{"id":356,"date":"2025-07-01T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/?p=356"},"modified":"2025-07-10T13:16:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T13:16:01","slug":"gtm-153-building-technical-growth-machines-signal-based-selling-with-austin-hughes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/01\/gtm-153-building-technical-growth-machines-signal-based-selling-with-austin-hughes\/","title":{"rendered":"GTM 153: Building Technical Growth Machines &amp; Signal-Based Selling with Austin Hughes"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/in\/podcast\/the-gtm-podcast\/id1369291464\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/2SA1dgQ2Yc5t4V5GcBLnD2?si=b9dcb3e53b2d4ad2&amp;nd=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLGXnz4Tyz3-SfJ5DPByHtUOQOFB3yJ6zZ&amp;si=Yj3qgzFty48-h9uI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">YouTube<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/austin-t-hughes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Austin Hughes<\/a> is the founder and CEO of\u00a0Unify, a platform helping high-growth teams turn buying signals into pipeline. Previously, Austin led the growth team at\u00a0Ramp, where he scaled the org from 1 to 25+ and pioneered a product-led, experiment-driven GTM approach. With a background in investment banking and venture capital, Austin brings a uniquely analytical and first-principles mindset to modern B2B growth.<\/p>\n<p>Timely enough, Unify is also launching something big today \u2014 Unify for Sales Reps, their new AI-native system-of-action built to help sales teams work smarter and move faster. With powerful features like an AI research assistant, manual sequence steps, a browser extension for prospecting, and an all-in-one tasks dashboard, it\u2019s designed to handle the busywork so sellers can focus on what really matters.<\/p>\n<p>Learn more about Unify for Sales Reps:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/unifygtm.com\/blog\/introducing-unify-for-sales-reps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">unifygtm.com\/blog\/introducing-unify-for-sales-reps<\/a><\/p>\n<h2><strong>Discussed in this Episode:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Why you should run marketing like product<\/li>\n<li>Distribution is a startup\u2019s best friend<\/li>\n<li>How Austin\u2019s content strategy turned LinkedIn into a hyper-efficient channel<\/li>\n<li>Why the best growth hires today are ex-engineers or investors<\/li>\n<li>How AI is redefining go-to-market motions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><strong>Highlights:\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>04:00 Ramp\u2019s growth org: running 100+ experiments per quarter<\/p>\n<p>08:45 Why LinkedIn became Unify\u2019s silver bullet<\/p>\n<p>11:30 Austin\u2019s content creation workflow (and why he doesn\u2019t use AI to write)<\/p>\n<p>13:00 Technical vs. traditional growth marketers\u2014how to hire for impact<\/p>\n<p>17:00 Using Unify to merge 1st &amp; 3rd-party data into a signal pipeline<\/p>\n<p>20:30 How automation + human-in-loop GTM creates leverage<\/p>\n<p>24:00 Austin\u2019s Carta example: what perfect relevance looks like<\/p>\n<p>27:00 What broke in outbound and why signal-based selling is the fix<\/p>\n<p>32:00 When startups should start ingesting signals<\/p>\n<p>36:30 Culture of experimentation: \u201cfailure is just a data point\u201d<\/p>\n<p>39:00 How Unify is using AI internally for GTM and support ops<\/p>\n<p>43:00 What\u2019s coming next: AI-relevant messaging, BDR collaboration tools<\/p>\n<p>47:00 The end of traditional marketing roles\u2014and what comes next<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Guest Speaker Links (Austin Hughes):<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/austin-t-hughes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/austin-t-hughes\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Unify:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unifygtm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.unifygtm.com\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/sophiebuonassisi\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/sophiebuonassisi\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Newsletter:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@sophiebuonassisi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/substack.com\/@sophiebuonassisi<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund\u2019s media brand):<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Website:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/gtmnow\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/gtmnow\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Twitter\/X:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/GTMnow_\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/x.com\/GTMnow_<\/a><\/li>\n<li>YouTube:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@GTM_now\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\/@gtm_now<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The GTM Podcast (on all major directories):\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/tag\/podcast\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/tag\/podcast\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><strong>Thanks to our Sponsors:<br \/><\/strong><\/h3>\n<h3>TriNet<\/h3>\n<p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\">Founding a company is hard enough. Navigating payroll, benefits, and compliance shouldn\u2019t slow you down. That\u2019s where TriNet comes in. They work with startups and scaling businesses to help take HR off your plate, so you can stay focused on building product, growing revenue, and hiring great people \u2013 the go-to-market engine. B2B companies like Hivebrite and Equilend trust TriNet to help handle the infrastructure of their workforce, so their teams can focus on execution.<\/p>\n<p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\">Learn more about TriNet at: <a href=\"https:\/\/trinet.com\/gtmnow\">https:\/\/trinet.com\/gtmnow<\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h2>GTM 153 Episode Transcript<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The way that we thought about growth as a function was much more akin to how you run product team.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">at an earlier stage, you just have to take big swings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">we announced our seed fundraise in, early 2024 on LinkedIn, and immediately had, I think 420 demo requests come in over the course of the next 48 hours.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also took a very first principles lens of the thing that we cared about was maximizing the dollars of pipeline that we could drive per hour of work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">we saw everything we were doing as taking bets,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">distribution is the advantage that we\u2019re looking for at a startup, we could build the best product in the world, but if nobody hears about it then it doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The thing that matters most is the impact rather than the actual solution that you\u2019re building.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Buyers just wanna solve problems, and if you can prove that you\u2019re the best person to solve that problem for them like they\u2019ll take you up on that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before we dive in today, a quick important message from our sponsor. Partner TriNet, a trusted HR provider to startups and scaling companies. Every early stage founder is told to focus on product and growth, but behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team, and building that team is one of the hardest and most important parts of the journey.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Build the team that builds the company that is part of your Go-To-Market strategy, responsible for growth, hiring the right people, keeping them supported, and creating the infrastructure to help them thrive is critical. Trying to exist to make that easier. TriNet\u2019s Full suite of HR Solutions is designed to support companies at critical inflection points from early traction to scale.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Learn more@trinet.com slash GTMnow to see what\u2019s possible for your business. That\u2019s TriNet, T-R-I-N-E <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">t.com\/gtm NOW. Now onto the episode.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode explores how to apply product thinking to Go-To-Market. Austin, founder of Unify and former founding growth leader at Ramp shares a behind the scenes look at how he helped scale Ramp\u2019s Go-To-Market Engine building the outbound automation program from scratch, and growing the growth team from one to over 25.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now as a founder, he\u2019s reapplying that playbook and reshaping it to help companies like Justworks Open phone and cursor turn signal data into pipeline. We get into the tactics, how to validate and scale Go-To-Market programs, how to operationalize product data, what technical growth really means in 2025 plus why AI doesn\u2019t eliminate the need for growth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Teams just changes how they\u2019re built. Enjoy the episode.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back to the GTM podcast, is your host Sophie Boni, and today I\u2019m joined by Austin Hughes. Welcome, Austin.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Thanks for having me, Sophie. I\u2019m excited to be here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Super <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:03:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> excited to have you been actually looking forward to this conversation for a while. I know we\u2019ve been jamming on ideas for. For quite some time. So excited to jam a little bit more publicly now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes, a hundred percent. Uh, it\u2019s been a long time in the making.