Podcasts about ICP

Join us for a special episode hosted by Geoff Campbell who is standing in for Matt Bertram, we focus on the part of marketing most teams ignore: turning existing traffic into real phone calls, form fills, and sales. We break down a simple conversion framework, why dynamic website messaging works, and how to think about proof, positioning, and AI search as buyer behavior changes. • traffic times conversion rate equals customers as the core lens for SEO and CRO • treating an agency website as proof of competence and a trust signal • the “practice what you preach” mistake that costs agencies better clients • the reality of wearing every hat and why teams and cash flow matter • productizing a service into SaaS by solving our own lead generation problem • fixing the “blocked toilet” problem before buying more traffic • answering four questions fast: who you are, what you do, why choose you, how to contact you • using dynamic messaging by time, intent, and customer situation to lift conversions • adding specials, testimonials, video, and clear calls to action without clutter • building attribution with codes and tracking to learn what really drives leads • scaling SaaS with proof first, then outbound, ads, and partner channels • narrowing the ICP to high-traffic, lead-driven, high-value businesses • using design and presuasion to match the buyer you want • simplifying pages like a movie teaser so skimmers become readers • watching AI search emerge as a new visibility layer on top of SEO Guest Contact Information: Website: irwinhau.comLinkedIn: au.linkedin.com/in/irwinhauInstagram: instagram.com/haudoyoudoMore from EWR and Matthew:Leave us a review wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon PodcastFree SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-callWith over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you'll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. Find more episodes here: youtube.com/@BestSEOPodcastbestseopodcast.combestseopodcast.buzzsprout.comFollow us on:Facebook: @bestseopodcastInstagram: @thebestseopodcastTiktok: @bestseopodcastLinkedIn: @bestseopodcastConnect With Matthew Bertram: Website: www.matthewbertram.comInstagram: @matt_bertram_liveLinkedIn: @mattbertramlivePowered by: ewrdigital.comSupport the show

270 | Nicolas Schell ist ein Pionier für GTM-Engineering - mit AI-Tools automatisiert er ganze Vertriebs-Teams.Mach das 1-minütige Quiz und finde eine Geschäftsidee, die zu dir passt: digitaleoptimisten.de/quiz.So erreichst du uns:Sprachnachricht senden: https://www.speakpipe.com/digitaleoptimistenEmail schreiben: alexander@digitaleoptimisten.deLearningsGo-to-market-Engineering: Vier SchritteDas Go-to-market-Engineering-Playbook besteht aus vier Schritten: ICP definieren, TAM mappen, Kontaktdaten der Entscheider finden und Cold Outreach planen. Nico erklärt diese Struktur explizit im Gespräch als Kernprozess des GTM-Engineerings. Die klare Abfolge macht GTM-operativ umsetzbar und messbar, statt vage zu bleiben.ICP und datengetriebene ZielgruppenDer ICP wird datengetrieben definiert, indem man das Problem des Kunden sichtbar macht und analysiert, in welcher Situation er es hat. Für die Longlist nutzt Scalantech Northdata, Google Maps Scraping (Epi-Fi) und Datenbanken wie AI Arc; dabei wird ein Pareto-Ansatz verwendet, um die 20% der Kunden zu finden, die 80% des Umsatzes ausmachen. In der Fallstudie Seven Senders erzielte man 10% Antwortrate per E-Mail, 25% per LinkedIn und 38 Meetings in zwei Monaten, was die Wirksamkeit datengetriebener Zielgruppenauswahl belegt.Natürliche Nachricht statt KI-MassenoutreachManuell erstellte Outreach-Nachrichten werden anschließend mit KI-gestützten Anpassungen personalisiert; vollständige KI-Generierung lehnt Nico ab. Der Fokus liegt darauf, dass die Ansprache natürlich wirkt, fast wie eine Nachricht an einen Kumpel, statt wie eine Standard-Sales-Nachricht. Obwohl Trigger-Hacks funktionieren können, bleiben Fundamentals wie gute Liste, Personalisierung und solides Angebot entscheidend.Hypothese: Services als SoftwareHypothese: Die Zukunft gehört Services as software; Unternehmen setzen KI-Agenten ein, um Services zu automatisieren; die nächste Trillion-Dollar-Firma könnte eine Softwarefirma sein, die sich als Servicesfirma maskiert. Zukunftsgespräche sehen auch produktisierte Services und AI-Agenten pro Kunde vor; eine konkrete Idee ist eine Go-to-Market-Engineering-School kombiniert mit einer Headhunting-Agentur für AI-Engineers.KeywordsGTM Engineering, Go-to-Market Engineering, Vertriebsautomatisierung, KI im Vertrieb, Sales Automation, B2B Vertrieb, Kaltakquise, Cold Outreach, Leadgenerierung, NeukundengewinnungClay, Lemlist, n8n, Claude Code, Apollo, Northdata, AI Arc, InstantlyKI ersetzt Jobs, AI SDR, KI Vertriebler, Services as Software, Vertrieb der Zukunft, Sales mit KI, Automatisierung MittelstandVertriebsteam durch KI ersetzen, Cold Outreach personalisieren, ICP definieren, B2B Leadliste erstellen, Outreach Antwortrate erhöhenNicolas Schell, Scalantech, Digitale Optimisten

