Podcasts about ICP

Michael Ray Bower: Some listeners reached out to Donkeylips himself to record a cameo for your boys at Jim and Them. Donkeylips likes what we do but also thinks we are lowlifes because he likes Corey?Michael Jordan: Why is Michael Jordan rubbing that little kid's butt at the Daytona 500? Also more and more sober people are being arrested for DUI.Doordash Delivery Chaos: A food delivery driver is busted putting his shoes on peoples' food. A lady foolishly says she didn't get her delivery at her job and Jim has tales of being Chaotic Good while delivering food. Also some TikTok classics like Daredevil Deb, bad Improv Group and RozTHE BEAR!, FUCK YOU WATCH THIS!, MICHAEL JACKSON!, BILLIE JEAN!, DONKEY LIPS!, SALUTE YOUR SHORTS!, MICHAEL RAY BOWER!, DABBLEVERSE!, CHARACTER!, THE BOY BLUE!, ICP!, BIGGEST FANS!, E-BEGGING!, CAMEO!, POGATS!, SCHIZ NASTY!, KRUSTY THE CLOWN ERA!, SALUTE THE SHORTS!, BUDNICK!, UG!, DONKEYLIPS!, NICKELODEON!, CAMEO!, GET A JOB!, FENCE SITTER!, PICK A SIDE!, MICHAEL JORDAN!, DAYTONA 500!, LITTLE KID!, BUTT!, FUCK ICE!, RUB DOWN!, MEMORY HOLE!, WET!, EPSTEIN FILES!, DRACULA!, WOLFMAN!, MONSTERS!, YN!, ARRESTED!, DUI!, SOBER!, SOBRIETY TEST!, JEFF BIT!, ARRESTED!, ASPERGER'S!, AUTISTIC!, SOBERING PROBLEM!, FAILED!, BREATHALYZER!, BLOOD TEST!, ADD!, MEDICATION!, DOORDASH DRIVER!, MONSTER DELIVERY PERSON!, PUT DOWN!, SHOES!, FOOD!, BUSTED!, JOB!, WORK!, DIDN'T GET FOOD!, BUSTED!, CONFRONTED!, PASSIVE AGRESSIVE!, ICE COLD!, AC!, WATER DOWN MOUNTAIN DEW!, BLACK LADY BONNET!, DAREDEVIL DEB!, FALLING!, COMEDY CLUB!, STUNTS!, IMPROV!, VIRAL!, BAD!, REALLY BAD!, CRINGE!, ROZ!, WEIRDOS!, NEIGHBORS!, DRUGS!, LONELY!, BALLOONS!, ALEVE! You can find the videos from this episode at our Discord RIGHT HERE!

In this episode, Duane Mancini sits down with Sarah to unpack her path from healthcare operator to investor and what founders should know when raising capital today. Sarah shares how her experience as the 10th employee at a digital health startup shaped her empathy for founders and the practical lens she brings to diligence, from ICP and pricing to building durable foundations early. The conversation pulls back the curtain on venture mechanics—how syndication and relationships really work, why fundraising is difficult when LPs demand DPI, and how fund structure, lifecycle, and co-investments can shape outcomes for startups. Sarah also explains Angelini Ventures' global strategy and thesis-driven focus in areas like cardiology and neurology, and why “exitability” requires forward-looking insight into strategic buyers, technology shifts, and long-term fit.Sarah Fox LinkedInAngelini Ventures WebsiteDuane Mancini LinkedInProject Medtech WebsiteProject Medtech LinkedInThank you to our sponsors: Ward Law and JumpStart Inc.

Reach Out Via Text!As spring kicks off and call volume starts ramping up, Jeremiah breaks down exactly how he's structuring call intake, time management, and estimate workflows inside Growing Green Landscapes. He shares the simple systems he's using — from LMN Crew and Google Calendar to Calendly — to eliminate chaos, reduce stress, and protect the company's reputation as it scales. The conversation moves into real-world lessons about AI receptionists, sales-to-operations handoffs, and why documentation during estimates matters more than ever. Jeremiah also opens up about pruning unprofitable clients, dialing in ICP, and positioning the business for smarter growth in 2025. If you're heading into spring feeling overwhelmed already, this one will ground you and give you a practical framework.OPS Event-https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1980729312694?aff=oddtdtcreatorSupport the show 10% off LMN Software- https://lmncompany.partnerlinks.io/growinggreenpodcast Signup for our Newsletter- https://mailchi.mp/942ae158aff5/newsletter-signup Book A Consult Call-https://stan.store/GrowingGreenPodcast Lawntrepreneur Academy-https://www.lawntrepreneuracademy.com/ The Landscaping Bookkeeper-https://thelandscapingbookkeeper.com/ Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/growinggreenlandscapes/ Email-ggreenlandscapes@gmail.com Growing Green Website- https://www.growinggreenlandscapes.com/

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the second track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP , "Riddle Box." Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss the Insane Clown Posse's carnivl mythology, talk about the full bodies of the Joker Cards , and tackle important topics like JCW going to war with other local feds!      The LinkTree is at https://linktr.ee/juggalorwd... Twitter/X: @JuggaloRWD IG: @JuggaloRWD Facebook: @JuggaloRWD TikTok: @JuggaloRWD Threads: @JuggaloRWD BlueSky: @JuggaloRWD The website is www.JuggaloRewind.com. Join us everywhere to talk to other listeners and about ICP, Twiztid and random juggalo nonsense. Email us at juggalorwd@gmail.com or call/text us at (810) 666-1570.        Join our Patreon! For only FOUR DOLLARS a month, you can join Kilnore's Army and get at least two bonus episodes per month, videos, chats and more! Even without paying, you can join the Patreon community! Become an official member of the Phat or Wack Pack today! -- Juggalo Rewind Patreon. Additional music provided by the IRTD. Voiceover work provided by Christmas. All music played is owned by the respective publishers and copywrite holders and is reproduced for review purposes only under fair use. #ForTheJuggaloCulture