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Definitely. And I would love to start off with your background because you actually have a bit of an investor background too, before we get to more of State of the Union around what you\u2019re working on now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> so, you know, today I\u2019m a founder and CEO, which is a ton of fun, but I actually got started originally in finance. And so before I moved over to the operating side, I spent a few years in investment banking and then in investing after that, looking at companies and sort of understanding how investors look at in diligence businesses, which was I think a pretty.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Informative experience for me. A lot of the frameworks that I actually used a ton as an investor, thinking about unit economics, thinking about how you benchmark these companies and some of the underlying operating metrics that really matter are things that I think carried really naturally to being an operator.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so definitely grateful for those experiences. But yeah, was an investor for a couple years, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:04:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> moved over to ramp and then, uh, started unify more recently.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Very cool. And when you were at ramp, you actually built out the growth function there and. started it from scratch and really grew it from one to over 25 employees. I\u2019m curious, when you started that function from scratch, what was the first kind of system or motion that you built and why?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So way back when, so I joined RAMP back in 2020. company was few hundred customers and so the era was very different and I think the way that we thought about growth as a function was much more akin to how you run a product team. And so the foundations and how we thought about how we\u2019d organize our time and the work that we would do and how we would prioritize what we worked on was much less, I think from like the traditional marketing lens and much more from the product lens of thinking about it in terms of sprints.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Running a regular cadence, writing specs, holding ourselves accountable for metrics. And so, uh. It\u2019s interesting. It\u2019s like, yeah, we were running a, you know, a growth team, which traditionally would fall more under the Go-To-Market team, but I actually sat under, Jeff, who\u2019s on the product team. And so very interesting microcosm there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:05:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> when we thought about building up the program over time, we saw everything we were doing as taking bets, right? And so some of those were more traditional, some of those we could look at the market and understand, okay, you know, you\u2019ve got your traditional channels like paid and whatnot that, are gonna produce for you, but.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also took a very first principles lens of the thing that we cared about was maximizing the dollars of pipeline that we could drive per hour of work. And so that led us to explore a lot of different channels. beyond your traditional ones as well. So really at the core though, was this foundation of like, how do we operate more like a product team than most Go-To-Market teams would.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And with that mindset around product, how did you end up validating high impact programs before investing real resources into it? Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> A lot of the art, I feel like in growth is, thinking about how to scope, projects really well. And I think that this is often really overlooked. But something that I think we did remarkably well at RAMP was we were really diligent about how we spend our time and maximizing the amount of output per hour of time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so oftentimes what I found was that. There were projects that the team would wanna work on that they\u2019d written down would take two <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:06:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> weeks. And in practice you could distill down an early learning from that project into an hour or two of work. Something like that. You could take something that somebody thought you needed to work with an engineer on and take it actually to be a CSV that you could sort of like just pull from a data set and test something.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think That idea that you could always sort of refine things and always descope things led us to this world where the way we operated was very much so in terms of MVPs and full builds is how we thought about it. So MVP is like an idea that you could build in a few hours. A full build is something that might take a week or two weeks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the way that we really de-risked a lot of the work that we did was by running MVPs to test learn. Something had signal, and then when we would actually go out and do a lot of work, it was usually investing behind something that we had high confidence in. So that was sort of the foundation for us being able to move really quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was just using our time really effectively.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, definitely that experimental mindset. It sounds like, I\u2019ve read that when you stood up the program, you\u2019re running over a hundred experiments per quarter. Which is a ton of volume, very high velocity. How did you set up those systems for <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:07:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> experimentation, measurement, and feedback?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That whole loop.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. you needed like, I think a couple different pieces to do this well, one is that. Everybody on the company side needs to just know how to dashboard and do analytics. And I think that\u2019s pretty table stakes is that it is certain scale intuition is valuable, but it starts being overtaken by your ability to use data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the only way that we were able to drive so many concurrent experiments and learn from them is that we had clear reporting and metrics, and the team was just generally data fluent. So I think that\u2019s really important. We also had a centralized CRM that we used to just like track what we were working on in a very systematized way of going about this.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So no learnings got lost. I think that was actually also really important was that when you have so many things going on, you need to make sure that everything, you know, it\u2019s the same thing of how you would Go-To-Market and make sure that you\u2019re using Salesforce or HubSpot. You need to make sure that you\u2019re not crossing your wires.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so I think we did that really well from systems perspective. I think also just The way that we organized the team was much more around the goal of, of pipeline. And, what that meant in practice was that teams that I think historically would\u2019ve sat in silos actually were very sort of like <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:08:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> cross collaborative at ramp.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think that was really powerful. Over time, we were able to try things that, probably would\u2019ve been shut down at, uh, a company that was organized in a more traditional way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I gotta ask, was there an experiment or channel that you doubled down on that changed everything? Maybe even if it didn\u2019t look promising at first?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I could talk more about the unify side. I would say ramp. There\u2019s no, there was no silver bullets. I think it was just a lot of hard work over many years that compounded continuously. And so I think that actually framed a lot of how I think about things at Unify. At Unify, I found that the silver bullet for us has been LinkedIn.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Honestly, I think like it\u2019s very fascinating to watch this pan out. I think it\u2019s the one bet that I\u2019ve taken as a growth operator where it just made sense out the gate. It just worked immediately. And, for context, we announced our seed fundraise in, early 2024 on LinkedIn, and immediately had, I think 420 demo requests come in over the course of the next 48 hours.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of that we were seeing was being driven by LinkedIn. That was an incredibly powerful signal, I think, to us that this channel and this medium works <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:09:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> really well. Since then, we\u2019ve really doubled down on the channel, which I can talk a lot more about that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You\u2019re a pretty prolific writer on LinkedIn, Austin, was that what kicked off the writing? Was it your seed announcement?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was, and I, I gotta say like there was just a lot of noise in our category at the time, and it was fascinating, I started, posting in call it March or April of 20, 24, 5 times a week on LinkedIn. before then, I was not a LinkedIn writer at all. I actually wrote a lot more on Twitter than I did on, on LinkedIn.