In this episode of the Prolonged Field Care Podcast, Dennis sits down with Dr. Mike Falk — pediatric ICU physician with multiple deployments to Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine — for a raw, practical, deep dive into pediatric care when you're the only asset and evacuation is denied.Most combat medics carry 99% adult gear. Kids still show up. Dr. Falk breaks down the absolute minimalist kit that actually works in austere and combat environments: canine tourniquets for toddlers, the single blue IO you really need, simplified airway choices, push-pull resuscitation with a syringe and stopcock, and a field-expedient needle cric setup.Then he walks through three real cases that expose the brutal decision-making required in prolonged field care:A 4-year-old pulled from rubble with a head injury who decompensates from rising ICPAn 8-year-old with a penetrating chest wound and tension pneumothorax at the thoracoabdominal junctionA 4-year-old with an infected blast wound fracture who develops septic shock days later in a denied environmentYou'll learn weight-based dosing that actually works in the field, why kids decompensate differently, how to mix and run an epinephrine drip with limited supplies, the realities of black-tagging children in mass casualty events, and why these cases stay with providers long after the mission.Key Takeaways:The truly minimalist pediatric kit that won't break your weight limitPractical field management of rising ICP when you have no CT or neurosurgeryPush-pull volume resuscitation and epinephrine drip mixing for pediatric shockWhy penetrating trauma at the 6th–7th rib level is often thoracoabdominalThe emotional and ethical weight of black-tagging kids — and why you must train itMalnutrition's hidden impact on wound healing and sepsis in prolonged scenariosChapters00:00 - Welcome & Why Most Medics Are Unprepared for Pediatric Patients00:57 - The Bare Essential Pediatric Combat Medic Bag02:25 - Canine Tourniquet for Under-2s & Minimalist Hemorrhage Control02:25 - Vascular Access: Why the Blue IO is Usually All You Need03:22 - Simplified Airway: OPAs, NPAs & i-gel Sizes That Actually Matter03:22 - ET Tubes: Why Only 4.0, 5.0 & 6.0 Cuffed Are Necessary04:24 - Push-Pull Resuscitation Technique (Syringe + Stopcock)04:56 - Needle Cricothyrotomy Setup & Critical I:E Ratio Warning07:09 - Case 1 Begins: 4-Year-Old Blast Victim Pulled from Rubble08:47 - Initial Assessment, C-Spine Considerations in Kids & Access12:16 - GCS 11, Pain Control & Why Fluids Make Sense Early14:17 - Hours Later: Decompensation & Rising ICP18:17 - Positioning, Hypertonic Saline Dosing (5 mL/kg) & Decision to Intubate23:13 - Ketamine-Only Intubation, Permissive Hyperventilation & Realities27:51 - The Emotional Toll: Black Tagging Kids in MCI29:44 - Case 2: 8-Year-Old with Right Chest GSW & Tension Pneumothorax31:36 - Chest Seal + Needle Decompression (Anterior Approach Preference)34:23 - Blood Resuscitation (10 mL/kg) & Why Location Matters (Diaphragm Level)40:20 - Case 3: 4-Year-Old with Infected Blast Wound Fracture – Septic Shock42:51 - Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics & Source Control in Denied Environments45:26 - Push-Pull Boluses, Epinephrine Drip Mixing & Permissive Hypotension51:09 - Malnutrition's Impact on Healing & Infection in Prolonged Care56:49 - Final Lessons: Training Black Tags, Calling for Help & Provider PTSD57:32 - Outro & Where to Find More PFC ContentFor more content, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.prolongedfieldcare.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Consider supporting us: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/ProlongedFieldCareCollective⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.lobocoffeeco.com/product-page/prolonged-field-care⁠

Neste episódio do Vamos de Vendas, Gustavo Pagotto recebe Hiram Damin, CRO da B2B Stack e uma das maiores referências em Customer Success da América Latina, para uma conversa sobre como transformar dados em ações práticas para aumentar retenção, expansão de receita e rentabilidade dos clientes.Ao longo do episódio, Hiram explica por que muitas empresas ainda olham apenas para aquisição de clientes enquanto ignoram a principal fonte de crescimento sustentável: a própria carteira. Ele mostra como estruturar uma operação de Customer Success do zero, quais dados buscar primeiro, quais métricas realmente importam e como evitar o erro de acumular dashboards sem gerar mudanças reais no negócio.A conversa também aborda temas como churn, lifetime value, ICP, Health Score, onboarding, Voice of Customer e o papel do CRM na gestão da jornada do cliente. Hiram compartilha exemplos práticos sobre integração entre vendas, financeiro e Customer Success, além de explicar como identificar clientes com maior potencial de retenção e expansão usando dados confiáveis.