How to Fix Your Underperforming B2B SaaS Funnel for Quick Revenue Wins In the fast-paced world of B2B SaaS, the ability to go to market, iterate on feedback, and close deals rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage. Unfortunately, many sales and marketing teams find themselves stalled by underperforming funnels that drain resources without delivering measurable results. When growth plateaus, the challenge lies in transforming these stagnant pipelines into high-velocity growth engines without requiring massive capital or long timelines. So, how can B2B SaaS teams identify the hidden leaks in their customer journey and unlock quick-win revenue through a strategic, data-driven approach? That's why we're talking to April Syed (CEO of Aperture Codex), who shares her expertise on fixing an underperforming B2B SaaS funnel for quick revenue wins. During our conversation, April discussed the importance of leveraging data to pinpoint “quick wins,” such as streamlining sales processes and eliminating high-friction points in user onboarding. She explained how to fix “conversion killers” like messaging misalignment and highlighted the necessity of aligning marketing and sales efforts to ensure a seamless experience. April also advocated for a culture of continuous testing, using small, incremental experiments to de-risk major strategic shifts. She emphasized the value of regular customer journey mapping to maintain a predictable, sustainable, and highly efficient path to profitable growth. https://youtu.be/VeeFMznhCfw Topics discussed in episode: [07:24] Why your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) must be a “living, breathing” document reviewed quarterly, not a static file sitting in a deck. [11:24] The critical mistake of treating marketing as a cost center rather than a revenue driver, and how it leads to “vanity metrics” over actual sales. [13:53] Why you should focus on small, incremental tests to “de-risk” big spends before committing to expensive strategies like rebrands. [18:05] The 5-Point Conversion Diagnostic: A framework to analyze time-to-value, messaging alignment, behavioral triggers, follow-up timing, and pricing friction. [23:07] A real-world example of how “pricing friction” (forcing an annual upgrade) caused a loyal promoter to churn to a competitor. [27:24] How to audit your funnel for “Quick Win” revenue opportunities in under 30 days by analyzing where deals stall in the CRM. [35:27] Why no marketing asset is ever “final”, and why high-traffic landing pages should be in a state of constant A/B testing. Companies and links mentioned: Apryl Syed on LinkedIn  Aperture Codex  Superhuman Notion  Motion Transcript Christian Klepp, Apryl Syed Apryl Syed  00:00 Brand for instance, doesn’t work itself into any metric, but it makes every metric better across the board. Sometimes we’re chasing these metrics and like the attribution of where a particular deal came from, or how did they find out about us, and we’re not thinking about all of the things that are outside in the flywheel that are, you know, causing that person to, yes, eventually convert. But were there seven or eight other things that kind of they interacted with. Christian Klepp  00:26 In the world of B2B SaaS speed is the name of the game. Get to market, quickly collect feedback, quickly iterate quickly and close deals quickly. But what happens if your sales and marketing teams get stuck with underperforming funnels that don’t generate the results you need? How can teams turn these funnels into growth machines without massive spend or long timelines? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today, I’ll be talking with Apryl Syed, who will be answering this question. She’s the CEO of ApertureCodex who gives founders the strategy and the psychology needed to jump into fast revenue gains. Let’s dive in. Okay, and away we go. Apryl Syed, welcome to the show. Apryl Syed  01:12 Thank you so much, Christian. I’m so excited to be here. Christian Klepp  01:15 Glad to have you on the show. I think we had such a great pre interview conversation. I kept telling myself I should have hit record, and I talked to you the first time, right? But, you know, two times is a charm or three times. But anyways, this is the second time we’re talking. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation Apryl, because we’re going to touch on a topic today that I think is not just relevant to sales teams. It’s really important to marketing teams as well. So I’m going to keep the audience in suspense just a little while longer while I set up this first question. Right? So you’re on a mission to help B2B SaaS teams turn underperforming funnels into growth machines without massive spend or lengthy timelines, and for people that didn’t hear that the first time, I think everybody wants something like that, right, quick results without spending massively, right? So for this conversation, I’d like to focus on the following topic and just unpack it from there, right? So how can SaaS teams leverage a quick win revenue approach for better and more predictable growth. And I mean, come on Apryl, who the heck doesn’t want that, right? Who doesn’t want predictable growth, right? So I want to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So first one is, where do you see many SaaS teams struggle with revenue growth? And the second question is, what are some of the key causes of this? Apryl Syed  02:44 It’s really great, by the way. As a side note, I got turned down for a podcast this week because they said I talked too much about quick wins, and they felt that it conflicted with their policy. I won’t mention the name, they’re an agency out there, but they were all about big spend, and they felt that I conflicted with that. And this exactly ties in. This is probably why the subject that I talk about so. Christian Klepp  03:13 Well, I’m sorry for them. Apryl Syed  03:15 Yeah, that’s okay. That’s okay. We don’t, we don’t match. You know, I’m not for everyone. Well, I think that, like SaaS teams don’t realize that they’ve got data. And within their data really, really lies some of the tweaks, opportunities and things like that that can make them extra revenue that they might not be looking at today. And I think, you know, perhaps it’s in tweaking their sales process. Maybe they don’t have a sales process misalignment between sales and marketing. Marketing is talking about one thing, sales is selling another thing, or could be marketing is marketing to one type of industry and user, and sales is saying that’s not the right user. It’s something completely different, that misalignment in itself causes revenue conflict, revenue opportunities. And you know, sometimes it’s spending on expensive tools before you’ve actually broken down some of those points in the funnel. Or could be tools that you’re getting a lot of data from, or they’re not doing anything with the data on a regular basis. So I think, you know, those are where I see some of those, like, struggle with revenue because of some of those issues and and then I think your second question was kind of like, well, how to, how do they kind of avoid some of those scenarios? Right? Christian Klepp  04:40 It was more about the the key causes, but you but, but you did talk about that already, right?   Apryl Syed  04:44 So, right, right? That definitely is there. Well, I think, you know, it’s also could be, you know, where they’re chasing certain metrics and focused in, and we had this conversation earlier. It’s like brand, for instance, doesn’t work at. Yourself into any metric, but it makes every metric better across the board. So sometimes we’re chasing these metrics and like the attribution of where a particular deal came from, or how did they find out about us, and we’re not thinking about all of the things that are outside in the flywheel that are, you know, causing that person to, yes, eventually convert. But were there seven or eight other things that kind of they interacted with before they got to that point? And we had to get them ready? So, you know, can definitely be about just chasing those metrics too much, which means you avoid doing things that don’t give you that instant metric. And I think that is a big challenge and pitfall that that teams can can certainly fall into. I think also the the challenge of treating marketing as a cost center and not letting them be in charge of all of those metrics down to the sale that happen. And that might sound weird to some folks, but I’ve certainly been in enough teams and enough experiences across you know my background that I’ve seen that sometimes you can make a change in marketing. It produces a lot of leads, but those leads aren’t qualifying and they’re not turning into revenue, and yet, if the metric is producing leads, well then marketing can walk away the end of the day and meet their metrics and jobs, but if the metric is revenue, then they’ve got to go all the way to that end cycle and see that it’s a qualified opportunity. That, of course, goes back to my original point that if sales and marketing aren’t in lock sync with each other, and they don’t have a good relationship and dynamic, then it ends up in finger pointing when things aren’t going wrong, instead of both teams coming together, being on the same page and figuring out what’s going to work. And that’s that’s really the key. Christian Klepp  07:03 Absolutely, absolutely. And I think you might have brought it up, and maybe I didn’t catch it, and if not, I apologize. But like, one of the things that I didn’t notice, too, is, like, this misalignment of who, who the who the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is, like the assumptions that both sides have and then somehow they just cannot meet in the middle. Apryl Syed  07:24 Well, I kind of brought it up just slight when I said that marketing might be marketing to one person, and sales is selling to another, but if we just want to double click, you know, on on that, that agreement around the ICP, the reason why it’s so important, and I think it’s hard for some SaaS companies, because there’s, there could be a lot of ICPs. And I kind of have this philosophy that with an ICP, people usually maybe do these personas, as I call them, one time, maybe at a, you know, a planning session or whatever, where they’re kicking off, you know, and kind of like planning who those are, and then they leave them. They sit in a deck somewhere. They’re never looked at again. They’re never revised. I like a more fluid method with personas. I like personas to kind of be active, living and breathing in something that’s reviewed on a quarterly basis, I think is a better cadence. And the reason being is, like, we want to see how many deals we’ve closed in that particular area, how many so we should be looking at the metrics right by persona. We should also look at the messaging by persona to see how that’s working. And we should, you know, look at our team and how that flow has gone through into the sales process by persona. And kind of looking at this lens, we may figure out that one persona is working really, really well, or two or three might be working really well. And maybe there’s two or three that aren’t working really well. We might want to flush those out or put them in, what I would say is like a vault or a holding pattern. They might come back later if something’s happened, and we might want to add different ones. And the reason why quarterly is important is because, if you are selling business to business, for instance, in that business environment, there are different things that might be happening in the world, you know, geographically, politically, that might be impacting a certain persona. And it’s important to also look at that lens on a quarterly basis and say, Okay, what’s the mindset of this particular persona? What are they dealing with? What are some of their issues? What are their pressures? What is their emotional state, and then how do we want to message into that emotional state during this time? How do we want to change and revise our messaging for what’s going on in their world right now, this quarter, right you can’t keep you can’t keep messaging the same and messaging constant needs to be looked at. I would say, on a regular basis, one to check and make sure it’s working. If it’s working, keep it working at some time. At some point, though, it might stop working, and it’s important to catch that as you see those numbers trailing off, as you see that change, and not wait until too long has passed and just double down on the same persona for the sake of really work, working with it, because it was the original plan. Christian Klepp  10:27 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely these, um, these personas are, and I believe that too, they it’s not something that that’s written in stone, and then you, you to use that archaic expression, just keep it on the shelf, and then it collects dust, right? Apryl Syed  10:40 Yeah Christian Klepp  10:41 It’s something that should be monitored, as you said, because certain certain companies are working in industries where, for example, government regulation impacts them. Apryl Syed  10:51 Yes. Christian Klepp  10:52 If government regulation changes, then that perhaps also influences the way they make decisions, or decide to work with external vendors and partners and so forth, right? Apryl Syed  11:05 Absolutely. Christian Klepp  11:07 You brought you brought up a few already in the past couple of minutes. I’m just, I just want to go back to pitfall. So one of them, I think, was chasing this, chasing metrics. Right? This, this habit of constantly chasing metrics. What are some of these other pitfalls that you’d say marketing teams should avoid them. What should they be doing instead? Apryl Syed  11:24 Well, I think, you know, another pitfall that I’ve seen is kind of launching a big rebrand and expecting, you know, or that could also be a plot, a platform overhaul, software overhaul, and expecting that that’s going to move the needle faster when you could test that type of messaging out in really small ways before you go and do that big rebrand. And I’m a big fan of those, like small tests, verify and then go big. Like I’m not I’m not saying don’t ever go big. What I’m saying is like, test and measure before you go into a big cut, a big, fresh rebrand, because it’s expensive, and you want those big, expensive expenditures to be a little bit more of a sure thing than a risky thing. So de risk the big spends, riskier moves. Do small, incremental tests and say, how could we test this out on a small scale. How could we test or rebrand out? How could we test a platform change out before we do that in a small way? So I think that’s another one. I talked about a cost center. Treating marketing as a cost center is another one. So I think those are, like my big, my big three, I would say, in terms of pitfalls. Christian Klepp  12:41 Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. You, you hit on something there with your with your third point. And I want to go to that, because that’s a topic that, um, that as a marketer, personally, it riles me up a little bit, but, like, you know, but, but we have to look at this as professionals too, and say, okay, you know what? In the world of B2B, that type of pushback is almost expected, right? Because I’m not sure what your experience has been. But I also work with a lot of companies that have done either little or no marketing before, so it’s, it’s to a certain extent, it’s like Terra Australis incognita. It’s uncharted territory. They are not sure what to expect. So it’s only, it’s only normal that they, that they view it with some kind of, I wouldn’t go so far as to say, suspicion, but yeah. Like, how do you know it’s gonna work, right? So over to you. Like, what’s your experience been? How do you deal with companies that view marketing with that kind of suspicion or or have these doubts, like, Is this even going to work for us? Right? How do you deal with that? Apryl Syed  13:53 Well, I mean, from my perspective, I think again, I go back to the small tests, small wins in those beginning, like, let’s get our sea legs before we go and launch some big strategy. And I think that’s, you know, a big divide between, you know, maybe myself and yourself and some other you know, marketing agencies and firms out there is, I would rather get small, incremental wins to start. I’m not against big strategies and big spends. I think they’re both needed, but when you’re kind of coming into a team that’s either had little to no success with marketing, because maybe they’ve had some bad experiences with agencies that haven’t delivered, or they’ve tried ads, or they’ve tried this thing and they kind of have that bad taste in their mouth, right? Or they just have not done anything at all, and perhaps they’ve, they’ve grown despite that. So they’re kind of like, Hey, I’ve seen success without doing this. So why? Why do I need this? So I think an educational approach is important, kind of giving the here’s the industry benchmarks, here’s what we should. See, here’s how we are going to test. Here’s a recommended way that we do small, incremental tests. And then I also think a really, really important piece is, if it’s a company that’s been around long enough is to dive into that data I have. I have a customer that I would say sits in this category. They’ve grown tremendously. They’ve had a very successful business, and they’ve never marketed before. And if I were to come in there with some big rebrand strategy, big moves, look at me like you’re crazy. We don’t need that. I mean, in all honesty, what are they looking for? They’re looking for incremental revenue gains. So how am I going to produce incremental revenue gains? I’m going to look at their data and see where there’s holes in gaps today, where, yes, marketing, but marketing is a very, very broad term. Marketing can be brands, marketing could be emails, marketing can be social media. Marketing can be customer advocacy, customer emails churn, you know, upgrading customers into other models. So when I say I look at data, I look at what their customers are doing, and what I get from that is, where is my ideal customer, because it’s going to show me in their base. So who might I want to go after and experiment with? First, those are going to be my biggest areas for opportunity of wins, where, with their existing customer base, can I sell something more or different for them to increase revenue in that way? I think that’s another big and then I look at where there may be failures across the process in their data. If it’s a SaaS company, let’s look at their free the trial, trial, you know, to paid, paid to churn, and look at those numbers and say, are they hitting industry standard for their industry? Can I improve any of these metrics? Let me go look at all of the various different things that are going to change these metrics. Where can I start to experiment to get incremental change? That’s how you give success to a team. And they start feeling like, Okay, we should invest more here. We should do more here, because it’s working. Now, let’s double down. Let’s triple down. Let’s do more, then you can go after those bigger strategies. Christian Klepp  17:26 Yep, yep, no, absolutely, absolutely, no. I’m glad, I’m glad you brought those up, because that’s a great segue into the next question, which I think you’re all too familiar with, right? So I think when we first talked, right in our previous conversation you were talking, you mentioned something called a five point conversion diagnostic, which uncovers, I think you refer to them as conversion killers, right? You can cover these conversion killers without expensive tools or massive product like changes or revamps, right? So if you could please walk us through this five point approach and how teams can leverage that. Apryl Syed  18:05 Now this is particularly for SaaS, that trial to onboarding experience and the time that I the thing that I look for the most in there is time to value. How long does it take for the customer to experience value is going to be indicative of how long their trial has to be with that onboarding experience, and are they legitimately going to get into the point of buying early, even because they can’t wait to utilize this tool or buying, of course, the moment that the trial, the trial the trial ends. That is all about time to value. The second is about messaging alignment. So does the promise that we give, if it’s a landing page, whatever that experience is that someone comes through to then get to that product, does the promise of what we’re giving them match what the experience is going to be in the software, and how long does it take again, from that time to value, for them to get to that matched experience of what we promised that will also be a predictor of so if we were, you know, on a scale from zero to 10, 10 being like matched, it perfectly, zero being not matching at all, we’d want to rate our company on that scale, and kind of see for the time to value and for the misalignment, where are we? Then I would kind of go after like behavioral triggers, and I would try to figure out what actions correlate with conversion. So I would look at everybody that’s converted, and I would say, what parts of the software did they touch right? Are they looking at, are they experiencing, which then would predict, like, if people do these five things and the solution, then we know that they’re going to convert. And you can use either, like a Pender or you know, products like that that give you some of that analysis and data. Or maybe it’s, you know, sitting in your CRM, but that would tell you and inform you about your messaging as well. Like, what should we be messaging about? These are the key things that people want out of this solution, and that’s going to inform your next piece, which is, I would look at the follow up timing, the sequencing. How frequently do we talk? I often, I’m a big superhuman fan, and I talk about superhumans onboarding experience, which I think is awesome. And of course, they get a little bit of a leg up because they are an email solution, so they see when you’re in the tool. But I have found that, like the timely messages and the trickling of features that they give you right when you’re ready to use that feature has been so well thought out. And if you have, if you have not experienced it, and you’re a SaaS product owner, Founder, CEO, I highly encourage you to go through their onboarding experience, because that, to me, is like the pinnacle, or one of the pinnacles of what you should want your users to experience, like these just great aha moments right when they’re ready to receive them as part of that trial period before conversion. That make sure that we’re just touching them at the right moments. And then the last piece that I look at is pricing and packaging friction. And here’s, this is, you know, this is something that’s changing an awful lot right now. SaaS is under pressure to maybe look at not seeds, but maybe it’s volume, but then volume is not great, because people can’t predict it, and certainly can’t budget appropriately for it. So there is all kinds of pricing friction happening right now that needs to be figured out, but understanding where people are dropping off and where in that you know, how many clicks do they need to do before they buy? What is that whole buying process like? What is the upgrading process like? Put it through the pressure test. See how many steps it is. Challenge yourself. If you can reduce the steps, make it easier. I’ll give you an example. I was a big, big user of the motion app for a really long time. I probably sold, let’s say, 10 to 20 of these to other people, because I was such a promoter and such a fan of motion, they changed something in their solution related to how many credits, and what happened is it stopped recording my meetings for me automatically, which meant didn’t go into my notes anymore. Didn’t automatically create my tasks for me. That’s a pretty big feature, and obviously I so I went to upgrade, and the upgrade didn’t allow for me to choose a monthly it only allowed me to upgrade to choose an annual. Christian Klepp  23:06 Why? Apryl Syed  23:07 Yeah, which did what to me as the user. I then went into the shopping mode, essentially, and I said, Now I’m going to go shop and look at, well, what other tools are out there that can do the same functionality. Because now, if I have to commit to an annual plan, so much changing in AI this year, I’m not sure if I can commit to an annual plan. It had nothing to do with the amount of dollar spent. It had everything to do with commitment. And here I was a promoter of their solution. I ended up canceling and I went with notion, because I realized that notion had added a significant number of AI features at a much lower price, which I know a lot of people complain about notion being expensive, and it isn’t as good of a user experience now that I’m using motion and yet notion. Yet, I’m still on notion, and I left motion app, which is probably better, because they put me through this experience. And I say that as an example not to and I don’t know if they fix that, but we make these decisions all the time, sitting from our lens, looking at what we want the outcome to be, and we don’t think through what that user experience is going to be, and we’re killing conversions, in some cases, by these little levers and moves that we make, and sometimes we don’t even realize that. So I really encourage, encourage founders, encourage, you know, everyone at the company go back through and look at these tiny little things that each one of them on the loan alone could be costing you revenue, costing you conversions along the pathway. Christian Klepp  24:53 Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re working with a client that’s that’s an that’s in tech right now, and the thing that we keep. Talking about is you gotta, you know, yes, of course you’re excited if you start developing more features and what have you right? But look at this through the lens of the user, right? I mean, I can totally relate to your to your situation. I mean, even things like for example, and this is probably like oversimplifying it. But the last update that Instagram did is driving me absolutely crazy. Like, why would you update something your interface that has already been working for the users, and now? Why do you update it so and completely change where the buttons are on the layout so people have to waste time looking for worse, the send button. I mean, you know, it’s just beyond me, right? Apryl Syed  25:45 Yeah, and it’s funny, and they actually, Instagram, for a long while, did a lot of user testing before they would roll out features, and did these limited, I didn’t see any of that necessarily. With this last rollout. Christian Klepp  25:58 No. Apryl Syed  25:59 Apple did a very similar, like their latest update introduced many phone changes in terms of prioritization of, you know, messaging and all that sort of stuff. And it’s like a common we’re finding commonality saying, like, Oh man, I hate this latest I don’t know how many people have said I hate this latest update, and it’s because it’s created too much friction in the process. We need enough friction, but not too much friction. And that balance, in itself, unfortunately, is like the most difficult thing to figure out. And if you’re not talking to your customers, if you’re not talking to people, you will never figure it out, because you’ll be making an assumption. Christian Klepp  26:38 Exactly, exactly. Okay, so we talked about this at the beginning of the conversation, but you mentioned something called a quick win revenue framework. And I know from what you were telling me that that was a little bit controversial to somebody else you spoke to. Apryl Syed  26:55 Yeah. Christian Klepp  26:56 But you know what we are, we are all embracing in the show. You know. Apryl Syed  27:00 Thank you. Christian Klepp  27:00 Not not judgmental. But in fact, the focus here is to help B2B Marketers. In your case, B2B SaaS Marketers to become better and to improve. So if we’re going to focus on this quick win revenue framework, where would you identify low hanging revenue opportunities in under 30 days. So talk to us about that. Apryl Syed  27:24 Yes, well, it sits at this crossroads between marketing and sales, right? And that’s why you’ve got to have such a tight friendship relationship with you know, your sales leaders and your customer success leaders. I think it has to be like such a great ecosystem. So first thing I would do is pull CRM data. I would look at where deals are stalling, you know, I would map the current funnel with actual numbers of where you have people. I would overlay that with like the industry and kind of like the marketing messaging that is created those those types of deals. And kind of look at that from the lens of, okay, here’s what we’re creating, and here’s what sales is able to close easily. Here’s what’s really lagging and taking a long time in the funnel. And it’s not to say that, like, longer is better than shorter, because, like, an enterprise deal takes longer to close than a SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) deal. So the answer isn’t always that the SMB deal is better, but looking at that and saying, Is there anything here that is that is giving me an indicator of something I can improve on? Can improve on. So that would be, you know, number one, go through that audit, take a look at the data, see what you’ve been producing from a marketing standpoint so far, and then say, is there anything that we should be testing to do differently better? You know, what are your hypotheses that you want to go out and you want to prove with some AB testing, two look at conversion killers, right? That’s either messaging, follow up, timing or onboarding friction, some sort of friction in the process. Friction could be a form fill too it could be, you know, too heavy, too long of landing page, I would look at every single detail and way that people are coming in through the funnel and say, are we doing anything to kill conversion and sometimes, and I’ve experienced this with one brand that I’m working with, and we have an agency that’s also in there that’s doing some ad performance, and they’re getting industry well above industry standard rates. And I asked the agency, because I’m sitting in kind of like my fractional executive role, and I said, Tell me out of your entire client, raw. Stair. Where does this client sit? And they said, Oh, at the top, best performing client we have, you know what that signaled to me? They’re comfortable. They’re getting great results. They’re not trying to improve anything. They’re just trying to hold the fort down and just keep getting these great results because they think that’s a place of safety. Christian Klepp  30:23 Stop rocking the boat Apryl. Apryl Syed  30:26 I know, I know, but I look at that and say, You’re not trying hard enough. You’re not examining right and going through the funnel and looking for all the tweaks and looking for. Christian Klepp  30:36 What can it improve? Apryl Syed  30:37 Can it be improved? You’re not trying to do any of that. And in fact, I’m adding that to you. I’m adding those things. I’m asking for those things, just because I come from that space and saying, like, Hey, we should be pushing here. We should be pushing here. We should be they don’t want to push. And they’re slow, slow, slow to react. And what’s going to happen is it’s going to earn them a change out in agency, right? Because they’re not pushing. Now, unfortunately, what I think is, if that was happening, obviously was happening before I was involved this customer, they thought they’re getting, they’re getting, like, six to one on their spend. That’s fantastic. We should be happy, right? And I’m like, no, no, no, I’ve pushed, I have pushed that envelope before. I’ve seen, you know, 14% conversion on landing pages. I’ve seen 49% conversion on landing pages. When you get it really right, you should always be pushing and pushing and pushing that envelope. So really diagnose and look, are there friction killers in those processes, and where can you be improved? And it is not like, I’m getting results good enough, so let me stop. It’s not stop because that might be one of your levers to really, really get quick wins, because you could tweak something and then even tip the scale further. And who doesn’t want a big win like that? The other thing is, like, I think there’s I look at I look at email sequences and messaging. I look at every single message that we’re sending a customer through the process, through their buying journey. You know, for one client, I basically call it a customer journey map, which a lot of people don’t do anymore, but my journey map is from the moment that they hear about you, all the way through buying, how do we touch them? What do we touch? And then from buying through that sales cycle, what is that like? And the reason why I map that out is because when you do and you put the different sections, you can kind of say, well, this is the process today. What would we like that process to be? And you will find in every single one of these customer journey maps that I’ve done, five to 10 areas where you’re like, instantly know, you instantly know the experience you could be providing better. I did this for one client, and we uncovered, like, the review process for their terms and conditions. On average took like, 10 days with an average back and forth between their lawyers and our lawyers, maybe 15 times that is that a desired customer experience? No, that’s a friction creator, which could be a deal killer, could be a deal staller. So what does that desired experience look like? What should we aim to get to? How are we going to do that? What should we test first? That’s just an example of one that might be in there. So look at everything. Then it becomes, you know, build exactly what you think you’re going to test, go and launch and measure those tests. And you don’t need this to be six months, right? Depending on how much data you’re getting through, it might only take you two weeks of data. It might take you a week of data on these experiments and levers that you’re going through so figure out how long you need to run the experiment for. Run that experiment, measure those changes, and then either permanently implement the change or make changes right and refresh and do another test. Christian Klepp  34:24 Wow, that was quite the list. And I’m sure you’ve, you’ve had, like, as you, as you’ve mentioned, you’ve had pushback for, you know, some of this, for this process, because it’s it. It makes teams uncomfortable, right? But I think the point is, you know, everybody says, right, change is uncomfortable. Improvement is uncomfortable. Uncovering ways to make things better should make you feel uncomfortable, right? Apryl Syed  34:53 So true, so true. And I always, I always think like, if you’re uncomfortable and you’re feeling like. A maybe, I don’t know all the answers here. It’s a really good place to be, and that’s where real growth happens. That’s where real change happens. Christian Klepp  35:06 Yeah. So I did have one follow up question for you, Apryl, like, you know, based on this framework that you’ve just proposed, like, How often would you recommend? And I know it depends, but how often would you recommend teams to continuously monitor some of these, some of these attributes and these factors that you’ve that you’ve brought up in the past couple of minutes. Apryl Syed  35:27 Gosh, I think it is very dependent on the data that’s coming through. If you were experiencing problem in an area, deep dive in there and uncover it. Kind of do that audit and analysis and create some tests that you could run to improve it. But as a measure, the customer journey map, for example, for existence, I think that’s a living, breathing document. I think we should look at it quarterly. We should update it with the experiments and the learnings and the new things that we’ve implemented permanently so that we can track how that experience is going and make sure that it’s our desired experience that we’re putting out there. Because I think a lot of times stuff just happens and it’s not our desired experience, but we kind of think like, oh, well, this is the process, the way it has to be, or, you know, so and so said that it has to be three days. So it’s three days, and it’s like giving you a moment to step back and be like, Why could we do it different? Could we do it better? Could we do it in two days? I don’t know. Could we do it in one and, you know, so I think as often as that customer journey, when updates happen, put those updates in their document. It, look at it, say, like, what’s next on the list should always be improving. When you get to the point where you don’t have any more insights in there, and you think it’s oiled up in the best that you could possibly do it, bring some customers in, bring some customers in to look at it and get their opinion. Ask them about it. It’s a great point to now be in survey mode and ask some questions about where you might have conflicts internally, or where you just aren’t sure where to go. So I think that when it comes to like email sequences, and remind you know like those provide provides, messaging, emails, one thing landing pages, like, I think your landing page just should be in a constant AB turnaround. Every time you have five to 10,000 people hitting a landing page, you should be trying to tweak that message to see if you can make it better. Message, layout, colors, all of the kind of industry standards there, you should be constantly trying to tweak that. If you’re not using landing pages and you’re sending stuff to a page, you should try landing pages so it’s just the constant improvement of those email sequences kind of, kind of, I feel, I feel they should be similar. I feel like you’ve got to examine those on a pretty regular basis, maybe it’s monthly, and kind of determine which messages are you going to trade out. I’m doing a pretty big switch out right now for, you know, an SMB app that’s, you know, selling to other businesses. So it’s a B2B, SaaS company, and we are revising all of their messaging, going through every single one, but trying to create, like a very purposeful journey now where there hasn’t been necessarily one before. And what I just said to one of the leaders yesterday is like, this is version one of what will be probably 10 before we’re done with this iteration. Because every single time we see the data and see how people are moving through the flow, we’re going to we’re going to see that those things that we didn’t consider, there’s going to be broken pieces. Like, don’t be in a position of thinking that any of your marketing is final ever. That’s a good position to be in. It’s never final. I think about this for websites as well. Like people like, oh, we go through our big website refresh, we get the website done, and then now we don’t have to touch the website. Oh, you should be, like, touching the website all the time. Experiment with the messaging on the homepage. Like to think that you got the messaging right the first time. I wish, I wish, and I’ve been in this industry for more than 25 years, I wish, and I’m considered, considering, considered a messaging, you know, wizard. Sometimes, it sometimes takes five or six tries before you get that like, nailed one, and that’s because persona, you know, it’s like how the person is feeling. It’s the emotional draw, and it’s the features, the problem of the pain and all of that coming into one like, I wish, I wish there was an AI tool that could get that right. But it’s not, they’re not. Christian Klepp  40:00 I haven’t found one yet. Apryl Syed  40:01 Yeah. You know, it’s only through really, really overworking that message and seeing the data come in that you kind of like, finally get to maybe a place that’s good, and then guess what? Your persona changes or something happens to so. So don’t ever think of it as, oh, to set it and forget it, it. It should be like it. And there’s also, like, Don’t tweak it too fast that you don’t have enough data coming through. Like, that’s also, I can, I can see that being a message, but have enough data, review that data on a regular basis, make some changes, test it. It’s like little incremental tests and learn. So that’s going to be kind of like it’s either in that category, which is like, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn constantly tweaking, or a quarterly or an annual kind of review. Christian Klepp  40:54 Fantastic, fantastic. Apryl. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Um, please. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. Apryl Syed  41:07 Well, my company is Apeture Codex. Best way to get in touch with me is just Apryl Syed at LinkedIn. That’s where I’m most active, is on LinkedIn, and you can book an appointment with me right off of my LinkedIn. And so that’s like the best, best way to find me out there. Christian Klepp  41:27 Fantastic, fantastic. And we’ll be sure to drop those links in the show notes once the episode goes live. So Apryl, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Apryl Syed  41:38 All right. Thank you so much, Christian. Christian Klepp  41:40 Okay, Bye, for now. Apryl Syed  41:41 Bye.