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that seed announcement was a really good indicator. But then also our category, which is very loud on LinkedIn, and it felt like we would show up to conversations and people will be talking about our competitors, not because our product wasn\u2019t better or things like that, but they just didn\u2019t know about us, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Actually, like what we found was that distribution was actually the thing that we were really struggling with and credibility and whatnot. And so I think actually heavily investing in LinkedIn boosted our credibility faster than anything else could have. Now, when I actually meet somebody in a conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">it comes up half the time. They\u2019re like, I see your LinkedIn content over and over and over again. And I\u2019m sure at a certain point <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:10:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> some of that gets repetitive, but I also try to keep it fresh and I do think that at a certain point, somebody seeing un Unified\u2019s name over and over again, it makes a huge difference.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">and eventually we\u2019ll reach somebody at the right time when they are actually, um, ready to buy. So it\u2019s been really powerful for us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, if anyone does not follow Austin on LinkedIn, highly recommend because I would say you absolutely do keep it fresh. It\u2019s always very interesting. Very different perspectives, very informative and tactical. What does your system look like for publishing and writing?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I run a regular schedule where every Sunday is like my LinkedIn day, so I\u2019ll sit down for four or five hours, plan out content for the week. Think about ideas that I wanna write about. usually most of my work happens on the Sunday where I sit down and actually write pieces out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Usually though, I keep a note in my phone of just ideas that I think are interesting. And it\u2019s funny, they come about it like very random times. I\u2019ll be like, on a hike or walking around the city or something like that. And something will sort of come to me as an interesting tidbit and I\u2019ll usually just take note of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then when I need to actually sit down and write, I will just pop into that note, sit down, write out the idea. So that\u2019s. Sort of, uh, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:11:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> how I approach it. We\u2019re also, actually gonna start introducing a lot more video content, which I\u2019m really excited about. So we have a whole new process for that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have a team member actually, that joined our team specifically to work on video content named Adara. So huge a shout out to Adara. And, we\u2019re gonna be introducing a lot of that to, to LinkedIn very soon, which I\u2019m excited about. That\u2019ll be something new that I think will be fresh for the audience.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Incredible. Shout out Dara. I can\u2019t wait to see that content coming.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> are you using ChatGPT or any AI to help support your writing? Whether it\u2019s, you know, voice recording yourself while you\u2019re hiking up the mountain and an idea or inspiration pops in?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I today don\u2019t use it at all. I find that the style is just not how I wanna write things, and the words matter so much that it just hasn\u2019t quite gotten there for me personally. But I do use it to record just like random ideas sometimes on my phone I do use you know, slack notes too, or voice notes as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I use a variety of ways of just getting ideas on paper. But that actual writing piece I do myself<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Love it. I think it shows through the writing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> appreciate<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I\u2019m definitely a big fan of the the chat GPT audio. That\u2019s helpful. It just went on the move.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:12:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It\u2019s awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I wanna transition to a little bit more around the technical side. As you mentioned, everyone was very fluent with dashboards, had that technical ability. How do you evaluate whether to hire a growth marketer or a technical growth lead at an early stage?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We\u2019re in a world today where. I think it depends on where your company is in lifecycle, right? Like if, if you\u2019re looking for somebody ultimately to do a very well scoped job, and let\u2019s say it\u2019s like, Hey, you want somebody to go run a performance marketing program, you\u2019ve got a budget of a hundred thousand dollars a month, whatever it might look like, I think in those worlds a I.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">More traditional growth marketer can make a ton of sense and can be a good fit for that role because ultimately the role is well understood. You can find someone who has four or five years of experience in it. You don\u2019t have a ton of volatility around that. You know what to goal someone on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think though, that depending on what you\u2019re looking for, oftentimes people will sort of. Conflate a growth marketer with a bunch of things. Sometimes it can be, oh, I want someone who can do paid, who can go do the website, who can maybe build product here and there, et cetera. And I <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:13:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> think in that case, you want someone who\u2019s more technical.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So our, our first couple growth hires at Unify were all folks who came from very non-traditional marketing backgrounds. And so whether it\u2019s somebody coming out of investing or it\u2019s somebody coming out of, being an engineer, we find that those more technical backgrounds just lend themselves to solving problems from first principles.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that\u2019s ultimately a lot of what we do. And so, we found a ton of success with, our growth leader named Bria today. she comes from a background of having been an engineer and also having, been at Bridgewater as an engineer there as well. And that sort of like mentality of how do I solve this problem from first principles just translates really well to being able to solve channels in ways that you hadn\u2019t really thought about.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And ultimately, like that distribution is the advantage that we\u2019re looking for. at a startup, we could build the best product in the world, but if nobody hears about it then it doesn\u2019t really matter. And so, that ability to think outside the box is something we really value. And that technical persona, I think has, tends to have a lot more of that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You are speaking our language. Austin distribution is definitely the moat. And I mean that, that\u2019s your background too, right? You <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:14:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> came from the investment side, you\u2019ve got that first principle\u2019s problem solving perspective, so it makes sense that you also recognize that in others and you hire us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, definitely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Are there signs. Perhaps that a team is trying to be technical, but maybe missing the mark bit.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I like this question. Yes, The goal of anything that we try to build is to keep it simple. Like even if we\u2019re doing something that\u2019s incredibly sophisticated and nuanced, we want that system to be really simple and scalable because. It sets us up to be able to plug more people into that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It sets us in to be able to easily improve it. It sets us up to learn from what we\u2019re testing and iterating on. And I think sometimes in today\u2019s world, some folks have a tendency to try to over-engineer a solution to a problem that\u2019s actually pretty simple. And so sometimes we may try to make things technical or we may try to write things in code when they.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Could be built in another system that makes them easier to use. And I think our bias is to keep things really simple because it means that it\u2019s gonna be just much more scalable. Ultimately the reason why technical matters and being technical matters is that you <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:15:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> can, build the system that goes from point A to point B.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And ideally it\u2019s as simple and as. Clean as possible to do that. If you start over-engineering things, all of a sudden you get a very complex system that\u2019s hard to maintain, hard to manage, and it\u2019s just gonna break more. And, um, that\u2019s ultimately not. In service of what you\u2019re after. The way that we actually think about this is that the way that we avoid over-engineering solutions is that the folks on our growth team just don\u2019t pipeline goals.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so there\u2019s a strong accountability around, I\u2019ve gotta drive a number. My job isn\u2019t to build the most creative elaborate system ever. It\u2019s actually to drive this number. And yes, you\u2019re gonna have to write some code from that. You\u2019re gonna have to try some things through outside the box, but the idea is, the thing that matters most is the impact rather than the actual solution that you\u2019re building.