Nos visita desde España, Álvaro Ovejas escofundador y CEO de Lead Motiv, consultora digital especializada en ayudar aempresas de servicios a construir sistemas de crecimiento más sólidos, mediblesy orientados a negocio. Desde hace más de 14 años trabaja en la intersecciónentre marketing, ventas y tecnología, acompañando a compañías B2B y B2C en eldiseño de estrategias de captación, conversión y gestión de leads, con unavisión muy enfocada en resultados: generar más oportunidades cualificadas,mejorar la eficiencia comercial y tomar decisiones basadas en datos.Desde Lead Motiv, Álvaro impulsa unenfoque de trabajo que va más allá de la ejecución de canales aislados. Suvisión parte de entender al detalle las bases estratégicas: modelo de negocio,ICP, Propuesta de valor y objetivos, para definir sistemas de adquisición,automatización y conversión que conecten marketing y ventas. Como CEO yconsultor estratégico, combina experiencia práctica, visión de crecimiento ycercanía con los equipos directivos para ayudar a las empresas a vender más ymejor, con mayor control sobre métricas clave como SQL, CAC, LTV y retorno dela inversión. Links :De la empresa (Lead Motiv)https://leadmotiv.com/https://www.linkedin.com/company/leadmotiv/https://www.instagram.com/leadmotiv/ De los socioshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alvaro-ovejas/https://www.linkedin.com/in/josemariafrancomartinez/

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Kady Srinivasan, Chief Marketing Officer at Freshworks, to explore what it really takes to build market share in SaaS, and why finding the right ICP is often the difference between accelerated growth and stalled momentum.Drawing from leadership roles across Dropbox, Klaviyo, Lightspeed, and Freshworks, Kady shares lessons from scaling PLG, inbound, outbound, and hybrid go-to-market motions, while navigating the realities of product-market fit, category expansion, and AI-driven disruption.The conversation dives into the evolution of modern GTM, from defining your initial ICP to expanding into adjacent markets without losing your positioning, and why many companies drift away from the messaging and audience that made them successful in the first place.They dive into:Why GTM is ultimately about building market share through coordinated actions across product, marketing, sales, and customer success.How great products still fail when they're sold to the wrong audience or positioned with the wrong messaging.The concept of ICP+ and how successful companies expand beyond their initial customer base without losing focus.Why many SaaS companies unintentionally drift away from their original positioning as they add products and features.The differences between PLG, inbound, outbound, and enterprise sales motions—and when each makes sense.How pricing, packaging, and expansion strategy influence long-term customer value.Kady's ABCD Framework for positioning: Audience, Benefits, Compelling Reasons to Believe, and Differentiation.Why storytelling frameworks like the Hero's Journey remain powerful tools for modern marketers.How AI is creating a new generation of multi-threaded marketers who can operate across traditional marketing silos.A creative CEO influence strategy that transformed LinkedIn engagement into pipeline and qualified opportunities.Lessons from a major ICP pivot at Lightspeed that helped drive significant market share gains in targeted geographies.Why defining and defending your ICP is one of the most important leadership decisions a company can make.Kady's core message is simple:The companies that win aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest products, they're the ones with the clearest understanding of who they're serving and why.This episode is a practical masterclass on ICP definition, positioning, GTM motion design, and the future of marketing in an AI-powered world.