hema.to is building AI-powered diagnostic infrastructure for cytometry—a specialized area of laboratory medicine analyzing immune system data to detect blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Unlike radiology or pathology where AI solutions are abundant, cytometry has remained largely untouched by the AI wave, creating both opportunity and isolation for the Munich-based company. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Karsten Miermans, CEO at hema.to GmbH, to discuss why they're deliberately keeping sales founder-led despite having paying customers, how South America became an unexpected beachhead market, and what it actually means to build infrastructure versus point solutions in healthcare. Topics Discussed:  From consulting project to venture-backed company: recognizing scalability in hindsight  The workflow integration problem killing healthcare AI implementations  Infrastructure versus technology: why healthcare AI isn't just about the algorithm  Learning ideal customer profile after 18 months of being "all over the place"  Why South America's governance structure enables faster adoption than the US  Resisting the urge to hire sales before achieving true repeatability  The 10-year vision: shifting from "watch and wait" to "predict and prevent" in immune disease GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Pattern matching fails when you're an outsider—budget 18+ months to find your beachhead: Karsten assumed every application of their diagnostic method was the same and spent a year and a half "blue eyed" (naively optimistic) before identifying their true ICP. The outsider advantage lets you reimagine workflows insiders can't, but you'll incorrectly assume transferability across use cases. Don't expect repeatability in year one when entering regulated, workflow-dependent markets. Infrastructure requires multi-stakeholder orchestration—resource for enterprise complexity from day one: Karsten distinguishes technology (point solutions, single users) from infrastructure (shared resources requiring data exchange and workflow integration). In healthcare, this means integration into hospital systems, databases, and electronic health records across multiple stakeholders. "Every sale becomes enterprise sales" even for individual labs because of this infrastructure requirement. Founders building horizontal platforms should model sales cycles and resource requirements as enterprise from the start, regardless of deal size. Your ICP is cognitively overloaded—they won't understand your category innovation: Doctors are "under so much pressure that they just don't have any cognitive capacity left" to philosophically evaluate why AI might be difficult to implement or how infrastructure differs from technology. They need problems solved within their existing mental models. Skip the category education. Frame everything as workflow enhancement, not innovation. Let sophistication emerge through implementation, not pitch decks. Revenue doesn't equal repeatability—know when you're still in discovery mode: Despite having paying customers, Karsten explicitly states "we're not at product-market fit yet" because they're "discovering and learning things with every new laboratory hospital" around data privacy, integration, and AI deployment. The PMF signal isn't customer count or revenue—it's when the process becomes predictable, customers refer others, and you stop discovering new requirements. Hiring sales before this point scales complexity, not revenue. Regulatory friction determines market sequencing, not just market size: US governance complexity turns every deal into heavy enterprise sales with "many stakeholders," while South America proved "much more willing to move with fewer processes," making them "just much faster to adopt innovative technology." This wasn't strategy—Karsten's CTO speaks Spanish through a personal connection. But the lesson transfers: for infrastructure plays in regulated markets, test adoption velocity in lower-governance environments first to build proof points, even if TAM looks smaller on paper. In healthcare, marketing is clinical evidence—customer success creates your GTM flywheel: Karsten spends minimal time on marketing because beyond the first 5-10 users, doctors "want to see clinical evidence, they want to see papers, they want to see maybe that a friend of theirs is using it." Marketing in healthcare isn't content or demand gen—it's peer validation and published proof. Founders should structure early customer engagements to generate this evidence, not just revenue. The "marketing sales flywheel really does kick in much more once you have product market fit" because PMF enables the evidence generation required for credibility. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Reach Out Via Text!In this solo Wednesday episode, Jeremiah pulls back the curtain on a major shift happening inside Growing Green Landscapes' maintenance division. After running deep analytics on man-hours, drive time, and revenue per hour, he shares why some long-time customers are being dropped — and how dialing in the right ICP (ideal client profile) is critical to scaling profitably. Jeremiah also breaks down the dangers of hidden drive time, why $63 revenue per hour isn't scalable, and how they're restructuring maintenance with mandatory enhancements and tighter pricing discipline. Plus, he announces the free April 10th Operations Event and shares an honest update on culture, hiring, and hitting their $1.3M revenue goal in 2026. If you're serious about tightening your operations this spring, this episode is a must-listenSign up for Ops Event here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1980729312694?aff=oddtdtcreatorLet's build smarter this year. Support the show 10% off LMN Software- https://lmncompany.partnerlinks.io/growinggreenpodcast Signup for our Newsletter- https://mailchi.mp/942ae158aff5/newsletter-signup Book A Consult Call-https://stan.store/GrowingGreenPodcast Lawntrepreneur Academy-https://www.lawntrepreneuracademy.com/ The Landscaping Bookkeeper-https://thelandscapingbookkeeper.com/ Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/growinggreenlandscapes/ Email-ggreenlandscapes@gmail.com Growing Green Website- https://www.growinggreenlandscapes.com/

Databox is an easy-to-use Analytics Platform for growing businesses. We make it easy to centralize and view your entire company's marketing, sales, revenue, and product data in one place, so you always know how you're performing. Learn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreScaling a company doesn't break because of a lack of ideas, but because instinct doesn't scale.In this episode of Move the Needle, Chris Savage (CEO & Co-Founder of Wistia) walks through the evolution from founder-driven decision-making to building a real operating system for scale.From choosing a single ICP when growth was already strong…- To installing a tri-annual planning cadence- To distributing ownership across teams- To using AI to compress execution cyclesThis is a masterclass in turning momentum into predictable growth. If you're a SaaS founder or GTM leader trying to scale without chaos, this episode is for you.

We help B2B brands launch shows that turn their point of view into pipeline. If you're launching a podcast (or have one already) and are not sure how it can hit your bottom line, book a meeting with Jason: https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/jason-bradwell/youtube-meeting-link -- Adam Holmgren turned three years of consistent LinkedIn posting into a $700K ARR SaaS business—without cold outbound, without a sales team, and with 80% of growth coming from organic content amplified by thought leader ads. In this episode of Pipe Dream, Adam Holmgren, co-founder and CEO of Fibbler, breaks down exactly how he built an attribution platform for SMBs by first building an audience of 25,000 marketers. Before launching Fibbler in May 2024, Adam spent years developing his point of view on demand generation, paid advertising, and attribution whilst at GetAccept—publishing consistently, giving value, and never asking for anything in return. When he finally launched his product, his audience was ready. Within two months, he had 50 paying customers purely from his network. But Adam didn't stop there. He shares the pivot that changed everything: shifting from organic-only to investing 50% of revenue into thought leader ads, specifically targeting the US market where LinkedIn ad spend is highest. The result? 400-500 signups per month, with 80% directly attributed to organic content plus paid amplification. Adam also reveals his weekend content system, his four content pillars (paid ads, brand building, founder-led growth, and personal), and why he believes distribution and brand are now the only real moats in a world where AI makes product features commoditised. Key Takeaways How to validate demand before launching: Build an audience first by giving value for years without asking for anything—then when you finally ask, conversion rates skyrocket. Why thought leader ads outperform traditional LinkedIn ads: Organic posts that already resonate are "battle-tested"—amplifying them with paid reach to new audiences dramatically improves ROI compared to brand account ads with CTAs. How to structure a sustainable content system: Plan content on weekends around 3-4 clear content pillars, schedule posts for the week, then stay active in comments during weekdays instead of writing on the fly. Why founder-led brands win in crowded markets: With 250,000-300,000 martech solutions available, distribution and brand are the only defensible moats—features alone won't differentiate you. How to convince sceptical executives to invest in brand: Start small, prove early signals (engagement from ICP, content mentioned in sales calls), then scale once you demonstrate pipeline impact over 3-6 months. The perfect LinkedIn post formula: Strong hook that creates curiosity or promises value + tactical insight or lesson learnt + no product pitch (let people discover you organically). Relevant Links and Resources Connect with Adam Holmgren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-holmgren/Learn more about Fibbler: https://fibbler.co What's Next If you're building a B2B brand and struggling to justify investment in owned media, start by building one person's audience consistently for 90 days—then amplify what works. The compounding effect is real. Useful Links Connect with Jason Bradwell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbradwell/Listen to Pipe Dream on Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/pipe-dreamLearn more about B2B Better: https://www.b2b-better.com

Companies go upmarket, hit three slow months, and decide the strategy “doesn't work.” In this live episode, Yann (co-founder of Userled, former Salesforce enterprise seller) breaks down what enterprise deals actually look like up close: long stretches of silence that aren't rejection, stakeholders who shape the decision without ever joining a call, and why “activity” can feel busy while the deal goes nowhere. You'll also hear the less glamorous side: what founder life feels like when momentum disappears, why some teams survive the hard quarters (and others don't), and how hiring for energy changes everything. Yann shares how Userled changed their ICP, survived two brutal quarters — then closed more in October–November than the rest of the year combined. We enjoyed this conversation. Hope you will too.

In this video, we dive into why B2B partnerships are one of the most powerful (and underused) growth strategies in 2026, and how to get your first one off the ground.We cover:Why partnerships act as a trust shortcut with your target audience, how rising paid media costs (up ~14% per year) are making partnerships more essential than ever, and the exact 4-step framework to land your first B2B partnership.If you are a B2B marketer or founder struggling with rising customer acquisition costs and want a more affordable, high-trust way to reach your ideal customers.Tune in and learn:- Why partnerships transfer trust from aligned brands to your audience- How overlapping ICPs make partnerships more effective than cold outreach- Why AI-generated content is making owned audiences even more valuable- The importance of executive buy-in and clear KPIs to make partnerships stick- Brian's #1 tip: don't go for the big fish first. Start with complementary, similarly-sized partners- The 4-step action framework: identify, shortlist (top 3–5), reach out, and go deep-----------------------------------------------------

In this episode, Caleb talks about having the bravery to stay disciplined — even in a slow economy with revenue pressure — and choosing the right clients. He emphasizes focusing on your ideal ICP, working with people who understand and value your work, and only taking on projects that are truly worth doing — purposeful and intentional, rather than driven by short-term fear. https://www.elitenetworks.us Auman Landscape on YouTube Primed For Growth www.companycam/kcpodcast Company Cam- 50% for 2 months! Linktree/AumanLandscape @aumanlandscapellc www.CycleCPA.com  Use code: Auman and save $200 when signing up. LMN Software Save on onboarding! Code: AUMAN

Lula rebuilt property maintenance from the ground up by solving a fundamental problem: property managers spend 40% of their time coordinating maintenance with zero visibility into work order status. After pivoting from a B2C app when they discovered landlords were their actual users, Bo Lais and his team made a critical insight—deep PMS integration wasn't a feature, it was the entire go-to-market strategy. Today, Lula's 9,000-contractor network processes 1,000 work orders daily across 50 markets, performing 30 HVAC replacements per day at scale that enables direct manufacturer relationships. Now they're commercializing their internal tech stack as Foresight, a standalone SaaS platform launching Q1. In this episode of BUILDERS, Bo breaks down the strategic decisions behind building integrations as distribution, using network density to create pricing advantages competitors can't match, and knowing when to productize your internal tools. Topics Discussed: Why the B2C to B2B pivot happened after discovering usage patterns, not market research How PMS integration eliminated "swivel chair" friction and became the primary distribution channel Strategic partnership depth over breadth: enabling co-selling with AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi rather than partner proliferation The 250-door threshold where maintenance coordination breaks and technology becomes necessary Network density economics: 30 daily HVAC replacements creating leverage for direct manufacturer negotiations and flat-rate service catalogs The decision framework for commercializing Foresight based on upstream customer advisory group feedback Maintaining discipline around ICP when sales teams naturally want to expand GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: System of record integration is your distribution strategy, not a feature: Lula's standalone app created adoption friction because property managers refused to work outside their PMS. Bo's realization: "They need everything to live in their system of record...They don't want swivel chair. And then providing that real time visibility throughout the entire life cycle of the work order was really valuable because prior to that they assign it to a vendor, and then they cross their fingers and hope that it gets done." The integration solved both adoption friction and delivered continuous visibility their workflow demanded. For B2B founders: if your users live in Salesforce, HubSpot, or vertical-specific platforms all day, your integration strategy IS your distribution strategy—build there first, not alongside. Strategic partnerships require enablement infrastructure, not just signed contracts: Bo's approach rejects partnership sprawl: "It's not about stacking on another 10 partnerships, it's about how do we go deeper and enable those partners to co-sell with us and talk about the value props that together we can provide." This means building co-selling toolkits, joint value propositions, and partner success metrics. For B2B founders: one partnership where the partner's sales team actively sells your solution beats ten partnerships where you're just listed in a marketplace. Invest in making partners successful sellers, not collecting logos. ICP discipline requires sales team enforcement mechanisms, not just definitions: Lula knew their ICP but struggled with execution. Bo learned "it's one thing when we understood who our ICP was, but then it's a whole nother thing to adhere to that and get the sales team to adhere to that ICP." The specificity matters: residential (not multifamily), single-family, 250+ doors (where coordination breaks), capped at several thousand doors (before enterprise needs diverge). For B2B founders: document your ICP, but also build the compensation structures, deal approval processes, and CRM workflows that prevent sales from chasing deals outside the sweet spot—even when quota pressure hits. Message outcomes customers measure, not the technology delivering them: Bo's AI framing: "They care about the outcomes, right? If we're able to move the needle on the outcomes and provide a better experience for residents by automating communication, automating the time to schedule, automating the time to get resolution...it's not the how, it's the result." Lula's AI eliminates truck rolls through upfront troubleshooting and improves one-trip resolution rates—that's what property managers track. For B2B founders: if your customer's boss asks "how's that new tool working," they answer with metrics they're held accountable for (resolution time, truck rolls, resident satisfaction), not "it uses AI." Lead with those metrics. Productize internal tools when customer advisory groups request them and you have defensible advantages: Lula commercialized Foresight after upstream customers specifically asked for their tech during advisory sessions. Bo's competitive moat thinking: "Everyone else thinks they're going to do it better with the AI and automation they have. But our competitive moat is that our on-demand network is built inside this AI work order management system. And because of the scale of our network and the buying power, we can provide instant quotes for a lot of services...our competitors that are just doing software don't have this network of contractors nationwide." For B2B founders expanding product lines: customer pull plus operational advantages competitors can't replicate (Lula's contractor density, manufacturer relationships, 1,000 daily work orders of training data) create viable new products. Without both, you're just building undifferentiated software. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the opening track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP , "Intro." Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss the Insane Clown Posse's joker card intros, talk about movies from 1995 (and 2025), and tackle important topics like if the Jokers Gallery is juggalo canon!      The LinkTree is at https://linktr.ee/juggalorwd... Twitter/X: @JuggaloRWD IG: @JuggaloRWD Facebook: @JuggaloRWD TikTok: @JuggaloRWD Threads: @JuggaloRWD BlueSky: @JuggaloRWD The website is www.JuggaloRewind.com. Join us everywhere to talk to other listeners and about ICP, Twiztid and random juggalo nonsense. Email us at juggalorwd@gmail.com or call/text us at (810) 666-1570.        Join our Patreon! For only FOUR DOLLARS a month, you can join Kilnore's Army and get at least two bonus episodes per month, videos, chats and more! Even without paying, you can join the Patreon community! Become an official member of the Phat or Wack Pack today! -- Juggalo Rewind Patreon. Additional music provided by the IRTD. Voiceover work provided by Christmas. All music played is owned by the respective publishers and copywrite holders and is reproduced for review purposes only under fair use. #ForTheJuggaloCulture

Send a textIn this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with AJ Gandhi, Chief Growth Officer and Go-To-Market Operating Partner, to unpack what it really takes to build a high-performing, holistic GTM engine.With a career spanning Bain, McKinsey, venture-backed startups, Salesforce, RingCentral, and private equity, AJ brings a rare 360-degree perspective on strategy, sales, marketing, partner ecosystems, and post-sales execution.AJ defines go-to-market as the entire lifecycle journey of a customer — not just sales — and explains why most companies underperform because they fail to integrate product, marketing, sales, partners, and customer success into a unified system.They dive into:Why GTM must be holistic across the full “bow tie,” from acquisition to expansion and advocacy.The diagnostic framework AJ uses to assess strategy, talent, execution, and performance in portfolio companies.How to identify waste in sales coverage, geography expansion, marketing spend, and organizational design.Why partner ecosystems follow the 80/20 rule — and how doubling down on top partners drives disproportionate returns.The importance of measuring value realization, not just selling ROI promises.How to elevate mid-level business problems to CFO-level strategic priorities through economic impact framing.Lessons from scaling enterprise and mid-market GTM motions — and the danger of straying from your ICP.Why pricing optimization and expansion within existing customers often deliver faster impact than new logo acquisition.The leadership discipline required in the first 100 days of a transformation.And AJ's advice to rising GTM professionals: master the fundamentals, focus on the 80/20, and develop influence without authority.This episode is a masterclass in combining strategic rigor with execution discipline — and a reminder that sustainable growth comes from fundamentals done exceptionally well.Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedInBrought to you by: stratyve.com

Qualytics is redefining enterprise data quality by positioning it as a collaborative business function rather than an isolated data engineering problem. Founded at the start of the pandemic by Gorkem Sevinc - a former CTO and CDO who spent years managing reactive data quality firefights - Qualytics emerged from a clear practitioner pain point: writing endless custom rules to catch data issues after they'd already broken dashboards and KPIs. The company raised pre-seed and seed rounds while building with beta customers, then closed a Series A as repeatability patterns emerged in their POC process. Now, as enterprises scramble to operationalize AI initiatives, Qualytics is experiencing explosive inbound demand from organizations realizing their data foundations aren't ready for democratized data access. Topics Discussed The practitioner insight that sparked Qualytics: reactive rule-writing doesn't scale Leveraging existing CTO/CDO networks and PE portfolio connections for beta customers The evolution from free POCs to paid POCs as a mutual commitment mechanism Identifying repeatability through week-by-week POC conversion patterns Building practitioner credibility into the sales motion while hiring for enterprise sales grit The decision to hire sales and marketing leadership simultaneously post-Series A Tracking in-product engagement metrics (DQ operations frequency, anomaly detection, rule editing) as churn prevention Positioning data quality as vertical-specific business problems (premium leakage, regulatory compliance) The timing advantage: AI adoption forcing enterprises to treat data governance as mandatory infrastructure GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Talk to 100 prospects before writing code—even with deep domain expertise: After burning 18 months building a radiology second opinion product that patients didn't want (they didn't even know radiologists were doctors), Gorkem adopted a hard rule: validate with 100 conversations before building. His advantage as a former CTO who lived the data quality problem created false confidence. Practitioners often assume their pain is universal, but buyer awareness and willingness to pay are separate questions. Start with NSF I-Corps-style problem validation: show rough sketches, probe what happened when they hit the pain point, understand how it hurt them financially or operationally. Repeatability appears in micro-conversions during trials, not just closed-won rates: Gorkem didn't declare product-market fit when deals closed—he declared it when he could predict POC behavior by week. "Week two, I'm expecting this. Week three, I'm expecting this." That predictability enabled ROI calculators and internal champion enablement materials. For technical founders, this means instrumenting your trial or POC to track leading indicators: specific features activated, data volumes processed, number of team members engaged, frequency of logins. When those patterns stabilize across prospects, you have a repeatable motion. Use paid POCs as a procurement front-loading mechanism, not a revenue play: Qualytics charges nominal amounts for some POCs—not for the revenue, but to get the MSA signed and force both parties through legal/security review upfront. This eliminates the pattern where free POCs succeed technically but die in procurement. Large enterprises often refuse to pay for POCs, which Gorkem accepts—but only if they commit equivalent effort (executive time, cross-functional teams). The paid POC is a qualification tool: if they won't commit anything, they're not a real opportunity. Hire sales and marketing leadership in parallel and hold them to unified GTM metrics: Gorkem regrets hiring early sales reps before leadership and delaying marketing investment. Post-Series A, he hired both leaders simultaneously and holds them jointly accountable to pipeline generation and velocity—not siloed MQL counts or quota attainment. This structural decision forces collaboration on messaging, ICP definition, and campaign strategy from day one. For technical founders who "figured out" founder-led sales, resist the urge to replicate your motion with more SDRs. Bring in strategic leadership that can build a scalable system. Instrument product engagement as your earliest churn signal—then intervene immediately: Beyond quarterly NPS and executive QBRs, Gorkem tracks granular product usage: how many data quality operations users run, how many anomalies they discover, how actively they're editing rules. When engagement drops, he doesn't wait—he jumps into the customer's existing weekly meetings to diagnose and course-correct. For B2B founders building complex products with long time-to-value, passive health scores aren't enough. You need active usage telemetry and a low-latency intervention process. Translate technical capabilities into vertical-specific business outcomes: Gorkem doesn't pitch "data quality for data engineers." He talks about premium leakage with insurance companies and OCC/SEC data controls with banks. This reframing works because buyers recognize their problem, not a vendor category. The shift requires research: understand each vertical's regulatory environment, operational pain points, and the business metrics executives care about. When you walk in speaking their language about their P&L impact, you're not another vendor—you're someone who gets it. Time your market entry to when "nice-to-have" becomes "must-have": When Qualytics launched, some enterprises called data quality a "nice-to-have." AI adoption changed that calculus overnight. Organizations planning to let 20,000 employees interrogate data through AI interfaces suddenly realized they need robust data governance, quality controls, and cataloging first. Gorkem's timing wasn't luck—he built during the "nice-to-have" phase so he'd be ready when AI budgets made it mandatory. Technical founders should identify the external forcing function (regulation, technology shift, economic change) that will transform their solution from vitamin to painkiller. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Krazy Train Podcast with Jasmin St. Claire pulls into full Juggalo + wrestling + conspiracy territory as Violent J (Insane Clown Posse / Psychopathic Records / JCW) jumps on for a no-holds-barred conversation. They hit everything from ICP’s origin story (backyard wrestling, Detroit “gimmick” culture, DIY grind, and the switch from Inner City Posse) to the birth of clown paint, the Hatchetman logo, and what it takes to keep Juggalos loyal for decades. Violent J also breaks down how Psychopathic Records operates today, why they’re not actively signing new acts, and what’s next with the brand. Then the episode veers hard into Bigfoot lore: why Violent J sees Sasquatch as an elusive primate, what an AI era does to “proof,” and how his obsession expanded into primates and orangutans, including inspiration from “Orangutan Jungle School.” On the wrestling side, he talks JCW’s evolution into “for all wrestling fans,” improving production + YouTube strategy, building characters, and why bringing in Vince Russo changed the creative direction. Plus, shoutouts to the upcoming ICP docuseries (Dead Bug) and a short doc from Cole Bennett / Lyrical Lemonade, along with plugs for PsychopathicVault.com and StrangleMania during WrestleMania week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this exciting episode: We listen to and discuss Siamese Goat God, and we review Alla Xul Elu's new album No Masters! We also talk about upcoming underground festivals and events, and we bring you all the most essential music news!If you want to interact with us, send us messages, follow us, support us, or join our community, check out the links on our WEBSITE.If you want EVEN MORE underground goodness, check out Robbie's underground rap and horrorcore focused news show on YouTube, DO IT FOR THE UNDERGROUND (DIFTUG) HERESend a text