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love it. That makes sense. Great answer. And you mentioned data. And ingesting data for growth themes. You\u2019re also doing that at Unify. Overall, what are systems that you\u2019ve seen work well to perhaps operationalize product informed growth?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So product informed growth, Takes a couple <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:16:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> different, I would say, like mediums. And one of the most, you know, well understood ways has been this idea of taking product usage data, drag product usage data, and turning that into, into some sort of growth channel. So classic example is a PLG company that orchestrates and upsell let\u2019s say you\u2019ve got linear and linear has got 25 users.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">They upsold their, you know, you added 26. That\u2019s sort of a signal that you should be reaching out. That works really well. Uh, not for linear necessarily. I don\u2019t know about their operations, but I\u2019m just saying it for a PLG company, you got another bucket, which is sort of a marry between first and third party data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Maybe you\u2019ve got a little bit of first party data and so whether it\u2019s website visitors or maybe a free user sign up and you\u2019ve got some third party data as well, which is like, things like, Hey, what technographics is this company using based off of going to their job descriptions and seeing what tools they reference as being important, or it\u2019s people starting in new, sort of like jobs within your ICP.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for us, when a new VP of marketing as an example, starts, you\u2019ve got this sort of other blend <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:17:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> of, of data that has a little bit of product usage, but a little bit of third party, that\u2019s the world that unify plays in a ton. Ideally, what you have is a system around these data points that makes it easy to understand the full user journey.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And inherent in that is that you\u2019ve got a bunch of different data sets that you need to join together. Selfishly, I\u2019m gonna shell my own product here, but Unify does an incredible job at this. And that\u2019s actually a lot of the beauty of what we do is that we take these disparate data sets, we actually take a perspective on the joining and the transformation of them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So they fit together in a way that makes a lot of sense. And so one of the most exciting experiences about Unify is you actually can drop somebody into the product, integrate a couple different data sources, and then they can see this incredibly clean timeline of. All these activities that their customers have taken are things happening on the account?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It could be a move champion somebody coming to the technical docs to read about the product. Somebody starting in a new role. And once you\u2019ve got sort of that core DA data foundation, I. Making taking an action off of that is actually quite simple. And so, historically the way that companies were doing this five years ago was with modern <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:18:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Data Stack, so data warehouse, DBT and or coalesce, something like that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then something like a high touch or a census to pipe data into different tools. Fairly brittle system. Also incredibly difficult to stand up. You usually need data engineering resources to do that really well. In this new world, you actually can just do all that outside outta the box with Unify, which is really powerful.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That is super powerful. are you seeing any kind of, broken data sets? I think that\u2019s a common ask we get from our founders is, you know, we don\u2019t know what kind of data we can pull in and we don\u2019t have reliability around those data sources. Is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Totally. Yeah, we, we actually spend a lot of time at the beginning of our customer engagements just thinking with them about the strategy and so usually. will come in with the best teams will come in with a few ideas, you know, something they thought about, something they saw on LinkedIn, et cetera, but they haven\u2019t fully thought through the strategy and that this is even a strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so usually we sit down with folks and for the first call, like month of the engagement, help them think through the strategy. What are the signals that matter, what are the plays you <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:19:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> might wanna run on top of that? Help understand and, and organize that. And then once you\u2019ve got that. Standing up the plays is actually relatively simple, but it is sort of that, that ideation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we find that the best companies today are able to craft, call it 25 to 50 different plays that they wanna be running at any given time. And each of those is delivering a handful of meetings a month. You stack that up and you\u2019ve got this incredible growth program. So it\u2019s cool to see that in practice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But yes, the data foundations definitely matter a ton.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So let\u2019s say you\u2019ve got that data foundation. \u2019cause that is a common ask we get from startups. Now that you\u2019ve got it, what does that look like from an impact on outbound perspective?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So we believe really strongly that. You\u2019ve got two different ways of going to market off this data. One is a fully automated approach and one is a human in loop approach. Both really matter and that synergistic equation between the two is really valuable. So, but you, what you want to do is drive the right message to the right time to the right person.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like that needs to be true. That\u2019s the real framework <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:20:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that we operate in, where you\u2019re gonna create the most impact because you know, ultimately. If you\u2019re, so, if somebody, you know, as an example, shows up to your website browsing around your PI pricing page, you take two weeks to reach out to them, they\u2019ve probably already made their decision, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Or they\u2019re in a conversation with somebody else at that point. So the timeliness really matters. so we end up spending you know, a lot of time helping companies to build these systems that do want, or that, that take those two approaches. The way that we start on the automated side is typically Within Unify, we\u2019ll help companies build plays that go from data point to actually action. All that happens within Unify, and we actually manage that full. workflow for somebody. We actually typically are used to companies using a tiering model. So on the account side, usually what happens is somebody will have tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four accounts, something along those lines.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tier one is really what they want their sellers to focus on. Anything beyond that, they\u2019re usually not covering super well. So what we\u2019ll do is we\u2019ll usually recommend an automated approach for tier two to tier four, and then for anything that\u2019s in tier one, usually what we\u2019ll do is tie in a human in the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:21:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> loop and usually the best companies are actually intermixing LinkedIn messages, voice notes, dials, whatever it might be on the human side.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And we find that both of those added together just create a ton of a ton of impact. So it\u2019s usually the approach that we are finding the best companies are taking to actually act on the data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It makes sense, and I mean, signal\u2019s a powerful, powerful word overall. You mentioned buying intent. Is that how you describe it, really in the context of how humans buy? Because now we\u2019re talking a lot about signal based selling, you know, signals. Overall, what does that actually mean to you? Somebody that\u2019s deep in the space and an expert in the space?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Signal corresponds with that moment to reach out is like really what it means to me. And so, you know, it could be something that the buyer is doing. It could be something that\u2019s third party. You know, it, there\u2019s a lot of ways to read into it. What we\u2019ll see is I would say one thing that is happening quite a bit today is that this idea of enrichment and signals are sort of being intermixed together and I do think that they are quite important to break out and so enrichment, what do I mean by <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:22:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Somebody, people are using clay to build these sort of like bigger audiences or bigger lists of companies, their total addressable market in a way that they can then. Go action against that. It\u2019s super, super valuable. Right. I would say that building up that original list though, is, is, is more on the enrichment side, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It\u2019s more in this world of, Hey, I\u2019ve got a list of companies that I want to go after. Historically, companies would\u2019ve done this in ZoomInfo or Apollo or something like that. Now it\u2019s happening in this product, and you\u2019re able to get just much tighter enrichment, right? You\u2019re able to get these qualities that are coming from data sources that you historically wouldn\u2019t have been able to, like as an example, classifying a company as PLG or not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That wasn\u2019t a data point that something like Apollo or ZoomInfo could offer. When I think about signals signals is then the actions and the behavioral data that\u2019s happening on top of that list of accounts that you care about to tell you when\u2019s the right time to reach out. So, you know, we\u2019ve got a laundry list of them and unify everything from, you know, user signs up for your product to someone\u2019s on the website, browsing around to, you\u2019ve got somebody who starts in a new <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:23:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> job within one of your top.