Most SaaS founders in the messy middle are making the same expensive mistake — building first and validating never. In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Corinne Kavanagh, founder of CAC Media & Publishing and former Microsoft Azure Data team contributor (part of a team that drove $500M+ in revenue with 76% YoY growth), to unpack what it actually takes to scale past the growth plateau.Corinne shares why your top-of-funnel obsession may be quietly killing your growth, how to validate demand before writing a single line of code, and why a fractional CMO may be the smartest hire you're not making. She also introduces her CARE re-engagement method, her SaaS Marketing Playbook, and the SCALE framework for building an AI-first marketing department without homogenizing your brand.If your business is growing and suffocating at the same time, this episode is for you.Key Takeaways0:24 — Welcome & episode framing: Why the messy middle is where most SaaS companies stall out3:22 — Guest intro: Corinne Kavanagh, founder of CAC Media, fractional CMO firm for SaaS & tech companies4:10 — Startups vs. enterprise: What big companies do differently — and what smaller companies can learn from retail validation models5:12 — Feature prioritization trap: Why founders rush to build before validating demand, and how to use micro-testing ($5–$10 ad spend) to validate before committing resources15:30 — Pre-development checklist: ICP study → messaging tests → distribution partner conversations → pricing research → competitive analysis17:09 — Competitor vs. customer time allocation: Why founders should be "in all channels" — and how AI tools can automate competitive monitoring23:04 — AI modernization in marketing: Efficiency gains without sacrificing brand authenticity — plus the importance of an AI use policy23:49 — Early churn warning systems: The retention play most SaaS teams ignore — and how to re-engage customers before they leave24:24 — The CARE Method: Corinne's re-engagement framework for growing lifetime value and sealing the leaky bucket25:08 — Account-based marketing (ABM): Why a focused list of 100 ideal accounts beats a massive TAM for execution27:01 — Growth plateaus: How to read your revenue chart — what "bubbles" mean vs. a flat line, and what each signals about your acquisition and retention engines29:48 — Aligning marketing, product & sales: Breaking down the wall between sales and marketing through co-invention, shared messaging, and CMO-level integration40:38 — The SCALE Framework: How to build an AI-first marketing department without producing brand slop45:24 — #1 marketing shift for 2026: Stop running your company — start building systems that run it for youTweetable Quotes"You can beat everyone else to market — but if your customer is not ready and chomping at the bit to buy it, it doesn't matter." — Corinne Kavanagh"Stop thinking about top of funnel only. Retention is half the story, and most SaaS companies are ignoring it." — Corinne Kavanagh"A consultant does a drive-by. They drop strategy and leave. That's not how you actually scale." — Corinne Kavanagh"If you're in the feature rat race, step back. Ask yourself: am I creating a category, or just chasing competitors?" — Corinne Kavanagh"Your marketing team should feel responsible for the P&L — not just the pipeline." — Corinne Kavanagh"Don't give sales a playbook and say 'go sell it.' Alignment has to be co-invention, or no one buys in." — Corinne Kavanagh"The most dangerous thing you can do with your runway right now might be shipping the next great feature." — Jeff Mains"Pretend you have a $200M company. What would you stop doing that you're doing right now?" — Corinne KavanaghSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Validate demand before you build — always. Retail companies won't spin up a new product line without marketplace testing. SaaS founders should apply the same discipline. Run micro-ads ($5–$10), talk to a pre-engagement cohort, and confirm that desire is "fiery enough to click the buy button" before writing a line of code.2. Your leaky bucket is as dangerous as an empty funnel. Pouring money into top-of-funnel while ignoring churn is a losing strategy. Build early churn warning systems using platform data (login frequency, monthly active users) and re-engage customers proactively before they silently leave out the back door.3. Bring marketing into R&D — not just into launch. Marketing shouldn't receive a finished product and be told to "figure out how to message it." A CMO-level voice in early R&D conversations means better competitive analysis, more relevant feature decisions, and messaging that actually lands in the marketplace.4. Break down the wall between sales and marketing. The old grudge match — "sales can't close our leads" vs. "marketing gives us garbage" — is a systems failure. Solve it through collaborative co-invention: shared meetings, shared messaging, and shared accountability for what's working.5. Category creation beats feature competition. If you're in a feature rat race with competitors, you've already lost the game. Step back and ask: how do we position ourselves so far apart from the competition that comparison becomes irrelevant? Companies like WooCommerce and GoDaddy didn't win by having more features — they won by creating new categories.6. Systems are your most important 2026 marketing investment. The #1 shift every SaaS founder needs to make: stop running the machine manually. Build systems around what's consuming your time, project forward to what a 100X customer base would require, and install those systems now. That's what gets you out of the messy middle for good.Guest Resourcescc@cac-media.comhttps://cac-media.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/corinnefss/https://www.instagram.com/corinnecava/https://twitter.com/Corinne_C_WAEpisode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains

Every generation says the next one is soft. Rob's dad said it. Dustin's dad said it. Now coaches are saying it about the athletes in their gyms right now. But before we accept the premise, it's worth asking a harder question: what if they're not softer at all? What if they're just more aware, more informed, and asking better questions than we're ready to answer?In this episode, Rob and Dustin take on the lazy version of the "today's athletes are soft" conversation and push toward something more useful — what coaches actually need to do differently when the people in front of them have more access, more options, and more questions than any generation before them.TopicsWhy "they're soft" is usually the wrong diagnosis — and what coaches miss when they stop thereThe difference between questions and questioning — and why Rob took it personally for yearsWhat COVID and social media actually broke (hint: it wasn't toughness — it was conflict resolution)How parents haven't really changed, but their access hasWhy coaches need to redefine toughness before they can teach it — Dustin's shift from calling out soft plays to catching tough onesThe Steve Magness two-part definition of team toughness: psychological safety + a real path to getting betterWhy the best marketer wins online, and what that means for how coaches teach their craft nowThe honest follow-up question: how much time are coaches spending on the 1% of 1% who bail?One Line Worth Thinking About"I don't think I've ever been harder on my guys from a practice, from a communication, from an accountability standpoint. And yet I don't think I've ever received more." — Dustin GalyonFor The Coach ListeningThree questions to take into your next staff meeting or solo drive home:When was the last time you trained conflict resolution like you train any other skill?What does tough actually look like in your program — and have you ever told your athletes specifically?Are you catching the tough plays, or only flagging the soft ones?About the Impactful Coaching ProjectThe Impactful Coaching Project develops coaches who coach the whole person. Built on the Three C's — Competence, Care, Constancy — ICP is the thought leader in coaching the 21st century athlete.Substack: impactfulcoachingproject.substack.comPodcast: beyondcoaching.alitu.comBeyond Coaching is produced by ICP with the support of Friends University.