George Terry built a LinkedIn ads agency by doing what he preaches: posting consistently, building a personal brand, and measuring ROI by channel. We help B2B companies build the same kind of owned media system.  If you run a service business and want to know what a LinkedIn-first pipeline actually looks like in practice, this episode is it. Host Jason Bradwell sits down with George Terry, Co-Founder of Winbox, a LinkedIn ads agency working with 50+ B2B brands, to unpack how they've built a system where personal brands drive more pipeline than any other channel. George's core point is clear: nobody goes on LinkedIn to hang out with brands. Everyone's there to hang out with people. Brands are boring. Personal profiles are the best distribution channel on LinkedIn right now, and the challenge is finding people in your company who are willing to get out there and back the business. Winbox segments pipeline into referrals, inbound, and events. Referrals close fastest but can't be your only channel. Events generate volume at the top of funnel but deals are smaller. Inbound from marketing, meaning people who sought them out because they trust the brand, generates the largest deal sizes by far. Why? Because buyers coming to you with trust come with bigger budgets. The move upmarket changed everything. When Winbox decided to stop working with small budgets and target companies spending £10k a month or more on LinkedIn ads, their market shrank dramatically. That forced a shift to an account-based approach: a defined list of 2,500 companies across UK and Europe, and everything; ads, content, targeting, focused exclusively on that list. The metric they obsess over is market saturation: reaching 50 to 80% of that list four to eight times a month. Hit that and you're influencing decision-making when buyers enter a cycle. Miss it and your marketing may as well not exist. The content system behind this is simpler than it sounds. George spends two hours a week on content creation, records voice notes on walks to capture ideas, and polishes them up on Monday mornings. Five days a week posting, a monthly video podcast, 40 LinkedIn posts, eight video shorts, four newsletters, a webinar, and a quarterly event. The machine behind it does the heavy lifting but the principle is the same for anyone starting out: done is better than perfect. Post the rubbish. Get the reps in. The five-year journey started with two likes. Chapter Markers 00:00 - Introduction: George Terry and Winbox  01:00 - From content business to LinkedIn ads agency 02:00 - How Winbox acquires clients today  03:00 - From personal networks to personal brands  05:00 - Pipeline breakdown: referrals, inbound, events  06:00 - Why inbound generates the largest deal sizes  08:00 - Multi-channel attribution and why black and white thinking fails  10:00 - Three or four channels done well beats eight done badly  11:00 - Starting over: invest earlier and move upmarket sooner  13:00 - Shifting to account-based marketing with a defined company list  14:00 - Market saturation: 50 to 80% reach, four to eight times monthly  15:00 - Cyclical buying patterns and summer brand-building  17:00 - Personal brands vs brand accounts on LinkedIn  18:00 - Why people buy agencies because of people, not logos  19:00 - Content mix: formats, frequency, and community engagement  20:00 - The weekly content system: two hours, voice notes, Monday polish  21:00 - Done is better than perfect: posting, reps, and consistency  26:00 - ICP clarity as the non-negotiable from day one Useful Links Connect with Jason Bradwell on LinkedIn Connect with George Terry on LinkedIn Visit Winbox Check out LinkedIn Ads Insider on YouTube, Apple Podcast, and iHeart Explore B2B Better website and the Pipe Dream podcast

Dozens of advertising events occur every year, but not every event is for you. Eric Franchi and Joe Zappa break down the purpose of the six core advertising events, who should attend based on stage and ICP, and how to think about events strategically. They also cover common mistakes founders make and how to build an event calendar that drives outcomes, not optics.

Most B2B companies don't lose because they lack opportunity. They lose because they try to be everything to everyone.In this episode of Content Amplified, Amie Milner, EVP of Marketing and Sales Enablement at Abstrakt, breaks down how a focused niche attack strategy fuels predictable pipeline growth—and why specialization, not scale, drives stronger close rates.Amie shares how Abstrakt grew into an $80M business by narrowing its focus, aligning sales reps to specific industries, and telling one powerful story instead of a hundred diluted ones. If you've ever struggled to say no to a prospect, clarify your ICP, or align marketing with sales development, this conversation will sharpen your thinking.Because when you stop casting randomly and start targeting intentionally, momentum follows.What you'll learn in this episode:Why one strong case study can outperform dozens of generic proof pointsHow to identify your most profitable niche using revenue fit, service fit, and stickinessThe difference between casting a wide net in digital—and staying hyper-focused in outboundHow to align SDRs and sales reps to industries where they naturally winWhy exclusivity can strengthen your pitch and improve close ratesWhen to say no to a prospect (and why it protects both sides)How to expand into adjacent industries without losing focusGuest Bio: Amie MilnerAmie Milner is the EVP of Marketing and Sales Enablement at Abstrakt, a B2B business growth company serving more than 2,000 clients across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.Over the past decade, Amie has worked her way up from SDR to executive leadership, building Abstrakt's sales enablement department from the ground up and leading marketing, digital strategy, and sales development under one unified vision. Her unique vantage point across marketing, outbound sales, and enablement allows her to create alignment most organizations struggle to achieve.Amie specializes in industry-focused growth strategies, outbound pipeline development, and building predictable revenue systems for small to mid-sized businesses.Connect with Amie:Amie's LinkedIn profileAbstrakt's WebsiteText us what you think about this episode!

This episode dives into the often-overlooked intersection of hepatology and women's health. Tatyana Kushner and Andrea Goldstein share their professional journeys, from the high-intensity liver transplant units of UCLA to pioneering women's liver health programs and their personal connections to the field. The conversation focuses on the complexities of Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP) and Primary Biliary Cholingitis (PBC), highlighting the racial disparities in diagnosis and the critical need for genetic testing. Our guests discuss the challenges of clinical trials in pregnant populations and offer a roadmap for better preconception counseling, interdisciplinary care, and the power of patient advocacy.  Adding a deeply personal perspective, the host also shares her own experience with ICP, underscoring why early recognition and coordinated care are essential for protecting both maternal and fetal health. This podcast is not available for CME/CE/CPD credits. Please visit the Medscape homepage for accredited CME/CE/CPD activities.

In this episode of Beyond Coaching, Rob sits down with Russell Smelley—NAIA Hall of Fame coach, longtime Westmont College faculty member and coach, and one of the most thoughtful voices in collegiate coaching—to explore what it really means to coach people, not just train athletes.Russell shares stories from nearly five decades in coaching, including his journey from proving himself through wins to measuring success by trust, character, and long-term impact. This conversation cuts straight to the heart of the profession: identity, psychological safety, competition, and the quiet work of shaping people who thrive well beyond sport.This is a grounded, honest discussion for coaches who want to win and lead with integrity.Key Themes & TakeawaysTraining vs. Coaching: Why developing people must take precedence over chasing results—and how the best coaches do both.Psychological Safety (Done Right): Safety doesn't mean low standards. It means accountability without fear.Evaluate, Don't Critique: How post-competition language shapes trust, learning, and long-term growth.Competing in the Context of Relationship: Why opponents aren't enemies—and how respect fuels healthier competition.Focus vs. Obsession: Where intensity helps and where it becomes destructive for athletes and coaches alike.Winning Isn't Enough: Russell reflects on when he realized success had to be defined by more than outcomes.Mentorship & Patience: Why some lessons take years to land—and why that's okay.Advice to Young Coaches: “Say no more often. Be clear. Get a mentor. Don't vacillate.”Memorable Quotes“The coaching part says my ego takes second place to wins and losses.”“Evaluate, don't critique.”“Psychological safety isn't avoiding hard things—it's opening the door to more responsibility.”“Your opponent is not your enemy. They're there to help you get better.”About the GuestRussell Smelley is a longtime cross country and track & field coach at Westmont College, a multiple-time conference Coach of the Year, and an NAIA Hall of Fame inductee. As both coach and faculty member, Russell brings a rare blend of competitive excellence, faith-centered leadership, and deep care for athlete development.Russell is currently developing workshops on transformational leadership for coaches, educators, and parents—focused on moving from transactional outcomes to lasting impact.Contact Russell: smelley@westmont.eduListen & SubscribeApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-coaching-an-impactful-coaching-project-podcast/id1711128150Spotify: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-coaching-an-impactful-coaching-project-podcast/id1711128150Beyond Coaching is produced by the Impactful Coaching Project, in partnership with Friends University. ICP exists to develop coaches who lead the whole person and to advance best practices for coaching the 21st-century athlete.Learn more at impactfulcoachingproject.com.

What if failure isn't something to avoid, but a skill to master? This episode breaks down why startups can't be built on certainty—new markets, new products, and new teams mean you're guaranteed to be wrong a lot. The goal isn't to “be right,” it's rapid error correction: make decisions, ship anyway, learn fast, and recover even faster. The conversation covers how avoiding failure leads to paralysis (“steering a parked car”), why indecision compounds in startups, and how to reduce risk by keeping failures small, reversible, and frequent (kill switches, stop rules, and capped losses). They share early personal stories—school fights and a childhood cattle business collapse—to show how overcoming real consequences builds confidence and resilience. Practical examples include choosing an ICP quickly, improving poor conversion rates through iteration, using vesting/cliffs when picking co-founders, and why even top VCs still miss constantly. The key takeaway: the most dangerous competitor is the one who isn't afraid to get hit, recover, and keep coming back—because that's as close to “invincible” as a founder can get.02:01 Failure Isn't the Enemy: Stop Optimizing for Being Right02:59 The Founder Reality: Uncertainty, Rapid Error Correction & the Boxing Analogy03:44 Safety vs Startups: Why Most People Avoid the Risk05:24 ‘Steering a Parked Car': Indecision Kills Startups07:54 Make the Call, Learn Fast: Small Failures, Big Truths09:02 We're Conditioned to Fear Failure (School, Work, Relationships)11:59 Will's Origin Story: Jason Barker and Learning to Beat the Monster14:48 Choosing to Fail on Purpose: Turning Fear into a Superpower17:06 Ryan's First Big Failure: The Farm/Cattle Business Lesson Begins17:45 Cash-Strapped Expansion: Inventory Leverage & a Brutal Winter18:09 When the Side Hustle Needs a Side Hustle (and the Cost of Neglect)18:35 Failing Hard at 12: Losing Animals and Learning to Plan19:51 Founders Don't Win by Being Right—They Win by Taking Hits21:36 Shipping While Wrong: Marketing Experiments, MVPs, and Momentum22:51 Hiring, Co-Founders & Investors: Why Nobody Can Pick Perfectly24:00 The Real Skill: Recovering From Failure (Resilience as a Reflex)30:26 Small Blast Radius, High Frequency: Reversible Bets & Kill Switches31:13 Failure Is Portable: Building a House, Living ‘Why Not,' No RegretsResources:Startup Therapy Podcasthttps://www.startups.com/community/startup-therapyWebsitehttps://www.startups.com/beginLinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/startups-co/Join our Network of Top FoundersWil Schroterhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/wilschroter/Ryan Rutanhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-rutan/What to listen for:

THIS WEEK: Big Money Hustlas (2000), Death Racers (2008) and Big Money Rustlas (2010)You may know ICP as the rapping leaders of a dubious "gang" of graps-loving clowns. You may even know them for their contributions to the science of magnetism. But did you know that they're also auteur filmmakers? Donate to Palestinian Medical AidSupport Optimism Vaccine on Patreon

BONUS: Why Embedding Sales with Engineering in Stealth Mode Changed Everything for Snowflake In this episode, we talk about what it really takes to scale go-to-market from zero to billions. We interview Chris Degnan, a builder of one of the most iconic revenue engines in enterprise software at Snowflake. This conversation is grounded in the transformation described in his book Make It Snow—the journey from early-stage chaos to durable, aligned growth. Embedding Sales with Engineering While Still in Stealth "I don't expect you to sell anything for 2 years. What I really want you to do is get a ton of feedback and get customers to use the product so that when we come out of stealth mode, we have this world-class product."   Chris joined Snowflake when there were zero customers and the company was still in stealth mode. The counterintuitive move of embedding sales next to engineering so early wasn't about driving immediate revenue, it was about understanding product-market fit. Chris's job was to get customers to try the product, use it for free, and break it. And break it they did. This early feedback led to material changes in the product before general availability. The approach helped shape their ideal customer profile (ICP) and gave the engineering team real-world validation that shaped Snowflake's technical direction. In a world where startups are pressured to show revenue immediately, Snowflake's investors took the opposite approach: focus on building a product people cannot live without first. Why Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Existential "If we're not driving revenue, if the revenue is not growing, then how are we going to be successful? Revenue was king."   When Denise Persson joined as CMO, she shifted the conversation from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to qualified meetings for the sales team. This simple reframe eliminated the typical friction between sales and marketing. Both leaders shared challenges openly and held each other accountable. When someone in either organization wasn't being respectful to the other team, they addressed it directly. Chris warns founders against creating artificial friction between sales and marketing: "A lot of founders who are engineers think that they want to create this friction between sales and marketing. And that's the opposite instinct you should have." The key insight is treating sales and marketing as a symbiotic system where revenue is the shared north star. Coaching Leaders Through Hypergrowth "If there's a problem in one of our organizations, if someone comes with a mentality that is not great for us, we're gonna give direct feedback to those people."   Chris and Denise maintained tight alignment at the top level of their organizations through four CEO transitions. Their partnership created a culture of accountability that cascaded through both teams. When either hired senior people who didn't fit the culture, they investigated and addressed it. The coaching approach wasn't about winning by authority—it was about maintaining partnership and shared accountability for results. This required unlearning traditional management approaches that pit departments against each other and instead fostering genuine collaboration. Cultural Behaviors That Scale (And Those That Don't) "We got dumb and lazy. We forgot about it. And then we decided, hey, we're gonna go get a little bit more fit, and figure out how to go get the new logos again."   Chris describes himself as a "velocity salesperson" with a hyper-focus on new customer acquisition. This focus worked brilliantly during Snowflake's growth phase—land customers, and the high net retention rate would drive expansion. However, as Snowflake prepared to go public, they took their foot off the gas on new logo acquisition, believing not all new logos were equal. This turned out to be a mistake. In his final year at Snowflake, working with CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, they redesigned the sales team to reinvigorate the new logo acquisition machine. The lesson: the cultural behaviors that fuel early success must be consciously maintained and sometimes redesigned as you scale. Keeping the Message Narrow Before Going Platform "Eventually, I know you want to be a platform. But having a targeted market when you're initially launching the company, that people are spending money on, makes it easier for your sales team."   Snowflake intentionally positioned itself in the enterprise data warehousing market—a $10-12 billion annual market with 5,000-7,000 enterprise customers—rather than trying to sound "bigger" as a platform play. The strategic advantage was accessing existing budgets. When selling to large enterprises that go through annual planning processes, fitting into an existing budget means sales cycles of 3-6 months instead of 9-18 months. Yes, competition eventually tried to corner Snowflake as "just a cute data warehouse," but by then they had captured significant market share and could stretch their wings into the broader data cloud opportunity. Selling Consumption-Based Products to Fixed-Budget Buyers "Don't believe anything I say, try it."   One of Snowflake's hardest challenges was explaining their elastic, consumption-based architecture to procurement and legal teams accustomed to fixed budgets. In 2013-2015, many CIOs still believed data would stay in their data centers. Snowflake's model—where customers could spin up a thousand servers for 4 hours, load data, while analysts ran queries without performance impact—seemed impossible. Chris's approach was simple: set up proof of concepts and pilots. Let the technology speak for itself. The shift from fixed resources to elastic architecture required changing not just technology but entire mindsets about how data infrastructure could work.   About Chris Degnan Chris Degnan is a builder of one of the most iconic revenue engines in enterprise software. As the first sales hire at Snowflake, he helped scale the company from zero customers to billions in revenue. Chris co-authored Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions with Denise Persson, documenting their journey of building Snowflake's go-to-market organization. Today, Chris advises early-stage startups on building their go-to-market strategies and works with Iconiq Capital, the venture firm that led Snowflake's Series D round.   You can link with Chris Degnan on LinkedIn and learn more about the book at MakeItSnowBook.com.