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">To your accounts and those are sort of like the right moments and nuggets to be engaging with that account. And usually the strategy that we\u2019re trying to, ideally you have a well enough understanding of signal and you\u2019ve been able to build all the architecture to to move data off of them that you can actually be engaging with accounts call it like once a quarter off of a signal that\u2019s best in class we see is you\u2019ve able, been able to operationalize the strategy enough that when those data points come up, you\u2019re able to move really quickly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> what are your thoughts overall on signal accessibility? Because of course the question becomes, if everyone starts to be able to connect with the same signals, then. It doesn\u2019t break out from the noise. It becomes noise eventually, and maybe it won\u2019t, but what happens then? How do we make sure that not everybody\u2019s prying on the same signal?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If the signals are good, I think it doesn\u2019t matter as much. I guess my point being that if you get the timing right somebody who\u2019s in market <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:24:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is gonna, it\u2019s in their best interest to, to take a quick look at what you\u2019re doing. And I find that really the thing that stands out is relevant more than anything If you can, Show up to a conversation and just show you\u2019ve done your research and show that you know the customer, you know their market, you understand their problems and their pain points. We find that that is actually a much better way to be standing out than to be reaching out and saying like, Hey, so and so, like I noticed you started a new job like in 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">That\u2019s just not actually differentiating anymore, but being able to use that as the. The reason why you\u2019re reaching out and then to be able to show sort of what you know and build really strong relevance, it goes a really long ways. And so I think in that world, like hopefully what we start pushing down is this idea of, uh, of re relevance being super important.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019ll give you an example is like, I bought a product from Carta like a year ago off a cold outbound email from them. I had a to-do list item on my, notepad of I needed to go out and find some sort of solution to, employees understanding equity compensation, it\u2019s a huge problem at startups.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just generally speaking, folks ask a lot of questions and there\u2019s a lot left to <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:25:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> be understood that it\u2019s not well researched. Carta has a, has a product around that. They had reached out to me and it was just like the timing was perfect. The messaging was like very clear. I understood what the offering was and how it fit in and bought the product within like six hours.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so I think in an ideal world, like that\u2019s sort of the model we move to. Is that like. You get the timing piece right, you actually can make a ton of decisions really quickly because you\u2019re getting relevant research there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think that almost flips it on its head where a lot of people say, oh, we don\u2019t like being sold to. But the reality is we like being helped. We like our lives easier. And when it does that and when the resonance is there, when the message is great, it is helpful. It\u2019s actually saving you something on your to-do list.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yep. Definitely.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I remember back a little while I was running an outbound program and there was no difference in terms of performance between the automated version and a personalized version based on relevance. So when somebody identified it as a key relevant priority, no difference in terms of performance, which was shocking at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is going years back before a lot of the sophistication that we have now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Buyers just wanna solve problems, and if you can prove that <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:26:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> you\u2019re the best person to solve that problem for them like that they\u2019ll take you up on that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Definitely. And what was broken about outbound when you decided to build unify? Was there a moment that tipped it for you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I, I had spent quite a few years around this world of like outbound and outbound automation and so was well aware of just like the problem space. I think the biggest thing was that I. When we started unifying early 2023, we saw just this huge crescendo of the old way of the world no longer working right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The world was sort of recovering from this VC hangover of 2021 and 2022 where the market had gotten, had gotten really exorbitant, and things were really easy to sell. All of a sudden we\u2019re course correcting in 2023. It was impossibly hard to sell. Growth rates across the board and public companies are slowing down.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Go-To-Market efficiency is, is, is just going through the floor. And I think the thing that really just stopped working at that time is just you couldn\u2019t spray and pray anymore. This had sort of been building up over the last five to 10 years. You know, we saw the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:27:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> rise of the sales engagement platforms like Outreach and SalesLoft, et cetera.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sort of create this idea of cadences become really popular and then. They continue to proliferate. But I think what we saw is just that strategy just stopped working. And come 2023 companies were looking for a new way of going about things. They were looking for a new way outbound still mattered.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Controlling your own destiny still really mattered, but we needed a new strategy. And, um, we just believed really deeply in this idea of signal based selling and using these, these insights at the right time to actually break through the noise. And so I think it was just, what\u2019s the saying? Like, it\u2019s like success is like the combination of like luck and like timing and something like that. Anyways I think it was a combination of those things that we understood the space really well. You know, we had actually been practitioners in it before and I had built in the space and my co-founder Connor, Had well understood the technology that would actually power all of it. And that plus like this compelling event of the world falling apart and outbound no longer working in 2023 sort of was the catalyst to, to really leaning into the company.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love it. That makes sense. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:28:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And, success equals hard work, luck and timing, I think is at least one variation. I think there\u2019s a bunch of variations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That\u2019s it, that\u2019s what I was looking for.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And what about today? So if you are building or you\u2019re advising another founder who\u2019s building outbound from scratch today, where do you start?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, tech message people, what does that foundational step look like?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, so. I guess I can offer two pieces on this. So one is that I think for most companies, like the best way to get started with outbound unless you have this sort of DNA on your team already, is to find a great agency partner to work with and to lean into that in the early days. So test messaging, test tactics, et cetera.<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, if, if it\u2019s helpful for folks, I\u2019m happy to, happy to recommend. But I, I\u2019ve got a ton of folks in our, in our network that have just been proven to get companies to success on outbound. And I think the reason why I suggest that approach is that there\u2019s so many pieces that go into getting it right, which is why it\u2019s so hard, right?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You\u2019ve gotta get the technical things right. You\u2019ve gotta get email deliverability, right? <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:29:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You\u2019ve gotta get the systems talking together. You\u2019ve gotta get the messaging. You\u2019ve gotta get the signals, you\u2019ve gotta get the CRM pieces and you\u2019ve gotta get the copy as well. And all those things take a lot of nuance.