In this today's segment, Dan Sperring, founder and CEO of Align ICP, breaks down a mistake most revenue leaders make when defining their ideal customer profile. The instinct is to chase the highest lifetime value customers, but those segments are often the hardest to win, the slowest to close, and the first to break when the market shifts. This clip focuses on how to balance three critical factors inside your ICP: lifetime value, ease of acquisition, and market health. Dan explains why ignoring any one of these creates pipeline risk, and how leaders can avoid over-rotating into segments that look great on paper but fail in execution. For leaders responsible for predictable growth, this is about making smarter tradeoffs, not just better targeting. Dan Sperring is the founder and CEO of AlignICP, a company focused on helping revenue teams align around high-value customer segments to drive predictable growth. He brings experience across customer success, revenue leadership, and scaling SaaS businesses through product-market and go-to-market alignment. Connect with Dan: AlignICP LinkedIn Books mentioned: The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and ​​Marylou Tyler  Amp It Up by Frank Slootman Tools and podcasts mentioned: clay.com zoominfo.com The Science of Scaling Podcast Listen to the full episode: Aligning Pipeline to Ideal Customer Profile with Dan Sperring Get the Force Management framework for aligning your ICP, sales motion, and customer lifecycle around high-value use cases and measurable business outcomes: The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

This week, join Peter and Chris on the wrap up episode for Season 10, talking all things RiddleBox! Sit back and listen as they go over fixes and updates from the season, discuss merch from the era of the thirds Jokers Card, listen to your voicemails, and tackle important topics like the top ten juggalo rappers of 2026!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

Sam Blond is the Co-founder and CEO of Monaco, the revenue engine for startups.Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign.If there's a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of it. But most importantly, we talk about what hasn't changed.We get into the sales work AI is now better at than humans, and why Sam thinks 90% of startups misdiagnose their bottleneck as conversion when it's really demand gen.He explains why he doesn't measure early brand marketing at all and trusts anecdotes over attribution, walks through the full Monaco launch playbook including the Super Bowl box-truck story, and shares a rev-ops insight from Brex, including how they figured out a specific ICP converted at 4x the rate of another.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) Scaling Brex to $12B(1:14) How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building(5:19) Using AI to get more leverage(9:15) Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund(12:56) Innovator's dilemma in AI(15:57) Why AI companies build full platforms, not wedge products(23:30) Revenue is just a math equation(27:18) Two ways AI increases conversion rates(36:56) AI will never replace spending time with customers(39:46) Don't measure the impact of brand marketing(49:03) Your marketing must be different (and hard)(58:39) Customer discovery calls and working with design partners(1:03:03) The zero to 100 launch(1:11:00) Monaco's launch playbook(1:19:00) Send gifts that are unique and social(1:22:17) Naming your company(1:28:04) Founders should send early outbound(1:32:38) How multi-channel augments AI outbound(1:39:42) Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions(1:43:28) Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue(1:50:22) Monaco's Forward Deployed AE'sReferencedTry Monaco: https://www.monaco.com/Careers at Monaco: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monacoSam's launch post: https://x.com/samdblond/status/2026420015793320129?s=20Follow SamTwitter: https://x.com/samdblondLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Going after a new segment sounds sexy… until you actually try to do it.