Sorry folks. Chris was very sick this week and we didn't want to start the season off like that. So give us a week and we will be back at it next Thursday morning, normal time. Thank you! But for now, listen to Peter rambling for five minutes as he tests out the new microphones.      The LinkTree is at https://linktr.ee/juggalorwd... Twitter/X: @JuggaloRWD IG: @JuggaloRWD Facebook: @JuggaloRWD TikTok: @JuggaloRWD Threads: @JuggaloRWD BlueSky: @JuggaloRWD The website is www.JuggaloRewind.com. Join us everywhere to talk to other listeners and about ICP, Twiztid and random juggalo nonsense. Email us at juggalorwd@gmail.com or call/text us at (810) 666-1570.        Join our Patreon! For only FOUR DOLLARS a month, you can join Kilnore's Army and get at least two bonus episodes per month, videos, chats and more! Even without paying, you can join the Patreon community! Become an official member of the Phat or Wack Pack today! -- Juggalo Rewind Patreon. Additional music provided by the IRTD. Voiceover work provided by Christmas. All music played is owned by the respective publishers and copywrite holders and is reproduced for review purposes only under fair use. #ForTheJuggaloCulture

Send a textGrowth isn't a mystery; it's a system. We sit down with award-winning fractional CMO and bestselling author Kathryn Strachan to unpack the moves that turn scattered marketing efforts into a commercial engine that compounds. From the mindset shift that frees founders from bottlenecking their teams to the exact sequence for building demand and then layering sales, Kathryn shares a clear, proven path to scale.We start with the hardest habit to break: doing everything yourself. Kathryn explains how she stepped out of the weeds, hired senior operators, and aligned teams around outcomes instead of tactics. Then we go deep on foundations—positioning, ICP clarity, and validated messaging—so every tactic has a purpose. She walks through the first levers she pulls inside a company: rebuild the website as a true conversion hub and run a spend audit to stop wasting money on channels that don't move pipeline. The result is a tighter story, a cleaner funnel, and a budget that works harder.Kathryn also challenges a common startup reflex: hiring sales before marketing. Her approach flips the order. Keep founder-led sales while a fractional marketing leader builds brand, content, and credibility that drive inbound. Six months later, add sales to convert that momentum and amplify with targeted outbound. We explore how personal branding fuels trust at scale, why technical founders struggle with commercial storytelling, and how a visible leader can win enterprise attention without a giant ad budget.Finally, we tackle the 2025 reality: AI is the new search. If your brand isn't cited across the web, AI won't surface you. Kathryn outlines a practical strategy to expand your digital footprint—third-party features, consistent expert content, and multi-channel visibility—so you become “pickable” by AI systems and human buyers alike. It's a candid, no-fluff masterclass in scaling smarter.If this conversation sparked ideas, share it with someone building something big, subscribe for more bold, practical strategies, and tell us: what lever will you pull first?Support the show

Woody Klemetson scaled sales from 100 people at Divi to 350 at Bill.com post-acquisition, then walked away to build something harder: infrastructure for hybrid AI-human revenue teams. At AskElephant, he's tackling the problem that every revenue leader faces but few can articulate—how to actually implement AI in revenue operations when your systems weren't built for it. With zero marketing spend, AskElephant hit 400% growth through pure referral motion and converts 85% of pilots to production (versus single digits industry-wide). Woody breaks down why most "AI-ready" companies aren't, how to structure pilots that actually ship, and what it takes to hire sellers who orchestrate agents instead of relying on armies of support staff. Topics Discussed: Post-acquisition culture collision: the cost of moving too fast versus too slow Why "AI readiness" is usually one person at a company, not the organization  The 27-agent CRM system that delivers 5% forecast accuracy without human input  Revenue outcome systems as category evolution: solving for predictability across disconnected tools  Pilot-first GTM that converts at 85% by starting with one-minute-per-day wins  Partner-led distribution through consultants evolving from slideware to implementation  Hiring ops-minded sellers who code: over half of non-engineers using Cursor daily  The PLG expansion coming in 2025 and why traditional demand gen is getting tested alongside door-to-door GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Culture integration requires explicit deceleration early: Woody's team assumed Bill.com wanted their aggressive startup velocity immediately post-acquisition. They didn't slow down to map cultural differences, causing "whiplash" across 350 people. The specific mistake: not creating space to understand Bill's processes before challenging them. Even when acquired for your approach, the first 90 days should be listening and mapping, not executing. Only after understanding their system can you effectively challenge and merge cultures. This applies whether you're acquiring or being acquired—the cultural work is non-negotiable and front-loaded. Diagnose AI readiness by system documentation, not enthusiasm: Most companies think they're AI-ready because leadership wants AI. Reality check: if your teams haven't documented their systems and processes, AI has nothing to learn from. AskElephant starts some customers with basic dictation—not because it's revolutionary, but because it's the prerequisite to anything meaningful. The diagnostic question: "Walk us through your current customer journey." If the answer is "we have sales stages," you're not ready for automation. You need documented systems before AI can execute them. Start by having AI observe and document before it acts. Build agents incrementally to compound context: AskElephant runs 27 different CRM agents that collectively deliver 5% forecast accuracy. This wasn't built in one sprint—it took 40 hours of training and context-building. Each agent handles a specific job: contact creation, data enrichment, ICP scoring, churn monitoring, stage updates. The misconception founders have: AI should work perfectly from the first prompt. The reality: you build agents brick by brick, each one learning from the previous context layer. This is why their forecasting works—because 27 agents watching different signals together create accuracy that one "smart" agent can't. Pilot conversion at scale requires deliberately small scope: Single-digit pilot-to-production rates happen because teams scope too big. AskElephant's 85% conversion comes from "dream big, implement small." First pilot: automated CRM notes. Then: notes humans wish they'd written. Then: automated field updates. Each step saves minutes, builds trust, proves value. Woody's framework: if you're not saving one minute per person per day in your first pilot, you've scoped wrong. The goal isn't to wow with ambition—it's to ship something that works perfectly, then expand from proven trust. Their customers average 27 hours saved per week per person, but none started there. Revenue outcome systems emerge from tool sprawl failure: Every revenue leader uses 15-20 disconnected tools trying to make revenue predictable. The category insight isn't "operating systems"—it's that companies care about outcomes, not operations. AskElephant's positioning: we focus on the outcome (predictable revenue), not just the operating infrastructure. This distinction matters because it shifts the conversation from technical plumbing to business results. When creating categories, find the frame that makes the buyer's problem visceral and your solution inevitable, even if you're solving similar problems as others in the space. Partner-led GTM turns consultants into distribution: AskElephant's entire growth came through partners: Salesforce/HubSpot consultants becoming AI strategists, sales coaches extending from training to implementation. The unlock: these partners needed a way to deliver lasting value beyond slideware. Previously, a coach would train your team and leave. Now they implement AI systems that hold teams accountable to the training, creating longer engagements and better outcomes. For founders: identify services providers whose business model gets dramatically better by incorporating your product. They become your sales force because you make them more valuable to their clients. Hire for orchestration capability, not pure sales skill: Over half of AskElephant's non-engineering team uses Cursor daily. Woody hires "ops-minded" and "tech-minded" sellers who can manage AI agents alongside human work. The old model: silver-tongued seller + solutions engineer + 27 support people. The new model: one seller orchestrating 27 AI agents. These reps don't build lists, don't create SOWs, don't write product scopes, don't need SEs for demos. But they still need human connection skills—listening, curiosity, presence. The hiring filter: can this person think in systems and implement technical solutions while maintaining high-touch relationships? If they can't code enough to orchestrate agents, they can't scale in this environment. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Identity fraud spiked 148% in 2025 as AI democratized identity fabrication. Financial institutions now face a fundamental question: Are you dealing with a real human? Heka Global is addressing this with web intelligence—analyzing digital footprints like connected applications rather than traditional signals. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Idan Bar Dov, Co-Founder & CEO of Heka Global, to explore how his company created a fourth layer in the anti-fraud stack and why legacy identity verification systems are becoming liabilities rather than assets. Topics Discussed:  The emergence of "fraud as a service" and why consumer-facing attacks replaced traditional enterprise breaches  How web intelligence works: validating identity through connected applications and digital footprints  The anti-fraud tech stack: credit bureaus, biometrics, transaction analytics, and web intelligence as distinct layers  Why heads of fraud expand budgets rather than replace vendors, and what causes solutions to get kicked out  The partnership sales model: navigating vendor management complexity and red tape in financial institutions  Why 10-person dinners and fraud simulations outperform traditional enterprise marketing  How Barclays and Cornerback backing solved the chicken-and-egg problem for a data product  Why specific fraud prevention messaging (account takeover, synthetic identities) beat investor credibility GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Target ICP based on liability exposure, not just industry fit: Heka narrowed beyond "financial institutions" to lenders who bear immediate losses from fraud—companies like LendingPoint, Avant, and Upstart. These buyers feel the pain acutely versus institutions with reimbursement terms who can deflect liability. Idan's insight: "We need the client to feel the pain just as much as we see it. That means we want them to see the liability." Map your ICP not just by vertical or size, but by who internalizes the economic impact of the problem you solve. Frame your product as a new stack layer, not a competitive replacement: Heka positioned web intelligence as the fourth distinct layer after credit bureaus, biometrics, and transaction analytics. This became their second pitch deck slide, showing logos of each category. The result: buyers stopped comparing Heka to existing vendors and started evaluating complementary value. When entering mature markets, resist the urge to claim you're "better than X"—instead, define where you fit in the existing architecture and why that layer didn't exist before. Abandon spray-and-pray for sub-1,000 TAM markets: Heka tested Lemlist flows with targeted LLM personalization and saw zero pipeline from it. Idan's take: "When you're selling to maybe a thousand financial institutions, that's it. You can be super specific when you target them." For enterprise plays with small addressable markets, allocate zero budget to automated outbound. Focus entirely on warm introductions, relationship nurturing, and becoming known to every relevant buyer through content and community. Leverage investor networks to break data product cold-starts: Data products face a critical barrier—you need customer data to prove value, but need proven value to get customers. Heka solved this by bringing on Barclays and Cornerback as investors who vouched for the team's capability to "do magic and create a new layer." Their backing convinced risk-averse financial institutions to pilot. If building a product requiring customer data for training or validation, prioritize strategic investors who can credibly de-risk early adoption for target buyers. Build trust through teaching, not pitching: Heka hosts dinners and fraud incident simulations with ~10 heads of fraud per session. Critical detail: they never pitch Heka in these forums. Idan explained the approach focuses on "building a community around Heka and how people engage with your product and you being a thought leader while listening." In high-trust categories, educational forums where you facilitate peer learning without selling create stronger pipeline than direct pitching. Structure partnerships with active enablement and incentive alignment: Idan's key lesson: "Partnerships are not synonymous to distribution channels." Heka requires partner sales teams to join early customer conversations to learn the pitch, provides detailed API and output training, and ensures partners get extra compensation for selling non-core products. Without this, partners lack motivation to prioritize your solution. Structure partnerships as true collaborations requiring ongoing enablement investment, not passive referral channels. A/B test credibility signals versus technical specificity: Idan assumed messaging around Barclays backing would crush, while specific fraud prevention content (account takeover, synthetic identity detection) was an afterthought. The data showed 10x better response to technical specificity. The lesson: sophisticated buyers in technical categories respond to precise problem-solving over brand credibility. Test whether your audience values "who backs us" or "exactly what we do" before defaulting to investor logos and validation. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Edward Burtynsky is one of the preeminent photographers working today. For decades, his work has examined the human impact on the environment. By turns troubling and awe-inspiring, his large-scale images reveal a world in rapid transition. An illuminating and deeply engaging discussion.Links:Edward Burtynsky websiteBurtynsky at the International Center of PhotographyEdward Burtynsky Instagram

Send me a text (I will personally respond)Are you struggling to build a channel sales program that actually produces meaningful revenue? Wondering why bigger isn't always better when choosing channel partners? Frustrated by the constant pressure to sign as many partners as possible, only to see limited results? This episode dives deep into the strategic and tactical mistakes cybersecurity startups make with channel go-to-market, and reveals how to build a scalable, effective partner ecosystem.In this conversation we discuss:

Ivan Cossu is Co-Founder and CEO of deskbird, a flexible workplace management platform that's scaled past $10 million ARR. Founded in April 2020 during COVID's most uncertain period, deskbird survived a near-death pivot just months in and scaled across 10 international markets within six months—an unconventional path that challenged conventional wisdom about market domination strategies. Ivan shares the tactical decisions behind their international expansion, the shift from founder-led to scalable sales, and why they're deliberately targeting an underfunded VC category. Topics Discussed: The critical pivot from an Airbnb for co-working spaces to workplace management software in July 2020, months before running out of capital The counterintuitive decision to scale internationally within six months rather than dominating a single market first Balancing consumer-grade UX with enterprise-level customization in a category where competitors felt like "database queries" The mechanics of transitioning from pure inbound to incorporating outbound without breaking what's working US market expansion from Europe with higher close rates than home markets—and what that signaled about timing Why traditional email outbound is dead in the AI era and what actually works for breaking through GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Scale your proven funnel globally before you perfect it locally: When deskbird saw strong early traction, they launched landing pages across UK and US markets within months to test demand signals. Ivan's contrarian take: "If you have a good funnel that's working, be bold enough to scale it globally" rather than spending years dominating Germany first. The key qualifier—you need solid core product and conversion metrics, not just initial traction. They were "way too scared of going international because it always worked out way better than we thought," often seeing better metrics in new markets than home markets. Most founders over-index on local penetration when they should be testing international demand. Choose validation channels by cycle time, not potential scale: In the first 6-12 months, avoid any channel with an 18-month feedback loop, even if it's your eventual ICP. Ivan targeted paid search and lower mid-market specifically because "you get a good sample size quite fast." Fast feedback loops let you iterate positioning, messaging, and ICP assumptions weekly rather than annually. Once you have conviction from high-velocity channels, then layer in longer-cycle enterprise motions. This sequencing prevents burning 12+ months on the wrong strategy. Founder-led sales is a permanent muscle, not a phase to exit: At $10M+ ARR, Ivan still joins sales calls regularly, citing a top entrepreneur-investor's rule: "Sales always needs to remain a final topic." The evolution isn't binary—it's additive. First hires (around 9 months post-MVP) were generalist "hard workers" who could sell vision over process. Today's hires are more disciplined as repeatable plays emerged. But the founder never exits—they shift from doing all deals to strategic deals, competitive situations, and maintaining direct customer insight. Even Benioff at Salesforce's scale still jumps into deals. Outbound in the AI era requires anti-scale tactics: Ivan's blunt assessment: "I don't believe in emails and any kind of written communication, especially not in the age of AI—it's just inflated." What works: (1) Targeted account selection—not 1:1 but not 1:1000 either, find the sweet spot of focused ABM, (2) Physical mail and offline media, (3) Cold calling with proper infrastructure. The challenge isn't the tactic—it's "having all the BDRs and AEs knowing which accounts they have to call, seamlessly calling account after account." Most companies can't operationalize the calling machine. Best results come when marketing warms leads with intent data, then hands them to outbound teams—not pure cold outreach. Underfunded categories force better unit economics: Deskbird's space isn't flooded with VC dollars—Ivan mapped 50-60 European competitors but limited mega-rounds. His take: "There's a downside, it's harder to get VC money, but once you get it you don't have the problem that some spaces are overfunded and it's crazily driving up customer acquisition cost." Markets with excessive capital often have one winner and "very sad consolidation" for positions 2-4. Constrained capital forced deskbird to build profitably and focus on product differentiation (Airbnb-like UX meets enterprise customization) rather than outspending competitors. Close rates in new markets signal expansion timing better than absolute numbers: Deskbird closed US deals from Europe with European AEs in mismatched time zones—and saw the highest close rates of any market. Ivan's logic: "If we can close them from Europe with our European AEs working in different time zones who cannot deliver the same SLAs, and we then go to the US, it should get even better." Don't wait for perfect execution—if you're winning despite structural disadvantages, that's your signal to invest. They hired their first US-based team only after proving they could win remotely. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Mark Roberge is calling it now: we are about to witness the highest failure rate for a single cohort of startups in the history of tech. As author of Science of Scaling, and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, Mark joins the pod to dismantle the "growth at all costs" mindset that still plagues founders. He explains why the assembly-line sales model is dead and how AI will force a return to the full-cycle "rainmaker" rep. **Key moments:** The AI Bubble: Why the index fund of the last two years of AI investments is likely doomed. Fixing Your ICP: And how optimizing for CAC or inbound volume without ICP fundamentals in place is a recipe for disaster The 80% Rule: How AI moves reps from 25% selling time to 80%, and what that means for the future of SDR, AE, and CS functions LIR - What it is and Why It Matters: Why every board deck needs a a LIR slide to predict product-market fit before revenue numbers hit **Note:** Mark is donating 100% of the proceeds from his new book to mental health causes. Grab a copy of *The Science of Scaling* on Amazon!   Subscribe to Topline Newsletter. Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast!   Chapters: 00:00 Introduction: Mark Roberge and The Science of Scaling 03:44 Founder Turnover and Loyalty in the AI Era 06:18 Navigating Founder Burnout and Strategic Pivots 16:30 Predicting High Failure Rates for AI-Native Startups 18:57 The Origin Story Behind The Science of Scaling 24:51 Why Most Companies Define Their ICP Wrong 28:34 The Leading Indicator of Retention (LIR) Framework 32:30 Real-World Example: Shifting ICP Based on Retention 37:22 Who Should Own Product-Market Fit? 43:23 Transitioning GTM Strategies from SaaS to AI 47:29 The End of Specialization: Collapsing GTM Roles 51:12 Solving GTM Inefficiency by Increasing Selling Time 56:50 How to Pilot the Consolidated "Ninja AE" Role 01:04:29 Designing Organizations for Rainmakers vs. Average Reps 01:08:01 Mental Health, Gratitude, and Closing Thoughts  

Luigi Mallardo joined Woffu as an early angel investor and later became CRO, helping founder Miguel Fresneda shape a practical SaaS growth path. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Woffu has built a modern cloud-based time and attendance platform for SMEs and mid-market companies, replacing legacy tools and spreadsheets with a focused, mobile-first workforce solution. Starting from just €2K MRR, Luigi led growth first through inbound, then outbound, and partner channels, increasing average revenue per account five to seven times. By 2025, the company reached nearly €500K in monthly recurring revenue, or about €6M ARR, with more than 50 employees and profitable, efficient growth across Spain. Woffu sold to Visma in 2022 following a multi-year, proactive exit strategy, with a total reported value of €20–30M including the 3-year earnout. Luigi shares how early focus, diversified revenue, and optionality shaped every decision. His biggest lesson: clarity about your endgame determines your strategy early on, including your growth model and many other important decisions. Key Takeaways Strategic Focus - Choosing one clear use case and market unlocked faster growth than chasing horizontal HR suite ambitions across Europe. Optionality First - Designing for multiple future paths gave founders leverage rather than forcing a sale based solely on valuation. Revenue - Layers Inbound, outbound, and partners created resilience while steadily raising average contract value and predictability. Exit Readiness - Warming buyers years early turned selling into a strategic process rather than a rushed financial event. Customer Success - Investing deeply in retention created low churn and made Woffu more attractive to long-term acquirers. Builder Mindset - Great CROs zoom in and out, connecting go-to-market execution with strategy, culture, and long-term outcomes. Quote from Luigi Mallardo, Chief Revenue Officer at Woffu "We chose our focus of ICP and focus of use case, to reduce the space of market optionality to get more business optionality. You see what I mean?  "The advice I give most often is to focus, which doesn't mean to close off the option of having more verticals forever, but you need 75% or 80 % of your pipeline on where you are already monetizing and building traction. And then you leave that 20 % of pipeline to do experimentations in a new vertical. "It's one of the historical challenges, especially with young founders: the feeling of losing opportunities if they decide and don't do everything. But you are losing opportunities if you go too wide and you don't focus. Just be patient, postpone, and focus on what works." Links Luigi Mallardo on LinkedIn Woffu on LinkedIn Woffu website Podcast Sponsor – Lighter Capital This podcast is sponsored by Lighter Capital. In the last 15 years, Lighter Capital has helped over 600 software and SaaS founders secure simple, non-dilutive financing to grow a little faster—without giving up any precious equity or board seats to investors.  Simple debt funding from Lighter Capital can range from $50K to $10 million, with straightforward terms, no personal guarantees or covenants, and up to a 4-year payback period. Go to LighterCapital.com to apply and get a quick pre-qualification. Then talk with their experienced team to create a practical funding plan to achieve your goals.  The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com. Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups Be part of a committed and confidential group of practical founders creating valuable software companies without big VC funding.  A Practical Founders Peer Group is a committed and confidential group of founders/CEOs who want to help you succeed on your terms. Each Practical Founders Peer Group is personally curated and moderated by Greg Head.