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think in particular we find that, nine outta 10 companies we work with are, they really struggle with copywriting. Uh, and doing so in an outbound context. It\u2019s incredibly different to pitch someone cold over email versus to be writing copy for your website and it shows up and how people, you know, tend to.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tend to approach outbound. So I think agency partners can be a really good way of just going from zero to one, getting some of those learnings outta the way, and then you can always in-house or double down on that with your own team. For us at Unify, what we found was that, uh, so I had quite a bit of background in outbound and then our first AE Skylar also had a ton of background in outbound business development.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, we sat down at a coffee shop one day and just like hashed out different ideas for. The thing that really broken the through the noise for us, uh, at Unify was, this is before we had even 10 customers. we just sat down and got incredibly <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:30:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> specific about the types of people that we wanted to go after.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we\u2019re on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, building these lists of a hundred to 200 people that. Not only had the job titles we cared about but had like specific keywords in their profiles that signaled that they cared about the problem space that that we do. Whether it was tooling they use or their goals as an example, like we would look for marketers that would mention like that they had owned outbound, which is like sort of a weird microcosm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And use that as the reason why we would reach out. We would send them a super personalized message, et cetera. We actually found that in doing that we were able to one, hone our product market fit because we really understood precisely who and with what message would respond to us. Well, even with very little credibility.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, two, we just started putting meetings on the board. We would. See something like a 15 to 20% response rate to the message we were sending out. And nobody was telling us to, like, no one was like unsubscribed. It was like people were always engaging in the conversation, which I think was a good indicator to us that that was working.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you can take it a couple ways if you want to go agency versus taking it in-house.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I\u2019m <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:31:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> sure you got faster feedback loops too, just from responses to outbound and then the calls itself that were generated.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, exactly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So what if a company wants to and believes in signal based selling? When are they mature enough? Like when you\u2019re recommending that, at what point does it make sense for them to be ingesting all these signals?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I do think in general. Once you\u2019ve gotten to the place of. you\u2019ve got tens of customers, you\u2019re probably at a place where you can start leveraging signals. The first one that I\u2019ll usually recommend folks get started with is new hires, which is one that we offer. So, hey, new VP of marketing starts in this category.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reason why is that that audience is just always refreshing for you, and it\u2019s actually not dependent upon your company and your. Brand awareness. There are a lot of other signals like website intent data that are very dependent upon brand awareness, but this one\u2019s not. So usually it\u2019ll recommend starting there because you can start to get, that was actually the first signal that we ran at Unify as an automated approach was we would see these people would start a new jobs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We would automate the reach out with the message around that. And that worked for us. You\u2019d book five to 10 meetings, a month, which was a, a great <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:32:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> strategy. At a certain point, you\u2019ll hit a tipping point probably around like series A, series B, where you actually have enough critical mass around your brand, where you\u2019ve got caught like 5,000 to 10,000 monthly website visitors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You\u2019ve got tens of customers, maybe you have a PLG motion, and people are sort of signing up self-service at this point. And at that point, it\u2019s important to start building the foundations for signal based selling because it helps you to amplify and double down on the things that you\u2019ve already gotten to work, which is exactly what you\u2019re just gonna find a lot of wins in there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Awesome. What parts. Of your growth experience from the past or investor experience have been most valuable in building unify?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think it\u2019s just a little bit of this, , I think the biggest thing is just like the humility to fail over and over again, and like the willingness to, to do that. So, and growth something that. I always tell our team is that you\u2019re gonna fail two outta three times. And like, that\u2019s actually good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like that\u2019s a good hit rate. It\u2019s sort of like baseball in that way. And I think there\u2019s just an element of. You open up a risk taking mentality when you do that and you have that sort of <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:33:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> right DNA where you\u2019re not afraid to fail because that is actually the default and what\u2019s gonna happen more often than not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think you need to have that sort of, you need to have that sort of DNA on the team, on a growth team and it, you know, it applies to a bunch of different. Places it applies to being a founder. It applies to taking big swings on ideas and building product and all these ideas. But it started for me in growth and I think that\u2019s been really powerful.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think it actually, for us on the growth team today, it opens us up to find new opportunities because we\u2019re willing to take the risk. We do so in a calculated way, but we are exploring the problem space and we will find wins because we know how to execute through it. So, I think that\u2019s personally the thing that sort of crescendos into a bunch of other areas of the work that I do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love the baseball analogy. One of my favorite sayings is around just how Babe Ruth led the league in home runs, but also in strikeouts. So it kind of gives that perspective<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> what does it feel like to really lead an organization where failure is the norm or where it\u2019s encouraged.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For me, it feels really natural. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:34:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I feel like I\u2019m generally like a more truth seeking person. I want to get to the right answer rather than it being like, you know, whose perspective wins or whatnot. I think ultimately I\u2019m just looking for the right answer. I think culturally though, if you\u2019re gonna do that, you have to set a few things up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You\u2019ve gotta just like get in the mode of like culturally celebrating losses as learnings, you know? I think that\u2019s something that matters a lot And I think this shows up in a bunch of different ways. Like this example on the growth team, we\u2019ll do, uh, you know, a monthly retro where we talk through ideas that didn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also though hold ourselves accountable for tracking all of our experiments. So the ones that don\u2019t work, we can like sometimes have a variation of that that will work, and we sort of write that out and we\u2019re clear about it. I definitely think it\u2019s not for everybody. You know, it\u2019s, uh, it definitely sucks to to lose sometimes, but I think if you can build that right DNA and build that right culture and.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Build the right amount of safe space to experiment. And the, the thing I, I used to always tell the growth team at RAMP was, Hey, the only time that we are, the only time that we are losing is if we are not learning from the experiment. If it works, great, fantastic. That\u2019s a win. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:35:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If it doesn\u2019t work, but we learn something from that, that\u2019s also a win.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What we can\u2019t do is not hold ourselves accountable for finding the learning. And I think ultimately same thing at Unify. That matters a lot. But, uh, I like it. I, I thrive in this environment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love that. I love that. I don\u2019t think she actually started the saying, but she\u2019s who I first heard it from. But Pa Akia, the founder of ClassPass in her book. Life path said, failure\u2019s just a data point. And so like you said, if you\u2019re not getting that data point from it, that\u2019s actually the failure.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Otherwise, it\u2019s just data at the end of the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> totally.