Justin Moore (Creator Wizard) joins Matt and Kolby to talk about how Sponsor Games lost ~$10K in year two but still turned a profit, why 22% of his challenge attendees upgrade to VIP every single time, the great event food debate, and how to find your real ICP with a book funnel.Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:26 Sponsor Games Year Two: A $10K Loss and a Reality Show03:50 How the Mastermind Offer Made It Profitable04:15 Marketing a Novel Event With No Speakers05:56 Changing the Date and Venue for Year Three09:30 Should the Event Go on Tour?11:50 Pre-Selling 20% of Next Year's Tickets12:09 Ryan Deiss's 3 Types of Events16:15 The Halo Effect of Hosting an Event22:56 The Great Event Food Debate26:14 Do You Actually Need a VIP Tier?30:16 Inside the 10K Brand Deal Challenge36:09 The Partner Challenge That Flopped42:00 Book Funnels and Finding Your Real ICP50:07 The Case for Focus Over Shiny Objects51:42 Where to Find Justin

Merwan Mery a été négociateur au sein des forces spéciales françaises, fondateur de l'agence ADN et son dernier livre se nomme "L'élégance de la manipulation." Tout un programme :)Je me suis dit depuis longtemps que la négociation, c'était une compétence pour les autres, je me défini moi même comme "nul" dans le domaine, aussi parce que je n'aime pas le conflit. Et puis en lisant le livre puis en discutant avec Merwan je me suis rendu compte que j'avais tout faux. Il est né au Liban en 1975, son père a sauvé sa famille d'un peloton d'exécution par les seuls mots. Et depuis, Marwan a fait de ça une vie entière.Dans cet épisode, nous parlons de pourquoi éviter le conflit, c'est se condamner à perdre, des vrais leviers pour débloquer une négociation, de ce que Trump révèle d'un négociateur piégé par sa propre rhétorique, et de comment sortir quelqu'un d'une emprise sans jamais casser le lien.J'ai questionné Marwan sur les 6 mécanismes universels qui nous rendent tous perméables à la manipulation, sur la différence entre gain réel et gain perçu, sur la technique d'inoculation psychologique pour protéger quelqu'un qu'on aime et évidemment sur la manipulation.Citations marquantes"Je préfère gérer 100 psychopathes, 200 sociopathes, 400 pervers qu'un passif agressif. C'est pas une blague.""La clôture d'une négociation ne se fait que sur de la perception. Il n'y a rien de rationnel.""L'absence de résistance de ta part ne fera qu'augmenter le niveau d'exigence de l'autre.""On est tous manipulés, on est tous manipulateurs et on est tous manipulables.""Si vous ne décidez pas pour vous, les gens décideront pour vous. C'est le principe de l'indécision."Idées centrales Idée 1 — La manipulation n'est pas un défaut moral, c'est une nécessité humaine Marwan distingue l'influence de la manipulation par un seul critère : l'intention. Pas l'acte. On manipule tous dès l'enfance, avant même de savoir parler — dès qu'on oriente la réalité pour obtenir quelque chose. Ne pas exercer d'influence sur l'autre, c'est se soumettre à lui. Refuser cette réalité ne protège pas, ça fragilise. C'est pourquoi se réconcilier avec la manipulation, c'est le début de la liberté. Timestamp : 02:17 – 20:30Idée 2 — Distinguer position et enjeu : la clé de 100% des conflits Derrière chaque position affichée se cache un enjeu réel qui n'a, dans la quasi-totalité des cas, rien à voir avec elle. La prise d'otage de Munich en 1972 ? La position, c'est la libération de prisonniers. L'enjeu, c'est la cause palestinienne. Tant qu'on répond à la position, on ne résout rien. La seule voie, c'est de comprendre ce qu'il y a en dessous — et c'est toujours caché. Timestamp : 09:47 – 11:00Idée 3 — L'ICP, intérêt commun partagé : transcender le conflit plutôt que l'affronter Quand tout oppose deux parties, le seul levier est de trouver la chose sur laquelle les deux peuvent dire oui. En grande distribution, face à l'hyperinflation : le distributeur et le fournisseur s'opposent sur tout — sauf sur une chose, faire revenir le consommateur en magasin. Ça suffit à créer un espace de négociation là où il n'y en avait plus. Timestamp : 11:00 – 16:00Idée 4 — Les 6 mécanismes universels de perméabilité Marwan en a identifié six qui s'appliquent à tous, quelle que soit la culture : la mortalité (on agit pour ne pas mourir), l'émotion (qui prend souvent le pas sur la raison), le besoin de croire (donner du sens à ce qu'on ne comprend pas), la dissonance cognitive (les histoires qu'on se raconte pour éviter l'inconfort), le bénéfice supérieur (toutes nos actions sont guidées par lui), et l'économie des ressources (on choisit toujours le chemin le plus court). Ces six leviers font de chacun de nous une cible permanente. Timestamp : 