Season 10 starts off with the pilot episode, aka Episode Zero. This is a great place to start if you are a new listener to the podcast. Sit back and listen as Peter and Chris talk about RIDDLEBOX, discuss the Insane Clown Posse's timeline leading up to the release of the almighty 3rd Jokers Card, talk about making Dallas an official Clown Town, and tackle important topics like sugar free Faygo!        The LinkTree can be found at https://linktr.ee/juggalorwd. Otherwise here are all of our links -  Twitter/X: @JuggaloRWD  IG: @JuggaloRWD  Facebook: @JuggaloRWD  TikTok: @JuggaloRWD  Threads: @JuggaloRWD  BlueSky: @JuggaloRWD  The website is www.JuggaloRewind.com.  Join us everywhere to talk to other listeners and about ICP, Twiztid and random juggalo nonsense.  Email us at juggalorwd@gmail.com or call/text us at (810) 666-1570.        Join our Patreon! For only FOUR DOLLARS a month, you can join Kilnore's Army and get at least two bonus episodes per month, videos, chats and more! Even without paying, you can join the Patreon community! Become an official member of the Phat or Wack Pack today! -- Juggalo Rewind Patreon.      Additional music provided by the IRTD. Voiceover work provided by Christmas. All music played is owned by the respective publishers and copywrite holders and is reproduced for review purposes only under fair use. #ForTheJuggaloCulture

I recently sat down on the Snowpal Podcast with Javier Lozano Jr., a fractional CMO/CRO who's helped B2B tech companies scale from ~$1M to $20M in revenue. As an engineering founder myself, this conversation hit close to home. Many of us believe that if we build a great product, the market will magically find us. In reality, that's rarely how it works. The core issue isn't engineering or effort; it's the lack of a clear, aligned go-to-market strategy. Before growth tactics come into play, founders need to understand their ICP, identify real buyer pain points, and align marketing, sales, and customer success around a focused narrative that differentiates them in crowded markets.

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss autonomous AI agents and the mindset shift required for total automation. You’ll learn the risks of experimental autonomous systems and how to protect your data. You’ll discover ways to connect AI to your calendar and task managers for better scheduling. You’ll build a mindset that turns repetitive tasks into permanent automated systems. You’ll prepare your current workflows for the next generation of digital personal assistants. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-what-openclaw-moltbot-teaches-us-about-ai-future.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! [podcastsponsor] Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher S. Penn [00:00]: In this week’s In Ear Insights, let’s talk about autonomous AI. The talk of the town for the last week or so has been the open source project first named Claudebot, spelled C L A W D. Anthropic’s lawyers paid them a visit and said please don’t do that. So they changed it to Maltbot and then no one could remember that. And so they have changed it finally now to Open Claw. Their mascot is still a lobster. This is in a condensed version, a fully autonomous AI system that you install on a. Christopher S. Penn [00:35]: Please, if you’re thinking about on a completely self contained computer that is not on your main production network because it is made of security vulnerabilities, but it interfaces with a bunch of tools and hasn’t connected to the AI model of your choice to allow you to basically text via WhatsApp or Telegram with an agent and have it go off and do things. And the the pitch is a couple things. One, it has a lot of autonomy so it can just go off and do things. There were some disasters when it first came out where somebody let it loose on their production work computer and immediately started buying courses for them. We did not see a bump in the Trust Insights courses, so that’s unfortunate. But the idea being it’s supposed to function like a true personal assistant. Christopher S. Penn [01:33]: You just text it and say hey, make me an appointment with Katie for lunch today at noon PM at this restaurant and it will go off and figure out how to do those things and then go off and do them. And for the most part it is very successful. The latest thing is people have been just setting it loose. They a bunch of folks created some plugins for it that allow it to have its own social network called Mult Book, where which is a sort of a Reddit clone where hundreds of thousands of people’s open Claw systems are having conversations with each other that look a lot like Reddit and some very amusing writing there. Christopher S. Penn [02:12]: Before I go any further Katie, your initial impressions about a fully autonomous personal AI that may or may not just go off and do things on its own that you didn’t approve? Katie Robbert [02:24]: Hard pass period. No, and thank you for the background information. So I, you know, as I mentioned to you, Chris Offline, I don’t really know a lot about this. I know it’s a newer thing, but it’s like picked up speed pretty quickly. I thought people were trying to be edgy by spelling it incorrectly in terms of it being part of Claude, but now understanding that Claude stepped in and was like heck no. That explains the name because I was very confused by that. I was like, okay, you know, I, I think a lot of us have always wanted some sort of an admin or personal assistant for paperwork or, you know, making appointments and stuff. Like, so I can definitely see the potential. Katie Robbert [03:10]: But it sounds like there’s a lot of things that need to be worked out with the technology in terms of security, in terms of guardrails. So let’s say I am your average, everyday operations person. I’m drowning in the weeds of admin and everything, and I see this as a glimmer of hope. And I’m like, ooh, maybe this is the thing. I don’t know a lot about it. What do I need to consider? What are some questions I should be asking before I go ahead and let this quote unquote, autonomous bot take over my life and possibly screw things up? Christopher S. Penn [03:54]: Number one, don’t use this at work. Don’t use this for anything important. Run this on a computer that you are totally okay with just burning down to the ground and reformatting later. There are a number of services like Cloudflare, with Cloudflare’s workers and Hetzner and a bunch of other companies that have, they very quickly, very smartly rolled out very inexpensive plans where you can set up a open clause server on their infrastructure that is self contained and that at any point you just, you can just hit the self destruct button. Katie Robbert [04:27]: Well, and I want to acknowledge that because you said, you know, you started by saying, like, any computer, I don’t know a lot of people besides yourself and other handful who have extra computers lying around. You know, it’s not something that the average, you know, professional has. You know, some of us are using, you know, laptops that we get from the company that we work for and if we ever leave that job, we have to give that computer back. And so we don’t have a personal computer. Speaker 3 [04:59]: So it’s number one. Katie Robbert [05:01]: It’s good to know that there are options. So you said Cloudflare, you said, who else? Christopher S. Penn [05:06]: Hetzner, which is a German company, basically, anybody that can rent you a server that you can use for this type of system. What the important thing here is not this particular technology, because the creator has said, I made this for myself as kind of a gimmick. I did not intend for people to be deploying clusters of these and turning into a product and trying to sell it to people. He’s like, that’s not what it’s for. And he’s like, I intentionally did not put in things like security because I didn’t want to bother. It was a fun little side project. But the thing that folks should be looking at is the idea. The idea of. We’ve done some episodes recently on the Trust Insights livestream about Claude Code and Claude Cowork, which Cowork, by the way, just got plugins. Christopher S. Penn [05:58]: So all those skills and things, that’s for another time, but when you start looking at how we use things like Claude code. This morning when I got into the office, I fired up Claude Code, opened it in my Asana folder and said, give me my daily briefing. What’s going on? It listed all these things and I immediately just turn on my voice memo thing. I said, this is done. Let’s move this due date, this is done. And it went off and it did those things for me. Someone who hated using project management software like this now, I love it. And I was like, okay, great, I can just tell it what to do. And it does. And I actually looked. I opened up an asana looked, and it not only created the tasks, but it put in details and descriptions and stuff like that. Christopher S. Penn [06:44]: And it now also prompts me, hey, how much time do you think this will take? I’ll put that in there too. I’m like, this is great. I don’t have to do anything other than talk to it. Something like openclaw is the next evolution of a thing like Claude Code or Open or Claude Coerc, where now it’s a system that has connection to multiple systems, where it just starts acting like a personal assistant. I’m sure if I wanted to invest the time, and I probably will, I’m going to make a Python connector to my Google Calendar so that I can say in my Asana folder, hey, now that you’ve got my task list for this week, start blocking time for tasks. Christopher S. Penn [07:26]: Fill up my calendar with all the available slots with work so that I can get as much done as possible, which will make me more productive at a personal level. When people see systems like OpenClaw out there, they should be thinking, okay, that particular version, not a good idea. But we should be thinking about how will our work look when we have a little cloud bot somewhere that we can talk to, like a PA and say, fill up my calendar with the important stuff this week. Speaker 3 [07:58]: Right? Christopher S. Penn [07:59]: Yeah, because you’ve connected it to your son, you’ve connected your Google Calendar, you’ve connected to your HubSpot. You could say to it, hey, as CEO, you could say, hey, open agent, fill Up. Go look in HubSpot at the top 20 deals that we need to be working on and fill up John’s calendar with exact times that he should be calling those people. Right. Katie Robbert [08:24]: I’m sorry, in advance. I’m gonna do that. Christopher S. Penn [08:27]: He’s been saying, hey, it looks like Chris has gotten some time on Friday open agent. Go and look in Chris’s asana and fill up his day. Make sure that he’s getting the most important things done. That as a manager, you know, with permission, obviously is where this technology should be going so that you could, like, this is the vision. You could be running the company from your phone just by having conversations with the assistant. You know, you’re out walking Georgia and you’re like, oh, I forgot these three things and I need to do lunch here and I do this. Go, go take care of it. And like a real human assistant, it just does those things and comes back and says, here’s what I did for you. Katie Robbert [09:10]: Couple questions. One, you know, I hear you when you’re saying this is how we should be thinking about it. You are someone who has more knowledge than the most of us about what these systems can and can’t do. So how does someone who isn’t you start thinking about those things? Let’s just start with that question. You know, and I know that this, know I always come back to. I remember you wrote this series when we worked at the agency and it was for IBM. So you know, for those who don’t know, Chris is a, what, eight year running IBM champion. Congratulations on that. That is, I mean that’s a big deal. Katie Robbert [09:56]: But it was the citizen analyst post series that always stuck with me because I always, I’d never heard that terminology, but it was less about what you called it and more about the thinking behind it. And I think we’re almost, I would argue that we’re due for another citizen analyst, like series of posts from you, Chris, like, how do we get to thinking about this the way that you’re thinking about it or the way that somebody could be looking at it and you know, to borrow the term the art of the possible, like, how does someone get from. There’s a software, I’ve been told it does stuff, but I shouldn’t use it. Okay, I’m going to move on with my day. Katie Robbert [10:41]: Like, how does someone get from that to, okay, let me actually step back and look at it and think about the potential and see what I do have and start to cobble things together. You know, I feel like it’s maybe the difference between someone who can cook with a recipe and someone who can cook just by looking inside their pantry. Christopher S. Penn [11:01]: I, the cooking analogy is a great one. I would definitely go there because you have to know when you walk into the kitchen what’s in here, what are the appliances, what do we have for ingredients, how do those ingredients go together? Like for example chocolate and oatmeal generally don’t go well together. At least not as a main. It’s kind of like when you look at the 5PS platform we always say this in most situations do not start with the technology, right? That’s, that’s a recipe usually for not things not going well. But part of it is what’s implicit in platform is that you know what the platforms do, that you know what you have. Because if you don’t know what you have and you don’t know how to use them, which is process, then you’re not going to be as effective. Christopher S. Penn [11:46]: And so you do have to take some time to understand what’s in each of the five P’s so that you can make this happen. So in the case of something like an open claw or even actually let’s go, let’s take a step back. If you are a non technical user and you’re, let’s say you decide I’m going to open up Claude Cowork and try and make a go of this, the first question I would ask is well what things can it connect to? That’s an important mindset shift is what can I connect this to? Because we’ve all had the experience where we’re working like a chat GPT or whatever and it does stuff and it’s like fun and then like well now I got go be the copy paste monkey and put this in other systems. Christopher S. Penn [12:29]: When you start looking at agentic AI that where do I have to copy paste? This should be a shorter and shorter list every day as companies start adding more connectors. So when you go to Claude Cowork you see Google Drive, Google Calendar, fireflies, Asana, HubSpot, etc. And that’s your first step is go what does it connect to? And then you take a look at your own process in the 5ps and go of those systems. What do I do? Oh I every Monday I look in HubSpot and then I look in Google Analytics and then I look here and look here and go well if I wrote down that process as a standard operating procedure and I handed that sop as a document to Claude in cowork. I could literally asking, hey, how much of this could you do for me? Christopher S. Penn [13:21]: And just tell me what to look at. So first you got to know what’s possible. Second, you got to know your process. Third, you have to ask the machine can how much of this can you do? And then you have to think about and this is the important question, what, Given all this stuff that you have access to, what could you do that. I am not thinking about that. I’m not doing that. I should be. The biggest problem we have as humans is we do not. We are terrible at white space. We are terrible at knowing what’s not there. We. We look at something we understand, okay, this is what this thing does. We never think, well, what else could it do that I don’t know? This is where AI is really smart because it’s been trained on all the data. Christopher S. Penn [14:09]: It goes well, other people also use it for this. Other people do this. Or it’s capable of doing this. Like, hey, you’re asana. Because it contains a rudimentary document management system, could contain recipes. You could use it as a recipe book. Like you shouldn’t, but you could. And so those are kind of the mindset things. And the last one I’ll add to that. There’s something that I know, Katie, you and I have been talking about as we sort of try and build a. A co AI person as well as a co CEO to sort of the mirror the principles of trust. Insights is one of the first things that I think about every single time I try to solve a problem is this a problem that can solve with an algorithm? This is something that I Learned from Google 15 years ago. Christopher S. Penn [14:56]: Google in their employee onboarding says we favor algorithmic thinkers. Someone who doesn’t say, I’m going to solve this problem. Somebody who thinks, how can I write an algorithm that will solve this problem forever and make it go away and make it never come back? Which is a different way of thinking. Katie Robbert [15:14]: That’s really interesting. Speaker 3 [15:17]: Huh? Katie Robbert [15:18]: I like that. And I feel like. I feel like offline. I’m just going to sort of like. Speaker 3 [15:23]: Make that note for us. Katie Robbert [15:24]: I want to explore that a little bit more because I really, I think that’s a really interesting point. Speaker 3 [15:31]: And. Katie Robbert [15:31]: It does explain a lot around your approach to looking at this. These machines, as you’re describing, sort of the people are bad with the white space. It reminds me of the case study that was my favorite when I was in grad school. And it was a company that at The Time was based in Boston. I honestly haven’t kept up with them anymore. But it was a company called Ideo and ido. One of the things that they did really well was they did basically user experience. But what they did was they didn’t just say, here’s a thing, use it. Let us learn how you’re using the thing. They actually went outside and it wasn’t the here’s a thing, use it. It’s let us just observe what people are doing and what problems they’re having with everyday tasks and where they’re getting stuck in the process. Katie Robbert [16:28]: I remember this is just a side note, a little bit of a rant. I brought this case study to my then leadership team as a way to think differently about how, you know, because were sort of stuck in our sales pipeline and sales were zero and blah, blah. And I got laughed out of the room because that’s not how we do it. This is how we do it. And, you know, I felt very ashamed to have tried something different. And it sort of was like, okay, well that’s not useful. But now fast forward jokes on them. That’s exactly how you need to be thinking about it. Katie Robbert [17:03]: So it just, it strikes me that we don’t necessarily, yes, we need to understand the software, but in terms of our own awareness as humans, it might be helpful to sort of maybe isolate certain parts of your day to say, I am going to be very aware and present in this moment when I’m doing this particular task to see. Speaker 3 [17:31]: Where am I getting stuck, where am. Katie Robbert [17:32]: I getting caught up, where am I getting distracted and then coming back to it? And so I think that’s something we can all do. And it sounds like, oh, that’s so much extra work, I just want to get it done. Well, guess what? Speaker 3 [17:45]: Those tasks that you’re just trying to. Katie Robbert [17:47]: Survive and get through, they are likely the ones that are best candidates for AI. So if we think back to our other framework, the TRIPS framework, which is. Speaker 3 [17:57]: In this list somewhere, here it is. Katie Robbert [18:01]: Found it. Trust, insights, AI trips, time, repetitiveness, importance, pain, and sufficient data. And so if it’s something that you’re doing all the time, you’re just trying to get through, may be a good candidate for AI. You may just not be aware that it’s something that AI can do. And so, Chris, to your point, it could be as straightforward as. All right, I just finished this report. Let me go ahead and just record voice, memo my thoughts about how I did it, how it goes, how often I do it, give it to even something like a Gemini chat and say, hey, I do this process, you know, three times a week. Is this something AI could do for me? Ask me some questions about it and maybe even parts of it could be automated. Katie Robbert [18:50]: Like that to me is something that should be accessible to most of us. You don’t have to be, you know, a high performing engineer or data scientist or you know, an AI thought leader to do that kind of an exercise. Christopher S. Penn [19:07]: A lot of, a lot of the issues that people have with making AI productive for them almost kind of reminds me of waterfall versus agile in the sense of, hey, I need to do this thing. And you know, this is this massive big project and you start digging like, I give up, I can’t do it. As opposed to a more bottom up approach, you go, okay, I do this as possible. What if I can automate just this part? What if I can automate just this part? What if I can do this? And then what you find over time is that then you start going, well, what if I glue these parts together? And then eventually you end up with a system. Now that gets you to V1 of like, hey, this is this janky cobbled together system of the way that I do things. Christopher S. Penn [19:47]: For example, on my YouTube videos that I make myself personally, I got tired of putting just basically changing the text in Canva every video. This is stupid. Why am I doing this? I know image magic exists. I know this library, that library exists. So I wrote a Python script, said, I’m just going to give you a list of titles. I’m going to give you the template, the placeholder, I’ll tell you what font to use, you make it. This is not rocket surgery. This is not like inventing something new. This is slapping text on an image. And so now when I’m in my kitchen on Sundays cooking, I’ll record nine videos at a time. AI will choose the titles and then it will just crank out the nine images. And that saves me about a half an hour of stupid typing, right? Christopher S. Penn [20:33]: That stupid typing is not executive function. I’m not outsourcing anything valuable to AI. Just make this go away. So if you think and you automate little bits everywhere you can and then you start gluing it together, that gets you to V1. And then you take a step back and go, wow, V1 is a hot mess of duct tape and chewing gum and bailing wire. And then that you say to with, in partnership with your AI, reverse engineer the requirements of this janky system that we’ve made to A requirements document. And then you say, okay, now let’s build v2, because now we know what the requirements are. We can now build V2 and then V2 is polished. It’s lovely. Like my voice transcription system V1 was a hot mess. Christopher S. Penn [21:16]: V2 is a polished app that I can run and have running all the time and it doesn’t blow up my system anymore. But in terms of thinking about how we apply AI and the sort of AI mindset, that’s the approach that I take. It’s not the only one by any means, but that’s how I think about this. So when someone says, hey, open call is here, what’s the first thing I do? I go to the GitHub repo, I grab a copy of it, make a copy of it, because stuff vanishes all the time. And then I dive in with an AI coding tool just to say, explain this to me what’s in the box. Christopher S. Penn [21:53]: If you are a more technical person, one of the best things that you can do in a tool like Claude code is say, build me a system diagram, analyze the code base and build me system. Don’t make any changes, don’t do anything, just explain the system to me and you’ll look at it and go, oh, that’s what this does. When I’m debugging a particularly difficult project, every so often I will say, hey, make a system diagram of the current state and it will make one. And I’ll be like, well, where’s this thing? It’s like, oh yeah, that should be there. I’m like, yeah, no kidding it should be there. Would you please go and fix that? But having to your point, having the self awareness to take a step back and say show me the system works really well. Christopher S. Penn [22:39]: If you want to get really fancy, you could screen record you doing something, load that to a system like Gemini and say, make me a process diagram of how I do this thing. And then you can look at it with a tool like Gemini because Gemini does video really well and say, how could I make this more efficient? Katie Robbert [22:59]: I think that’s a really good entry point for most of us. Most machines, Macs and PCs come with some sort of screen recorder built in. There’s a lot of free tools, but I think that’s a really good opportunity to start to figure out like, is this something that I could find efficiencies on? Speaker 3 [23:19]: Do I even have documentation around how I do it? Katie Robbert [23:22]: If not, take this video and create some and then I can look at it and go, oh, that’s not right. The thing I want to reinforce, you know, as we’re talking about these autonomous, you know, virtual assistants, executive assistants, you know, these bots that are going to take over the world, blah, blah. You still need human intervention. So, Chris, as you were describing, the process of having the system create the title cards for your videos, I would imagine, I would hope, I would assume that you, the human reviews all of the title cards ahead of, like, before posting them live, just in case you got on a particular rant in one video, it was profanity laced and the AI was like, oh, well, Chris says this particular F word over and over again, so it must be the title of the video. Katie Robbert [24:14]: Therefore, boom, here’s title card. And I’m just going to publish it live. I would like to believe that there is still, at least in that case, some human intervention to go. Oh, yeah, that’s not the title of that video. Let me go ahead and fix that. And I think that’s. Go ahead. Christopher S. Penn [24:29]: There isn’t human intervention on that because there’s an ideal customer profile that is interrogated as part of the process to say, would the ICP like this? And the ICP is a business professional. And so, you know, I’ve had it say, the ICP would not like this title and it will just fix itself. And I’m like, okay, cool. So you, to your point, there was human intervention at some point, and then we codified the rules with an ideal customer profile. Say, this is what the audience really wants. Katie Robbert [24:54]: And I think that’s okay. Speaker 3 [24:56]: I think you at least need to. Katie Robbert [24:57]: Start with that for V1. You should have that human intervention as the QA. But to your point, as you learn, okay, this is my ideal customer, and this is what they want. This is the feedback that I’ve gotten on everything. Take all of that feedback, put it into a document and say, listen to this feedback every time you do something. Make sure we’re not continually making the same mistakes. So it really comes down to some sort of a QA check, a quality assurance check in the process before you just unleash what the machines create to the public. Christopher S. Penn [25:31]: Exactly. So to wrap up Open Claw, Claudebot, Multbot, slash, whatever they want to call it this week is by itself not something I would recommend people install. But you should absolutely be thinking about, what does a semi autonomous or fully autonomous system look like in our future, how will we use it? And laying the groundwork for it by getting your own AI mindset in place and documenting the heck out of everything that you do so that when a production ready system like that becomes available, you will have all the materials ready to make it happen and make it happen safely and effectively. Christopher S. Penn [26:09]: If you’ve got some thoughts or hey, you installed open claw and burned down your computer pot, drop by our free slot group Go to trust insights AI analytics for marketers where you and over 4,500 marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day. And wherever it is you watch, listen to the show. If there’s a channel you’d rather have it on, said go to Trust Insights AI TI Podcast. You can find us all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in to talk to you on the next one. Speaker 3 [26:40]: Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable Insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen and prosperity. Aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data driven approach. Trust Insight specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive measurable marketing roi. Trust Insight services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies. Speaker 3 [27:33]: Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology and Martech selection and implementation and high level strategic consulting encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Anthropic, Claude Dall? E, Midjourney Stock, Stable Diffusion and metalama. Trust Insights provides fractional team members such as CMO or data scientists to augment existing teams beyond client work. Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In Ear Insights Podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the so what Livestream webinars and keynote speaking. What distinguishes Trust Insights in their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data, Trust Insights are adept at leveraging cutting edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations. Speaker 3 [28:39]: Data Storytelling this commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights educational resources which empower marketers to become more data driven. Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI sharing knowledge widely whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid sized business or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance and educational resources to help you navigate the ever evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI. Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information. Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.