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And what did you really have to unlearn when you became a founder after building these teams of scale, especially at ramp?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think the frameworks still really apply. You know, I would say like how to operate, how to grow a growth team, all that sort of stuff is very, is something that I definitely learned from. And I think, like another thing that I really learned was you gotta, it, it\u2019s all hard work. You know, I think outside data always looks up into the right, but like under the hood it\u2019s, it\u2019s a lot of hard work that\u2019s going <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:36:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> in these things.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think you can\u2019t discount that. In terms of unlearning, it\u2019s really important to I think just be o open-minded, especially like the first time for me, I, when I was stepping into starting Unify first time founder, I. Learning all these experiences for the first time, I think it\u2019s, it\u2019s important to be open-minded about that and to not write things off ahead of time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I also think the biggest thing that I\u2019ve had to do is at an earlier stage, you just have to take big swings. And, you know, I join Rampant 40 people. When you join a company that has some reasonable amount of scale, you start getting into more of a mindset of like, you\u2019re taking less, you\u2019re not taking quite as big of swings.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oftentimes. Usually it\u2019s like, Hey, how do we build the machine 25 50% better? Not, how do we think about this crazy outside the box idea that\u2019s gonna take us to the next level? I think one of the biggest things that I\u2019ve had to reset. That I have to think about that often. What is like the step change function that we\u2019re missing out on?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is the thing that could really, really work that doesn\u2019t today? And I think that\u2019s just something you just gotta, I, I\u2019ve become a lot more accustomed to <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:37:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> practicing over the past two years and it\u2019s now a ton of fun for me. But I don\u2019t think it was as natural when I first got going in the company besides the idea of like, Hey, we\u2019re gonna go start a new company and go raise money and all that stuff.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. I\u2019m really interested to hear your perspective around this, of course. Ai. What are your thoughts on AI\u2019s impact on growth teams? Do early stage companies? Still need growth teams or is it shifting towards great ai? It.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They definitely do. I think there\u2019s just like a lot of slop that AI can create. I ai leveraged in the right way is obviously fantastic. I use it. So many times every day to do my just general day job. But I do think that there is a ton of. Things that AI can\u2019t do. AI cannot be a very good strategist today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that will evolve over time and you\u2019ll start to have humans assisted on the strategy side by ai, but I don\u2019t think we\u2019re quite there yet. So I do think having a great growth team is really important. One of the things that AI has really opened up in growth teams is just like the ability to marry growth and sales teams in a way that wasn\u2019t possible before.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think one of the things that we\u2019re seeing the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:38:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> best teams doing today. Is bringing together how their growth team works with their BDR team as an example, and having that be a system that works together rather than a sort of silo, disjointed set of teams that didn\u2019t get along super well. Like I think we started unify.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the things that was really common that we would hear is, I. Marketers would be like, yeah, I\u2019ll give my list of prospects to the BDR team and they\u2019ll just never follow up. And it\u2019s super painful. And I think what we found is that AI has actually been a really good bridge for that. And our own product is becoming more and more that surface area.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the answer was a lot of times like, yeah, like BDRs oftentimes have really great prospects and folks they want to go after. If you make their lives easier using ai, then sure they\u2019re gonna lean into it more. But if you just try to give them more work, they won\u2019t. I think in that context we\u2019re finding that the best teams are able to use AI to sort of like grease the wheels and make sure that, hey, we\u2019re not asking teams to do work, that they could actually be, we could be automating.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so that\u2019s been, I think, really exciting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If I push you a bit further on that, what does that look like tactically? You mentioned in the product, it <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:39:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> could be in your product, it could be external of your product, but what does that actual lockstep look like?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For a growth team, AI is a way to automate actions. And it\u2019s a way to scale creativity, right? So, you know, you run a plan in unify. Historically, we\u2019ve had to run this manual job. We can automate all the prospecting work to 10,000 accounts in a matter of minutes that, that wasn\u2019t possible before.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But let\u2019s say you got, you know, a thousand in there that you think are really worth doubling down on and having humans dial into them, all that stuff. What that looks like in practice, in Unify is that you actually can pass those prospects off to a BDR. You can share with them all of the research that you\u2019ve done of why this is somebody that\u2019s interesting to go after.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, this is a tier one account. Hey, you know, I noticed they\u2019re using X, Y, Z competitors. I know that because they mention them on these job postings that are no longer up. I saw that they hired X, Y, Z people really recently. I think it\u2019s about just sharing that context, right? In a, in the, like the right accessible way where that person doesn\u2019t have to go look for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you do that. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:40:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Somebody\u2019s gonna take the action then because they\u2019ve got all this research, it\u2019s all powered by AI behind the scenes. Maybe in the future you can ask questions and say like, Hey, like, okay, but I wanna know about this as well. Like, what is this data point? And we actually can pull that up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think it\u2019s just a matter of simplifying the workflow, right? Historically, what you would\u2019ve seen is that. And we saw this when we were building the first version Unified product, we would literally see BDRs open 10 tabs and like go do this research of like going to everyone\u2019s website over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, we\u2019re just distilling that into like one screen where somebody can just act very quickly and have all the data that they need.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The browser tabs are being minimized. That is always a plus.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And what about AI\u2019s impact on other areas? Are there workflows that you\u2019ve automated at Unify that have material improved your own Go-To-Market outcomes, or that you\u2019re seeing customers do?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Two of the areas that we\u2019re seeing a lot of impact on today, well, three. One is using our own product. We actually power, depending on the quarter, anywhere between, call it like 15 to 30% of our new business from our own product. And <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:41:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> so<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Wow.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> that\u2019s obviously been a huge application and a huge growth accelerant for us. We also see that, I think two areas, customer support, uh, is a big one. And then just insights from sales calls. So customer support, we use pylon. And I think this idea of. Your support team shouldn\u2019t need to scale linearly with your company anymore, is how we think about it historically, right? When you grew your company, you needed to hire more support reps \u2019cause you had more tickets.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But today one of the key North Star metrics that we track internally is what percent of support tickets are we fully automating with an AI agent? And we want that number to continuously be going up into the right. To do that, we have to be building new articles, new knowledge base pieces that. AI can learn from and answer from.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">But if we continue to do that well we\u2019re seeing that that\u2019s paying a ton of dividends in terms of us just being able to deliver a better customer experience for the users of our product. So that\u2019s been a huge win. Another area is this idea of learning from sales calls. You know, just like we use attention for that personally for call recording, which is another great product.