23:39 – 27:08Idée 5 — Ce qui compte, c'est le gain perçu, pas le gain réel Une négociation ne se clôture jamais sur des faits — seulement sur un sentiment. Quelqu'un qui se bat quatre heures pour obtenir 1% sera plus satisfait que celui qui obtient 20% en claquant des doigts. Le travail du négociateur, c'est de provoquer chez l'autre le sentiment de satiété — lui donner l'impression qu'il a tout arraché, même s'il a tout perdu. Timestamp : 38:02 – 40:41Idée 6 — L'inoculation psychologique comme outil contre l'emprise Dire à quelqu'un "ton partenaire te manipule, regarde ce qu'il fait" ne sert à rien — le manipulateur l'a préparé à entendre exactement ça. En revanche, si on liste à l'avance les méthodes que le manipulateur va utiliser, sans cibler personne, la personne sous emprise fait elle-même le lien quand ces méthodes apparaissent. C'est l'électrochoc qui ouvre la fenêtre. Timestamp : 1:02:50 – 1:04:36Idée 7 — L'IA et la société sans friction : ce qu'on est en train de perdre Plus une technologie promet de réduire l'effort, plus on l'adopte silencieusement. GPS, ascenseurs, smartphones — et maintenant l'IA. Le problème : on perd les compétences que ces outils remplacent. Et les générations qui n'ont connu que l'après ne peuvent même plus se poser la question. La friction, c'est ce qui donne de l'expérience. L'enlever, c'est enlever le sens. Timestamp : 28:17 – 36:53Questions posées dans l'interviewLe titre L'élégance de la manipulation est volontairement transgressif — pourquoi choisir un mot que tout le monde fuit ?À quel âge commence-t-on à manipuler ?Qu'est-ce qui t'a amené à en faire une carrière — et quel rôle a joué ton histoire personnelle ?Comment passe-t-on de quelqu'un qui évite le conflit à quelqu'un qui sait le gérer ?Comment distinguer position et enjeu dans un conflit — et comment trouver l'ICP ?Que révèle Trump, lu à travers le prisme d'un négociateur professionnel ?Savoir qu'on est manipulables, est-ce libérateur ou anxiogène ?Comment repérer qu'on est dans une bulle de filtre algorithmique — et comment s'en extraire ?Quels sont les premiers signaux d'une emprise dans un couple, et comment sortir quelqu'un d'une emprise sans briser le lien ?Face à quelqu'un qui refuse de bouger, quelle est la pire erreur — et quelle question fonctionne vraiment ? Références citéesLivresL'élégance de la manipulation — Merwan Mehri (livre principal de l'épisode)The Art of the Deal — Donald Trump, cité pour illustrer la méthode du passage en force (16:11)Événements historiquesPrise d'otage de Munich, JO 1972 — exemple canonique de distinction entre position affichée et enjeu réel (10:30)Guerre du Liban, 6 décembre 1975 — le père de Marwan sauve la famille par la négociation face à un peloton d'exécution (03:35)Études et donnéesÉtude Universcience sur l'esprit critique : 76% des Français pensent avoir un bon esprit critique, 40% refusent de parler à des gens avec qui ils ne sont pas d'accord (52:28)Statistiques ONU sur la démographie mondiale : 8 milliards aujourd'hui, 10 milliards en chiffres médians d'ici 2050 (1:05:14)Références culturellesStranger Things (Netflix) — mentionné par Marwan pour évoquer la simplicité perçue des années 80 (1:05:14)Pyramide de Maslow — référencée sur le bonheur dans les sociétés riches (1:10:19)AutresFabrice Midal — cité en parallèle, discussion sur la société sans friction et l'expérience (27:08)Agence ADN — l'agence de Marwan, forme 3 000 à 4 000 personnes par an sur tous les continents (1:14:02)Timestamps clés (optimisés YouTube)00:00 — Introduction : manipulation, un mot qui fait peur Gregory se dit mauvais négociateur, Marwan aussi. Et pourtant. L'épisode s'ouvre sur une tension : pourquoi appeler un livre L'élégance de la manipulation quand le mot lui-même fait fuir ?02:17 — Manipulation vs influence : tout est dans l'intention Ce qui différencie les deux, ce n'est pas l'acte — c'est l'intention derrière. On peut manipuler positivement et influencer négativement. Le médecin qui te dit que c'est "le seul médicament" te manipule. On l'accepte parce que l'intention est bonne.03:35 — L'histoire personnelle de Marwan Né au Liban en 1975. Son père a sauvé la famille d'un peloton d'exécution le 6 décembre de la même année, par la seule force de la négociation. C'est là que tout a commencé.05:48 — Comment se réconcilier avec le conflit Le conflit n'est pas une violence. C'est l'expression normale d'un désaccord. Savoir le gérer, c'est un hard skill comme les maths. Ceux qui savent se battre n'ont pas peur de se promener à deux heures du matin. Ceux qui savent négocier vivent différemment.09:47 — La distinction position/enjeu : la clé de tout Derrière chaque position affichée