Peter Velardi, CEO and Founder of Refer Me IQ, joins Pathmonk Presents to break down how referral-driven growth can outperform traditional acquisition channels when supported by the right systems. Drawing from decades of experience in financial services and enterprise leadership, Peter explains how companies can turn referrals from an unpredictable bonus into a repeatable, scalable growth engine. The conversation covers building a referral culture, aligning systems with human behavior, and using automation to reduce acquisition costs while increasing conversion quality. Listeners will gain practical insights on ICP focus, customer journey design, and why predictable referral workflows are becoming a competitive advantage for modern growth-focused organizations.

Today on the show I get to spend time with Koyoltzintli. She is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Ulster County, New York. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo. She has had two solo shows at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and a solo show at Leila Greiche in 2023. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio's second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art.Koyoltzintli has performed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum, and Queens Museum. Recently, she performed at Performance Space in NYC, curated by Guadalupe Maravilla, at Dia Chelsea for the closing event of Delcy Morelos' El Abrazo, and at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.During our conversation, Koyo shares about her family, her childhood, how her travels with her father and the rooting into her ancestral lands with her mother helped to shape who she is today. We learn about her dear elders who she both photographed and studied with, and how they played a role in the work she does today with clay and indigenous sounds. While Koyo shares some of the stories of her days as a photojournalist, it would seem that we barely scratched the surface of all that flows from and through her. You can follow along with her offerings and creations by way of her website and social media. Stay tuned for details of an upcoming show in April! Here's the info on her Egg Cleansing Ritual at Spiral Mirror on February 16th.Here are your Full Moon vibes.Today's show was engineered by Ian Seda from Radiokingston.org.Our show music is from Shana Falana!Feel free to email me, say hello: she@iwantwhatshehas.org** Please: SUBSCRIBE to the pod and leave a REVIEW wherever you are listening, it helps other users FIND IThttp://iwantwhatshehas.org/podcastITUNES | SPOTIFYITUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i-want-what-she-has/id1451648361?mt=2SPOTIFY:https://open.spotify.com/show/77pmJwS2q9vTywz7Uhiyff?si=G2eYCjLjT3KltgdfA6XXCAFollow:INSTAGRAM * https://www.instagram.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast/FACEBOOK * https://www.facebook.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast

Rob continues his conversation with coach and youth-sport observer Shaun Reid, moving from diagnosing what's broken to exploring practical solutions. Shaun argues the core issue in youth sports is a lack of parent education. Most parents don't know what healthy support looks like, which leads to over-involvement, pressure, and confusion.Topics covered include how parents unintentionally make things harder for their kids, what healthy involvement looks like, why youth coaching has almost no barrier to entry, how to navigate pay-to-play without burnout, what the U.S. can learn from countries like Norway, and why the youth-sport dropout rate (around 70 percent by age 13) continues to rise.Shaun closes with rapid-fire reflections on formative books, failure, coaching success, and how his faith has shaped his life. Shaun can be reached at sfrsales76@gmail.com.About the Impactful Coaching Project The Impactful Coaching Project exists to help coaches lead with competence, care, and constancy through research-backed frameworks, practical tools, and ongoing conversations about holistic coaching.Listen and explore ICP resources: impactfulcoachingproject.com impactfulcoachingproject.substack.com

Jordon Comstock is founder and CEO of BoomCloud, a vertical SaaS company serving dental practices with patient membership software. He started the company scrappy and bootstrapped, with no outside funding, after years in the dental industry managing his family's dental lab business. BoomCloud now does about $3M in ARR with roughly 600 dental practices and an 11-person team. The company helps dentists replace insurance-driven revenue with subscription-based patient memberships, creating higher margins and more predictable cash flow. BoomCloud has been profitable since 2016 and continues to grow steadily. Jordon shares hard-earned lessons about hiring too fast, why systems scale better than people, and how he uses AI to increase output without adding headcount. He also shares how narrowing ICP transformed sales and marketing and why he's committed to building a durable, profitable business instead of chasing a fast exit. Key Takeaways Bootstrap Talent Gap — VC-funded talent often struggles in capital-efficient environments that require ownership, speed, and scrappy execution. AI Is Leverage — AI tools helped BoomCloud increase marketing and product output without rebuilding a large team. Profit Creates Buffer — Staying profitable provided margin for mistakes and reduced stress during periods of experimentation. Slow Markets Matter — Vertical SaaS wins by matching the pace of conservative industries instead of forcing VC-style growth. Exit Isn't Required — Steady profits allow founders to "exit slowly" through distributions without selling the business. Quote from Jordon Comstock, Founder and CEO of BoomCloud "We say systems scale, people don't. And we're learning that now. Let's implement the systems first. It doesn't mean people aren't important. People are important. But they have to have a system or a process first. "We've got to build it as a company and build that foundation first. When we hired a director of marketing and said, okay, you got to generate, you know, a thousand leads a month is what we were trying to do. And he couldn't do it because he didn't have systems. Fast forward a year, we implemented SEO systems to drive consistent traffic. And we convert that traffic into leads and now a thousand leads in a month is automatic. Because we have systems. We don't have a director of marketing anymore. I guess it's me, me with systems and AI. Links Jordon Comstock on LinkedIn Boomcloud on LinkedIn Boomcloud website Podcast Sponsor – Designli This podcast is sponsored by Designli, a digital product studio that helps entrepreneurs and startups turn their software ideas into reality. From strategy and design to full-scale development, Designli guides you through every step of building custom web and mobile apps. Learn more at designli.co/practical. The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app or view on our YouTube channel. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com. Practical Founders CEO Peer Groups Be part of a committed and confidential group of practical founders creating valuable software companies without big VC funding.  A Practical Founders Peer Group is a committed and confidential group of founders/CEOs who want to help you succeed on your terms. Each Practical Founders Peer Group is personally curated and moderated by Greg Head.

Send me a text (I will personally respond)Are you a sales or marketing leader at a cybersecurity company trying to accelerate your growth but hitting roadblocks with your ICP, pipeline generation, or scalability? Ever wondered how moving from a big company to a startup changes your playbook, and career mindset? Are you struggling to get your team focused on the right opportunities versus burning out on dead-end deals? This episode holds actionable insights for you.In this conversation we discuss:

Send us a textIn this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Joseph Sirosh, Founder & CEO of CreatorsAGI, to explore how go-to-market strategy fundamentally changes in the age of AI, and why trust, differentiation, and customer clarity matter more than ever.With nearly three decades of experience leading AI initiatives at FICO, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Compass, and Alexa Shopping, Joseph shares rare behind-the-scenes insights into how AI products actually make it to market, from early neural networks and fraud detection to today's agentic AI systems.The conversation spans founder-led sales, product-led vs. sales-led growth, and why AI forces companies to rethink how customers discover, evaluate, and trust complex products.They dive into:How Joseph defines GTM as ICP clarity plus differentiated value, not tactics or channels.Why GTM is never static and must evolve alongside product and customer maturity.The role of trust in B2B buying, and why buyers are betting their careers on your product.Lessons from selling AI at hyperscale versus starting from zero as a founder.Why product-led growth resembles DevOps for go-to-market.When sales-led growth is unavoidable and why complex products demand partnership selling.The early pivot from creator-focused AI to B2B agentic AI at Creators AGI.A real GTM success story showing how AI agents cut sales cycles in half.Why customers can't always tell you what AI product to build, and what founders should do instead.Practical advice for founders building GTM motions around emerging, fast-moving technology.This episode is a masterclass in AI-native go-to-market strategy, blending deep technical insight with real-world GTM execution from one of the industry's most experienced AI leaders.Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedInConnect with Joseph Sirosh on LinkedInBrought to you by: stratyve.com

Commenting is up 24% quarter over quarter on LinkedIn.That number matters more than most people realize.It tells us three very clear things about what's actually working right now.First:- People are hungry for thoughtful, meaningful conversations.- Quick takes and surface-level posts get seen.- But content that makes people think is what gets talked about.Second:- Who you connect with matters more than how many people you connect with.- When your network is aligned with your ICP or true business allies, engagement becomes natural instead of forced.Third:- Thought leadership and educational content win when it's created for a specific audience.- Generic content gets scrolled past.- Content that speaks directly to your ICP invites comments, discussion, and real relationships.Here's the takeaway most people miss:Visibility isn't the goal anymore.Conversation is.If you want more reach, more trust, and more inbound opportunities, stop chasing volume and start building dialogue with the right people.That's what this episode breaks down step by step.Don't forget to register for our LinkedIn workshop here:https://www.thetimetogrow.com/AtoEonLinkedinWorkshop