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:42:00]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you know, we are. You know, I just, last night I was poking around and I\u2019m trying to understand like competitive analysis on us versus how are people talking about our competitors? Is it on pricing? Is it on feature functionality? What are the things they care about historically, right? You would\u2019ve had to literally go parse through, I don\u2019t know, hundreds of calls and just like try to like control F and look for the right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, verbiage, et cetera. But I actually now can just run that analysis in a matter of minutes and understand exactly who\u2019s saying what. I can dive into the insights and the anecdotes that people are mentioning, and I\u2019m excited about how that\u2019s gonna feed into our product roadmap. I\u2019m excited about how that\u2019s gonna feed into how we better objection handle against certain things that competitors bring up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, lots, lots more to come there, but I think it really is transforming, it makes us just ask, Hey, like, is there a better way of doing this? At any, at every step of the journey, which is a lot of fun,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Very cool. And what are you most excited about looking forward if you pull out your magic ball? Around operationalizing and supporting your Go-To-Market with <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:43:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI that maybe we\u2019re not at yet, but you anticipate we\u2019re getting to.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> we\u2019re at the precipice of an unlock where. This idea of relevance, right? Is at, at the fingertips of ai. Like we historically haven\u2019t been there because you need, you need this unique combination of data and. The workflow layer around that data to be able to create that at scale. And I think we\u2019re just a couple quarters away from being able to do that with our own product at Unify, where we actually can just send hyper relevant messages to the right people at the right time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, we have, I. We definitely have strong messaging capabilities, but there\u2019s a level of like being able to mimic humans, understand their intonation on a personal level, being able to pull in, um, you know, just in time research on whatever data point you care about. And I think that unlock is gonna be really big because I think we\u2019re gonna get to a point very soon where spotting AI slot today in your inbox is pretty easy, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s gonna be as easy with a lot of great products in the next, like six to 12 <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:44:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> months. So that\u2019ll be something that\u2019ll be a, a really interesting unlock.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Very, yeah, we\u2019re definitely in the transitional phase right now where some are being done incredibly well and, and some quite the opposite, so it\u2019ll be interesting to see that at more at mass. What is on the product roadmap? If you can share, if you\u2019re open to sharing anything, coming up down the pipe Yeah,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> yeah. We\u2019ve been doing a ton of work for BDRs, so lots more to share there very soon. But one thing that\u2019s been a very common thread over the past year and change is that, uh, you know, our product was originally built for growth teams, right? Which is a very unorthodox way of thinking about outbound, but we found that growth teams, the.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experimentation. The idea of using plays, kind of like campaigns really resonated. But something that was always missing was, Hey, great, like, but I\u2019ve got this, you know, really high value prospect. I wanna pass that off to my sales team. How do I do that? Historically, that was something that we didn\u2019t do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We would pass it off to, you know, we\u2019d create a task in Salesforce or something like that. But it was <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:45:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> pretty, pretty rudimentary. Coming soon. We have a big announcement around, our work for BDRs and in particular, how they work really closely with somebody we called to be like the outbound quarterback, who\u2019s sort of our main champion today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And, we\u2019re using this product internally today, and it\u2019s been mind blowing. So excited to share with the<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Wow, alright, we\u2019ll keep our eyes out. And Austin, last two questions always the same. What is one tactic or strategy that\u2019s working for you today? And I know we\u2019ve talked about a bunch, so maybe if there\u2019s one you haven\u2019t touched on yet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> One tactic that\u2019s working for me today. We, I\u2019ve just got it. I just, it\u2019s, it\u2019s too good. Just not the hammer home, the. You\u2019ve gotta own, I think social today in this world, it\u2019s, it\u2019s a really important medium. And you know, I think y\u2019all obviously do this incredibly well at at the GTM Fund, but for us at Unified, just like the level of credibility that we\u2019ve gotten from LinkedIn in particular, and just like being prolific writers about our space I couldn\u2019t overstate how valuable that\u2019s been to us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so, even though we\u2019ve talked about it already, I do <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:46:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> think it\u2019s important to just like reinforce, it\u2019s like. For us, LinkedIn is where our audience lives. It\u2019s where we reach them. And that\u2019s been really powerful for us. You know, I, I think most of the companies that are taking off today have some form of social that they really own, whether it\u2019s LinkedIn or X or Discord or whatever it might be.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just know where your audience is and start practicing reaching them. \u2019cause it\u2019s just been, it\u2019s just been so powerful for us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That\u2019s a great one to hammer, hone, and a really good kind of note there, just around your audience lives in different places, so figure out where they are and then show up in those places.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What about if we flip that on its head a little bit, what\u2019s one widely held belief that revenue hold leaders or founders have today that you think is bullshit or no longer serving us?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I just think this idea of, I think the role of the marketer and the growth person is really changing and. I think no one\u2019s quite put their finger on this yet, but I, I do think that this era of hire a traditional marketer to go do a small segment of the <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:47:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> marketing function is, is slowly, it\u2019s not working.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, we see it happen time and time again with our customers, but I, I do think you\u2019re gonna see this rise of. Call it a growth engineer. Call it like, just like a growth operator, call it like a growth manager. This idea of somebody who owns a pipeline goal, who is more technical, who is more systems oriented, who can think from first principles and and problem solve.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think we\u2019re gonna see a lot more of the rise of that person as sort of the go-to marketer going forward and the go-to person who owns pipeline goals. And people are starting to put their finger on this, but I still think it\u2019s quite early. And just time and time again, we find that the best folks are the ones who are able to.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Take product like principles and apply them to growth. And so that\u2019s what I\u2019m, I\u2019m really bullish on<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I love it. What a fantastic way to end off. And Austin, where can people find you? I know we talked about LinkedIn, so I\u2019m, I\u2019m gonna throw out LinkedIn already, but where should people find you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Find me on LinkedIn. Definitely that\u2019s a, a great spot. And then you can also find me on X or <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">[00:48:00]<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Twitter at Austin h with three underscores after that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Beautiful. We will link to those in the show notes. Austin, thank you so much for the time, for the insight. Excited for that launch in a couple weeks. We\u2019re gonna keep our eyes out and to the audience, thank you for hanging with us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Austin Hughes:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Thanks for having me, Sophie.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophie Buonassisi:<\/strong><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You bet. All right, we\u2019ll catch everyone next week.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/gtm-153-building-technical-growth-machines-signal-based-selling-with-austin-hughes\/\">GTM 153: Building Technical Growth Machines &amp; Signal-Based Selling with Austin Hughes<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\">GTMnow<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Austin Hughes is the founder and CEO of\u00a0Unify, a platform helping <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/01\/gtm-153-building-technical-growth-machines-signal-based-selling-with-austin-hughes\/\" class=\"read-more-link\">[Read More&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions\/357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alaskansawmill.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}