banks, e-wallets, telcos, property developers, gyms, residential associations. A renovation brand bundled into a developer's handover pack, or a skincare brand bundled into a bank's card rewards, is the same play at SME scale. We package these partnerships with PR and news distribution so the launch gets earned coverage too.

The play. Clay is a data and AI automation tool for sales teams. Its smartest move wasn't a feature. It popularised a new role, the "GTM engineer": a person who builds automated go-to-market systems instead of doing outreach by hand. Once people had a job title, they needed training, peers and tools. Clay supplied all three.

The numbers. According to Clay's own Series C announcement, the ecosystem includes more than 60 Clay Clubs across 30+ countries, 2,500 alumni from its official cohort programme, and agencies built on Clay that reached US$1M+ ARR within a year. TechCrunch reported Clay expected about US$100M in revenue by the end of 2025, roughly three times the year before. In September 2026 it raised US$115M at a US$7.1B valuation with more than 17,000 customers.

Why it works. When you make your customers' careers better, they become evangelists. Each new GTM engineer who lands a job markets Clay to their next employer.

How to copy it in Malaysia. Ask what skill your customers want to be known for, then own the education around it. A cabinet maker can teach homeowners to read a quotation. A payroll software company can certify HR admins. The content becomes your moat, and the certified people become your sales force. Our AI copywriting team builds exactly this kind of educational content, and AI-assisted social media management keeps the community fed.

The play. Gamma makes AI-generated presentations, documents and websites. In late 2022 it had about 60,000 users and roughly a year of runway. The three founders bet the company on AI, spending three months rebuilding the product. Then they did something unfashionable: they stayed small.

The numbers (Gamma, TechCrunch):

Every Gamma someone shares puts the product in front of a new audience. But the part I want you to notice is the team size. Gamma treated AI as leverage for its own operations, so growth didn't require hiring ahead of revenue.

How to copy it in Malaysia. Before you hire your next marketing executive, ask which parts of the role AI can handle with a good system around it: first drafts, ad variations, reporting, lead replies. Keep humans on strategy, relationships and taste. We wrote about the thinking behind this in how AI gives SMEs a competitive advantage, and 24/7 WhatsApp automation is usually the first system we put in.

The play. Manus, an AI agent that completes tasks on its own, launched in March 2025 as invite-only. Its demo video passed a million views in about 20 hours. Invite codes became so sought after that people resold them, with The Wall Street Journal reporting some codes selling for more than US$1,000.

The numbers. By December 2025, Manus's revenue run rate had reached about US$125 million, up from roughly US$90 million in August. The company had moved its headquarters to Singapore in mid-2025. Meta then agreed to acquire it for a reported US$2 to 3 billion.

The plot twist. In April 2026, China's National Development and Reform Commission blocked the Meta deal. Meta formally cut ties in June, and Manus returned to independent operation in August 2026.

Why it works, and the lesson in the twist. Scarcity turns a product launch into a status symbol, and every person hunting for an invite becomes free marketing. But scarcity only pays off if the product lives up to the hype once people get in. The acquisition drama is a second lesson: the distribution you own (your users, your brand, your data) is what survives when deals and platforms change.

How to copy it in Malaysia. Launch with a waitlist, a founding-member batch, or a limited showroom preview instead of a public "grand opening." Scarcity is a psychological lever we cover in the psychology of impulsive buying with AI tools. Pair it with a high-converting landing page that captures every name on the list.

The play. ElevenLabs makes AI voice technology. Rather than only hiring voice talent, it opened a marketplace where real people upload a professional clone of their voice, set their own licensing terms, and get paid every time a customer uses it.

The numbers (ElevenLabs):

One professional voice actor told the company she earned more through the marketplace than from five years of traditional acting work.

Why it works. When people earn from your platform, they tell other people about it. Every creator becomes a recruiter, and every new voice makes the library more valuable for customers. That's a two-sided flywheel.

How to copy it in Malaysia. Turn customers, creators and partners into earners. That can be a KOC programme with commission per sale, an affiliate link for past customers, or a referral fee for contractors. Our creator commerce and advertising team builds and runs these programmes, and our KOL work with badminton talents in Johor Bahru shows what it looks like with a local community.

The play. Shein, the online-only fashion giant, is the most controversial brand on this list. It has faced sustained criticism over labour practices and environmental impact, and I'm not holding it up as a model on those fronts. I'm including it for one mechanism every SME can learn from: test tiny, then scale what sells.

The numbers. In Shein's own description of its model, a new item can start with a test run of just 100 pieces. One matching set sold out at 100 and was reordered eight more times. Follow-up batches average 350 to 400 pieces, with production cycles as short as 10 days. Customer traffic data decides what gets scaled and what quietly disappears.

Why it works. Most businesses guess what customers want, commit to a big order or a big campaign, and hope. Shein flips it: launch many small bets, watch the data, and put money only behind the winners.

How to copy it in Malaysia. You don't need a factory to do this. Test five product angles as TikTok Shop listings before committing to stock. Run ten ad hooks at RM30 a day each and scale the two that hold attention. We explain one of our favourite early signals in using hold rate as a Meta Ads custom metric, and you can see this test-and-scale approach across our AI e-commerce work on Shopee and Lazada.

Put the six cases together and a pattern appears. Each brand found a source of trust it didn't have to build from zero, then turned it into something it owned. Here's the loop we build for clients, with the part of iPrima Media that handles each stage.

Partner with someone who already has your customer's attention (Perplexity). Telcos, banks, developers, event organisers, communities, media. → PR and news release distribution · Our event and media platforms

A job title, a skill, a club, a certification (Clay). Educational content turns strangers into insiders. → AI copywriting and content · AI-assisted social media · Video production

Creators, KOCs, affiliates and past customers who get paid for results (ElevenLabs), plus scarcity that makes being early feel like a win (Manus). → Creator commerce and KOL/KOC campaigns · KOC marketing in Malaysia

Many cheap experiments, with AI reading the signals (Shein), run by a lean team with AI doing the heavy lifting (Gamma). → AI advertising and media buying work · AI e-commerce

Borrowed audiences can disappear. Deals can be blocked, as Manus learned. Convert borrowed attention into assets you control: search rankings, AI-assistant citations, a website that converts, and a WhatsApp list you can talk to tomorrow. → AI SEO and GEO services · AI website design · 24/7 WhatsApp automation

Then loop. Every owned customer makes you a more attractive partner for the next borrowed audience. That's the flywheel.

Most agencies can only rent you attention through ads. We decided years ago to build our own distribution so our clients could borrow it.

Alongside the agency, the iPrima ecosystem includes a creator and sports talent network, the AmpQuartz Badminton Club with more than 1,000 members, retail partnerships, and consumer event brands like Neon Rush. When a client launches with us, they aren't starting from zero followers. They're plugging into communities that already exist, and then we help them turn that borrowed attention into search traffic, leads and sales they own.

If you want to measure whether it's working, start with our guide to measuring the ROI of AI SEO for Malaysian businesses. We measure ourselves on revenue, not vanity metrics.

iPrima Media combines AI technology, media production, creator networks, e-commerce and automation into one growth system. We launch fast, test cheap, and scale only what's proven.

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Don't just buy attention. Borrow it, then own it.