Jason William Johnson, PhD, Founder of SoundStrategist, is driven by two lifelong passions: creating and teaching. Through SoundStrategist, Jason designs AI-powered learning experiences and intelligent coaching systems that blend music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations. We explore Jason's journey as a musician, educator, and business coach, and how he fused those disciplines into an AI-first company. Jason shares his AI for Deep Experts Framework, showing how subject-matter experts can identify an industry pain point, envision a solution, brainstorm with AI, leverage AI tools to build it, and go after high-value impact—turning deep expertise into scalable products and platforms without needing to be technical. He also explains how AI accelerates research and product design, how “vibe coding” enables rapid MVP development, and why focusing on high-value B2B impact creates faster traction with less complexity. — Turn Your Expertise Into Software with Jason W. Johnson Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, developing the Summit OS Business Operating System. And my guest today is Jason William Johnson, PhD, the Founder of SoundStrategist. His team designs AI-powered learning experiences and deploys intelligent coaching systems for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations blending music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement. Jason, welcome to the show.  Thanks for having me, Steve.  I’m excited to have you and to learn about how you blend music and learning and all that together. But to start with, I’d like to ask you my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’ and how are you manifesting it in your business?  I would say my personal ‘Why’ is creating and teaching. Those are my two passions. So when I was younger, I was always a creative. I did music, writing, and a variety of other things. So I was always been passionate about creating, but I’ve also been passionate about teaching. I've been informally a teacher for my entire adult life—coaching, training. I've also been an actual professor. So through  SoundStrategist, I’m kind of combining those two passions: the passion for teaching and imparting wisdom, along with the passion for creating through music, AI-powered experiences, gamification, and all of those different things. So I'm really in my happy place.Share on X  Yeah, sounds like it. It sounds like you're very excited talking about this. So this is quite an unusual type of business, and I wonder how do you stumbled upon this kind of combination, this portfolio of activities and put them all into a business. How did that come about? So Liam Neeson says, “I have a unique combination of skills,” like in Taken. I guess that's kind of how I came up with SoundStrategist. I've pretty much been in music forever. I've been a musician, songwriter, producer, and rapper since I was a child. My father was a musician, so it was kind of like a genetic skill that I kind of adopted and was cultivated at an early age. So I was always passionate about music. Then got older, grew up, got into business, and really became passionate about training and educating. So I pretty much started off running entrepreneurship centers. My whole career has been in small business and economic development. SoundStrategist was a happy marriage of the two when I realized, oh, I can actually use rap to teach entrepreneurship, to teach leadership skills, and now to teach AI and a variety of other things.Share on X So pretty much it was just that fusion of things. And then when we launched the company, it was around the time ChatGPT came out. So we really wanted to make sure we were building it to be AI-first. At first, we were just using AI in our business operations, but then we started experimenting  with it for client work—like integrating AI-powered coaches in some of the training programs we were running and things like that. And that really proved to be really valuable, because one of the things I learned when I was running programs throughout my career was you always wanted to have the learning side and the coaching side. Because the learning side generalizes the knowledge for everybody and kind of level-sets everybody.Share on X But everybody’s business, or everybody’s situation, is extremely unique, so you need to have that personalized support and assistance. And when we were running programs in the entrepreneurship centers I were running and things like that, we would always have human coaches. AI enabled us to kind of scale coaching for some of the programs we’re building at SoundStrategist through AI. So with me having been a business coach for over 15 years, I knew how to train the AI chatbots. It started off as simple chatbots, and now it's evolved into full agents that use voice and all those other capabilities. But it really started as, let's put some chatbots into some of our courses and some of our programs to kind of reinforce the learning, personalize it, and then it just developed from there. Okay, so there's a lot in there, and I'd like to unpack some of it. When you say use rap to teach, I’m thinking about rap is kind of a form of poetry. So how do you use poetry, or how do you use rap to teach people? Is it more catchy if it is delivered in the form of a rap song? How does it work? So you kind of want to make it catchy. Our philosophy is this: when you listen to it, it should sound like a good song.Share on X Because there’s this real risk of it sounding corny if it's done wrong, right? So we always focus on creating good music first and foremost when we’re creating a music-based lesson. So it should be a good song. It should be something you hear and think, oh, between the chorus and the music, this actually sounds good. But then, the value of music is that once you learn the song, you learn the concept, right? Because once you memorize the song, you memorize the lyrics, which means you memorize the concept. One of the things we also make sure to do is introduce concepts. The best way I could describe this is this, and this might be funny, but I grew up in the nineties, and a lot of rappers talked about selling dr*gs and things like that. I never sold dr*gs in my life. But just by listening to rap music and hearing them introduce those concepts, if I ever decided to go bad, I would have a working theory, right? So the same thing with entrepreneurship, and the same thing with business principles. You can create songs that introduce the concepts in a way where if a person's never done it, they're introduced to the vocabulary.Share on X They’re introduced to the lived experiences. They’re introduced to the core principles. And then they can take that, and then they can go apply it and have a working theory on how to execute in their business. So that’s kind of the philosophy that we took, let’s make it memorable music, but also introduce key vocabulary. Let’s introduce lived experiences. Let’s introduce key concepts so that when people are done listening to the song, they memorize it, they embody it, and they connect with it. Now they have a working theory for whatever the song is about.  And are you using AI to actually write the song?  No, we're not. That’s one of the things we haven’t really integrated on the AI front, because the AI is not good enough to take what’s exactly in my head and turn it into a song. It’s good for somebody who doesn’t have any songwriting capability or musical capability to create something that’s cool. But as a musician, as somebody who writes, you have a vision in your head on how something should sound sonically, and the AI is not good enough to take what’s in my head and put it into a song. Now, what we are using are some of the AI tools like Suno for background music. So at first, we used that to create all our background music for our courses from scratch. We are using some of the AI to help with some of the background music and everything and all of that so that we can have original stuffShare on X as opposed to having to use licensed music from places like Epidemic Sound. So we are using it for like the background music. But for the actual music-based lessons, we're still doing those old school.  Okay, that's pretty good. We are going to dive in a little bit deeper here, but before we go there, I’d like to talk about the framework that you’re bringing to the show. I think we called it the AI for Deep Experts Framework. That's the working title right now, but yeah, we're still finalizing it. But that’s the working title. Yeah.  But the idea—at least the way I'm understanding it—is that if someone has deep domain expertise, AI can be a real accelerator and amplifier of that expertise. Yep.  So people who are listening to this and they have domain expertise and they want to do AI so that they can deliver it to more people, reach more people, create more value, what is the framework? What is the five-step framework to get them there?  Number one: provided that you have deep expertise, you should be able to identify a core pain point in your respective industry that needs solving.Share on X Maybe it’s something that, throughout your career, you wanted to solve, but you weren’t able to get the resources allocated to get it done in your job. Or maybe it required some technical talent and you weren’t a developer, or whatever, right? But you should be able to identify what’s the pain point, a sticking pain point that needs to be solved—and if it's solved, it could really create value for customers. That's just old-school opportunity recognition. Number two: now, the great thing about AI is that you can leverage AI to do a lot of deep research on the problem. So obviously, you're still going to have conversations to better understand the pain point further. You're going to look at your own lived experiences and things like that. But now you can also leverage AI tools—using Perplexity or Claude—to do deep research on a market opportunity. So whether or not you have experience in market research, you can use an AI tool to help identify the total addressable market. You can brainstorm with it to uncover additional pain points, and it help you flesh out your value proposition, your concept statement, and all of those things that are critical to communicating the offering. Because before we transact in money, we always transact in language, right? So pretty much, AI can help you articulate the value proposition, understand the pain point, all of those different things. And then also if you have like deep expertise and you haven't really turned it into a framework, the AI can help you framework it and then develop a workflow to deliver value.Share on X So now you have the framework, you have the market understanding, and all of those different things. AI can even help you think through what the product would look like—the user experience, the workflow, things like that. Now you can use the AI-powered tool to help you build that. You can use something like Lovable. You can use something like Bolt. You could use something like Cursor, all different AI-powered tools. For people who are newer to development and have never done development before, I would recommend something like Lovable or maybe Bolt. But once you get more comfortable and want to make sure you're building production-ready software, then you move to something like Cursor.  Cursor has a large enough context window—the context window is basically the memory of an AI tool. It has a large enough context window to deal with complex codebases. A lot of engineers are using it to build real, production-ready platforms. But for an MVP, Bolt and Lovable are more than good enough. So one of the things I recommend when building with one of these tools is to do what's called a PRD prompt. PRD stands for Product Requirements Document.Share on X For those who aren’t familiar with software development, typically, and this is not even really happening anymore, but traditionally with software development, you would have the product manager create a Product Requirements Document. So this basically outlines the goals of the platform, target audience, core features, database, architecture, technology stack, all of the different things that engineers would need to do in order to build the platform. So you can go to something like Claude, or ChatGPT, and you can say: “Create a PRD prompt for this app idea,” and then give as much detail as possible—the features, how it works, brand colors, all of those different things. Then the AI tool—whether you're using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini—will generate your PRD prompt. So it’s going to be like this really, really long prompt. But it’s going to have all of the things that the AI tool, web-building or app-building tool needs to know in order to build the platform. It’s going to have all the specifications. So you copy and paste.  Is this what people call vibe coding?  Yeah, this is vibe coding. But the PRD prompt helps you become more effective at vibe coding because it gives the AI the specifications it needs and the language that it understands to increase the likelihood that you build your platform correctly. Because once you build the PRD prompt, the AI is going to know, okay, this is the database structure. It's going to know whether this is a React app versus a Next.js app. It's going to know, okay, we're building a frontend with Netlify. The stuff that you may not know, the AI will know, and it will build the platform for that. So then you take that prompt, you paste it into Lovable, paste it into Cursor, and then you can kind of get into your vibe coding flow. Don't let the hype fool you, though, because a lot of people will say, “Oh, I built this app in 15 minutes using Lovable.” No—it still requires time. But if you can build a full-stack application in two weeks when it typically takes several months, that’s still like super fast. So pretty much, on average, you can build something in a couple of weeks—especially once you get familiar with the process, you can build something in a couple of weeks. But if this is your first time ever doing this, pay attention to things like when the app debugs and some of the other issues that come up.  Start paying attention because you’re going to learn certain things by doing. As you go through the process, you'll begin to understand things like, okay, this is what an edge function is, this is what a backend is. You’ll start learning these different things as you’re going through the process, right? So you get the platform built. Now the next step is you want to distribute the platform. So obviously, if you’ve been in your industry for a while and you have some expertise, you should have some distribution. You should have some folks in your space who are your ICP that you can kind of start having some customer conversations with and start trying to sell the platform. One of the things that I always recommend is going B2B and selling something for significant valueShare on X as opposed to going B2C and selling a bunch of $19.99 subscriptions. And the reason for that is a couple of different things. Number one, when you have to do a lot of volume, your business model becomes more complicated. And then you have to introduce things to manage that volume. Whereas if you’re selling a solution that’s a five-figure to six-figure offering, like 10 clients, 15 clients, the amount of money that you can get to with less complexity in your business model. So I always say go B2B, at least a five-figure annual offering, because I know most of the offerings that we offer are at least high five figures, low six figures—subscriptions, SaaS licensing, or whatever. And that way it just introduces less complexity to your business model, and it allows you to get as much revenue as possible. And then as you go to market, you’re going to learn. So the learning aspect, you’re going to learn maybe customers want this or this feature. We thought the people were going to use the platform this way, but they’re actually using it this way. So you’re always learning, always evolving, and adjusting the offering. Okay, so let's say I have deep expertise in some area—maybe investment banking or whatever. I want to use AI. I identify an industry pain point that I've addressed or maybe I personally experienced. I visualize a solution, then I brainstorm with ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, figure out what to do, and then I leverage AI tools like Cursor, Lovable, or Bolt. I set the price point. I go B2B. Is this something that, as a subject-matter expert, is efficient for me to do myself because I have the expertise and the vision? Or is it better for me to hire someone to do this?  It depends on what your bandwidth is. I mean, pretty much I’m of the firm belief that like these are skills that you probably want to unlock anyway. So it might be worth going through the process of learning the tools, leveraging them, and everything, and all of that. And that’s kind of how you future-proof yourself. Now, obviously, if you have bandwidth limitations, there are firms and organizations that you could hire, et cetera, et cetera, that can do it for you. Obviously, developers and things like that. But the funny thing about a lot of developers is, even though they're using AI, they're still charging the prices they charged before AI, right? They’re just getting it done faster, and their margins are a lot lower. So you're still going to pay, in a lot of instances, developer pricing for a platform. Those are the things that you have to consider as far as your own personal situation. But me personally, I believe these are skills worth unlocking.Share on X Because one of the things is, if you get very senior in your career—let's say you've been there 15, 16 years, 20 years—we all know there's this point where you either move up to the C-suite or you get caught in upper-middle-management purgatory, where you're kind of in that VP, senior director space, et cetera, et cetera, and you just kind of hover there. At that point, your career moves tend to be lateral—going from one VP role to another VP role, one senior director role to another senior director role, right? At that point, your income potential starts to get limited. So unlocking one of these skills and becoming more entrepreneurial is something I genuinely believe is worth developing personally. And what would you say is the time requirement for someone to get competent in vibe coding?  Three months minimal. You could be pretty solid in three months.  But three months full-time or three months part-time?  Three months part-time.  So three months. That's about 143 working hours in a regular month. So that's basically around 420–430 hours if you were full-time.  If you spend weekends working on your project, learning how to build it, taking notes, and actually going through the process, you can get pretty decent in a couple of months. Now, obviously, there are still levels as you continue and to progress and things like that, but you can get pretty solid in a couple months. Another thing you want to consider is who you're selling to. You obviously wanna make sure that your platform security is really well, is really done. So even if you build it yourself and then you have an engineer do code review, that’s cheaper than having them build it. I think if you spend three months, you can get really good at building solutions for what you need to get done. And then from there, you just get better and better and better and better.  How do I know that, let's say I hire someone in Serbia to do a code review for me? Let's say I learn the vibe coding thing and create the prototype, then I have someone to clean the code. How do I know that they did a good job or not?  You really don’t. You really don’t know until the platform’s in the wild, and it’s like, okay, it’s secure. So there are some things that you can do to check behind people. Let's say you don't have the money to do a full security audit or hire someone specifically for a security review, a developer for security review. One of the things that you can do is you can do multi-agent review. Like you take your codebase, have Claude review it, have OpenAI Codex review it, have a Cursor agent review it. You have multiple agents do a review. Then they kind of check each other’s work, if you will.  They kinda identify things that others may not have identified, so you can get the collective wisdom of those three to be able to be like, “Okay, I need to shore this up. I need to fix this. I need to address that.” That gives you more confidence. It still doesn’t replace a person who has deep expertise and making sure they build secure code, but it will catch common issues, like hard-coding API keys, which is a risk, right? It’ll catch those type of things that typically happen. But let’s say you do have a security, a code review, you could just kind of take that same approach also to check their work. Because they shouldn’t find any major vulnerabilities. The AI agents that come in after it shouldn’t really find any major vulnerabilities if it was like done securely securely. Another thing to consider is that a lot of these tools use Supabase for the backend and database. Supabase also has a built-in security advisor, including an AI security advisor, that points out security issues, performance problems, and configuration errors. So like you do have some AI-powered check and balances to check behind people.Share on X  Interesting. So basically, I can audit their applications, and the AI will check the code and tell me what needs to be improved?  Yeah. And they can make the fixes for you.  Yeah. Wow, that’s amazing. It still sounds a little bit overwhelming. It’s basically a language, a new language to learn, isn’t it?  It’s not really — it’s English. That’s the amazing thing about it—it’s English. I mean, you literally talk to AI in natural language, and it builds stuff for you, which is, if somebody is like, had a idea for a minute, because I mean, pretty much running entrepreneurship centers, I’ve known so many people who’ve had ideas that they were never able to launch or build, and then they see somebody build it later. If you learn these skills, you get to the point where anything that's in your head, you can kind of start bringing it to life in reality.Share on X And even if you've got to bring somebody in to make sure it's secure and production-ready, it's way cheaper than having them build it from scratch. And then another thing that you’ll find also is if you’re able to build something, let’s say you want to turn it into a startup or something, right? It’s a lot easier to bring in a technical co-founder when they don’t got to build the thing from scratch, and then they also see that you were able to build something, they’re able to see your product vision, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes a lot more easier to recruit people who actually have that expertise into the company because you’ve already handled the hard part. You got something and it works. And all they got to do is just come in, make it safe, and make it work better.  Yeah, that is very interesting. It feels analogous to writing a book yourself or having a ghostwriter. Because essentially, you are vibe coding with a ghostwriter, right? You tell the stories, and then the ghostwriter writes the book for you. Probably now you can use  AI to do that. Yep.  But that's a skill. Not everyone has the skill to write it themselves, and then they need to go to the ghostwriter, but still is their book, right?  Yep.  So it sounds a little bit similar. That’s fascinating. So what’s the path to launching an MVP? So let’s say I’m a subject matter expert, and I want to launch an MVP within a few weeks. Is there a path for me to go there?  Once you get good with the platform, once you get comfortable with the tools, yeah. So for example, we're launching an AI platform. It's an AI coaching platform, but it's also a data analytics platform. Basically, it's targeted to entrepreneur support organizations and municipalities supporting small businesses. So on the front end, it's an AI-powered advisor — it's a hotline that people can call 24/7. But on the back end, the municipalities and entrepreneur support organizations get access to analytics from each of those calls. We built this in two weeks. We’re already talking to customers, we’re already having conversations, and all of those things. We literally brought it to market in two weeks. So the thing is, once you kind of get caught up with the tools—and I'm not a developer, I'm not a developer by trade at all. I had a tech startup before, but I was a non-technical founder. I just know how to put together a product. But once you get good with the tools, that's very conceivable. And then you just go out there, and you go in the market, you start having conversations with your ideal customer profile.Share on X As you’re going through that process, you’re learning, okay, maybe this isn’t my ideal customer profile, this is their pain point. Or maybe instead of this being the feature they want, this is the feature they want. And the crazy thing about it is in the past you had to really get that ICP real tight and the feature set real tight because it cost so much money to go back and have to make tweaks and changes and to get it to market in the first place. Now, you can get a new feature added in the afternoon. It allows you to go to market a little bit faster. You don’t have to have the ideal feature set. You don’t have to have the ICP figured out. You get out there, you learn, and then you’re able to iterate a lot faster because the cost of development is super cheap now, and the speed in which like new features can be added or deprecated is a lot faster. So it allows you to go to market a lot faster than in the past.  Okay, I got it. You can do this, you can code. What do you recommend for someone who’s starting out? You mentioned Lovable, Bolt, and then Cursor. Is Cursor like an advanced product?  Cursor’s a little bit more advanced, but if you want to build production-ready software, it's something you're going to eventually have to use. But can you convert from Lovable to Cursor?  Yes, you can. Yep. So what you typically do — and I still do this to this day — is every time I launch a product, I build it in Bolt first. You could use Bolt or Lovable, either one's fine. I use Bolt because Bolt came out first, and that's what I started using. Then Lovable came out like a month later. But I use Bolt. I’ll spin up the idea in Bolt. And the reason I like doing it in Bolt or Lovable is that it's really good at doing two things. It's really good at quickly launching your initial feature set, and then spinning up your backend. Your database — it's really good at that. So I start off in Bolt, then I connect it to a repository.  For those who aren't familiar with GitHub, there's a button in Bolt or Lovable where you can easily connect it to a GitHub repository. So then once I kind of get the app to a point where the basic skeleton is set, then I go into Cursor. Then I pull the repository into Cursor and do the heavy work. The reason Cursor has a learning curve is because there are still some traditional developer things you need to know to spin up a project. Your initial database — it's a lot harder to spin up your initial database and backend in Cursor. It's also harder to identify your initial libraries and all of those things. If you're a developer, it's not difficult. But if you're new, it is. Bolt and Lovable abstract those things out for you. So you start it off in Bolt or Lovable. Basically, since they're limited in their context windows, when you're trying to build something complex, eventually they start making a whole bunch of errors. They basically start getting stup*d. That's when you know it's time to move to Cursor, because Cursor can handle the heavy lifting. So if you build in Bolt or Lovable until it gets stup*d, then you move to Cursor for the heavy lifting.  And then is there a point where Cursor gets stup*d as well? No. Cursor has a couple of different things that allow it to extend its context window, which is his memory. You can put documentation into Cursor. For example, whatever your PRD prompt was, you can save that as a document in Cursor. You can also set rules. One of my rules in Cursor is: I'm not technical, so explain everything in layman's terms. And then as you’re starting to build code, you can save that code or you can point it to that repository. So there's some more flexibility with Cursor as far as managing your context window.Share on X But with Bolt and Lovable, the context window is more limited right now. So I start off in those, and then once I kind of get the skeleton up, then I move to Cursor. And at that point, a lot of the complicated things like spinning up your dev environment and all those things are kind of abstracted out. Then you can just jump in and use it the same way you use Bolt and Lovable. Fantastic. Fantastic. So, Jason, super helpful information for domain experts who want to build an application that will help them promote their product or manifest their ideas in product form. I think that’s super powerful. So if someone would like to learn about SoundStrategist and what SoundStrategist can do for them in terms of learning and experiential products, incorporating music, or building curriculum, or they would just like to connect with you to learn more about what you can do for them, where should they go?  Jason William Johnson, PhD, on LinkedIn, or www.getsoundstrategies.com.  Okay. Well, Jason William Johnson, you are really ahead of the curve, especially connecting this whole idea of vibe coding to people who are subject matter experts and not technical. And you know it because you don't come from a technical background, yet you've mastered it. I’m living it. Everything I’m sharing—this is not like a theoretical framework. I'm living all of this. So everything I’m saying. Super authentic. And especially coming from you—you understand what it's like to not be technical person, learning this, applying this.  So if you'd like to do this, learn more, or maybe have Jason guide you, reach out to him. You can find him on LinkedIn at Jason William Johnson, PhD, or visit www.getsoundstrategies.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us and subscribe on YouTube, follow us on LinkedIn, and on Apple Podcasts. Because every week I bring a super interesting entrepreneur, subject matter expert, or a combination of the two—like Jason—to the show, who will help you accelerate your journey with frameworks and AI frameworks in that gear. So thank you for coming, Jason, and thank you for listening. Important Links: Jason's LinkedIn Jason's website

In this episode, we explore how first-party data and AI are fixing the problem of rising ad costs. Tiago Costa Rocha, CEO of Full Venue and the creator of Clustie.ai, explains why traditional Meta ads are failing many Shopify brands today. He shares how brands can stop guessing and use their own customer data to find high-value buyers. Tiago also breaks down how to scale campaigns faster using "one-click" AI tools to lower costs and increase sales.Topics discussed in this episode:  How rising ad costs affect Shopify growth. What causes the "feedback loop" in ad spend. Why brands must identify their true ICP. How Clusty connects directly to Shopify data. What the one-click campaign builder automates. Why first-party data beats platform algorithms. How AI identifies high-propensity buyer groups. How to scale budgets without killing results. Links & Resources Website: https://www.fullvenue.ai/Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/clustie-ai-marketing-segmentsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fullvenueai/Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at https://tinyurl.com/yd2uxe9p______________________________________________________ LOVE THE SHOW? HERE ARE THE NEXT STEPS! Follow the podcast to get every bonus episode. Tap follow now and don't miss out! Rate & Review: Help others discover the show by rating the show on Apple Podcasts at https://tinyurl.com/ecb-apple-podcasts Join our Free Newsletter: https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com/ Support The Show On Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EcommerceCoffeeBreak Partner with us: https://ecommercecoffeebreak.com/partner-with-us/

Nathan Schiess explains why personal branding isn't optional for real estate investors—and why waiting until you need capital is already too late.In this episode of RealDealChat, Nathan Schiess—real estate investor turned personal branding consultant—breaks down why documenting your journey matters more than perfecting your pitch.Nathan shares his own story of building and liquidating a real estate portfolio without documenting any of it—and how that hard lesson shaped his work helping investors, agents, syndicators, and capital raisers build trust before they need it. We unpack the difference between personal brands and company brands, why repetition is necessary (not annoying), how to think about ICP and USP, and why most investors should hire this out instead of trying to DIY content.We also dive into AI, batching content, why “giving away the secret sauce” actually increases credibility, and how a strong personal brand follows you from one venture to the next—unlike a business brand that stays behind.If you ever plan to raise capital, partner on deals, or stand out in a crowded market, this episode is required listening.

Ursodiol (ursodeoxycholic acid) is a prescription bile acid medication used to dissolve cholesterol gallstones, prevent gallstones during rapid weight loss, and treat liver diseases like primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) by reducing toxic bile acids and cholesterol production. It works by changing bile composition, making it less saturated with cholesterol, and is available as oral medication. Of course, it is also the foundational medication for treatment of diagnosed Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP). Does this medication reduce adverse perinatal outcomes? In this episode, we will review a new study from the Green Journal, which will be out in February 2026, examining the recurrence risk for ICP using data from NY. In a patient with prior history of ICP, is there any guidance on monitoring of serum bile acids in the subsequent pregnancy before symptoms develop? We will explain. PLUS we will review the data on whether Ursodiol may hold promise in recurrence prevention or in reduction of adverse outcomes once the condition is diagnosed. Listen in for details. 1. 2019: Chappell LC, Bell JL, Smith A, Linsell L, Juszczak E, Dixon PH, Chambers J, Hunter R, Dorling J, Williamson C, Thornton JG; PITCHES study group. Ursodeoxycholic acid versus placebo in women with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (PITCHES): a randomised controlled trial. Lancet. 2019 Sep 7;394(10201):849-860. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31270-X. Epub 2019 Aug 1. PMID: 31378395; PMCID: PMC6739598. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31378395/2. February 08, 2025: Rahim, Mussarat N et al. Pregnancy and the liver. The Lancet. 2021; Volume 405, Issue 10477, 498 – 513 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02351-1/fulltext3. SMFM CS 53; 20214. Rosenberg, Henri M. MD; Sarker, Minhazur R. MD; Ramos, Gladys A. MD; Bianco, Angela MD; Ferrara, Lauren MD; DeBolt, Chelsea A. MD. Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy Recurrence in a Subsequent Pregnancy. Obstetrics & Gynecology 147(2):p 239-241, February 2026. | DOI: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000006033 https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/fulltext/2026/02000/intrahepatic_cholestasis_of_pregnancy_recurrence.13.aspx5. Ovadia C, Sajous J, Seed PT et al. Ursodeoxycholic acid in intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy: a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis. Lancet Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2021 Jul;6(7):547-558. doi: 10.1016/S2468-1253(21)00074-1. Epub 2021 Apr 27. PMID: 33915090; PMCID: PMC8192305.6. EASL Clinical Practice Guidelines on the management of liver diseases in pregnancy. European Association for the Study of the Liver; 2023