se cache un enjeu réel — et dans 100% des cas, les deux n'ont rien à voir. Le mari en retard et la dispute qui s'ensuit : ce n'est pas le retard le sujet. C'est un besoin de respect qui n'est pas comblé.11:00 — L'ICP : intérêt commun partagé Même quand tout oppose deux parties, il existe toujours quelque chose sur quoi les deux peuvent dire oui. C'est cet espace-là qu'il faut trouver. Distributeur vs fournisseur en pleine hyperinflation : l'ICP, c'est faire revenir le consommateur en magasin. Sans ça, tout le monde perd.16:01 — Trump analysé par un négociateur des forces spéciales Trump est prévisible dans son imprévisibilité. Il pousse les curseurs au maximum, ça fonctionne face aux faibles. Mais face à l'Iran — qui ne se perçoit pas comme faible et n'a rien à perdre — il se retrouve dans une situation impossible. C'est le syndrome du tigre blessé.23:39 — Les 6 mécanismes universels de perméabilité Mortalité, émotion, besoin de croire, dissonance cognitive, bénéfice supérieur, économie des ressources. Ces six leviers s'appliquent à tout le monde, partout, toujours. Connaître les 250 biais cognitifs du codex ne suffit pas à s'en protéger.37:46 — La clôture d'une négociation : rien de rationnel Le gain réel ne compte pas. Ce qui compte, c'est le gain perçu. Battu 4 heures pour 1% = satisfaction maximale. Obtenu 20% en claquant des doigts = sentiment d'avoir laissé de l'argent sur la table. Le travail du négociateur, c'est de provoquer le sentiment de satiété.42:27 — Les 4 pouvoirs pour asseoir sa crédibilité Institutionnel (ton statut), situationnel (ce que tu sais faire que les autres ne savent pas), relationnel (ta capacité à créer le lien), personnel (ce que tu es, ton genre, ton charisme, ta couleur de peau). On n'existe qu'au travers du pouvoir que l'autre nous confère.44:44 — Le passif agressif : le profil le plus dangereux Marwan préfère 100 psychopathes à un passif agressif. Ce sont des gens qui sabotent le système de l'intérieur, qui retournent les équipes contre le patron, qui ne quittent jamais l'entreprise parce qu'ils savent qu'ils ne sont pas bankable ailleurs.51:41 — Bulles de filtre : impossible de s'en protéger seul Les algos confirment toujours ta pensée originelle. Connaître les biais ne suffit pas à les éviter. La seule vraie protection : ne pas rester seul dans ses décisions. L'isolement décisionnel, c'est ce qui nous tue.58:01 — Emprise dans un couple : les deux signaux à surveiller Privation de liberté et contrôle coercitif. Les deux s'installent si progressivement qu'au bout de deux ans, les gens ne se rendent même plus compte que demander la permission pour sortir, ce n'est pas normal.1:02:50 — L'inoculation psychologique Ne pas dire "il te manipule, regarde". Mais lister à l'avance les méthodes qu'il va utiliser. Quand il les utilise, la personne fait le lien elle-même. C'est l'électrochoc qui ouvre la fenêtre — sans provoquer de réactance.1:05:14 — Comment redonner envie du futur Pas avec de l'optimisme naïf. En apprenant à gérer l'incertitude. En choisissant quelle fenêtre ouvrir. L'alphabétisation a chuté, la longévité a augmenté, la pauvreté a reculé — les données existent. C'est un choix de regard, pas une certitude.1:12:06 — Ce qu'il faut retenir du livre Détourner un enfant d'un écran, libérer un proche d'une emprise, briser un discours radical : ça nécessite de l'expertise. Ça ne s'improvise pas. Et comme on manipule tous de toute façon, autant bien le faire. Suggestion d'autres épisodes à écouter : [SOLO] Atrophie sociale : anatomie d'une manipulation de masse (https://audmns.com/UouEwvn) #342 Manipulation des idées : enquête sur un lobby libertarien mondial avec Anne-Sophie Simpère (https://audmns.com/NqsewHr) Vlan #64 Comment vos émotions sont-elles manipulées à travers les réseaux sociaux? avec Guy Philippe Goldstein (https://audmns.com/bZIlUdE)Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Merwan Mery a été négociateur au sein des forces spéciales françaises, fondateur de l'agence ADN et son dernier livre se nomme "L'élégance de la manipulation." Tout un programme :)Je me suis dit depuis longtemps que la négociation, c'était une compétence pour les autres, je me défini moi même comme "nul" dans le domaine, aussi parce que je n'aime pas le conflit. Et puis en lisant le livre puis en discutant avec Merwan je me suis rendu compte que j'avais tout faux. Il est né au Liban en 1975, son père a sauvé sa famille d'un peloton d'exécution par les seuls mots. Et depuis, Marwan a fait de ça une vie entière.Dans cet épisode, nous parlons de pourquoi éviter le conflit, c'est se condamner à perdre, des vrais leviers pour débloquer une négociation, de ce que Trump révèle d'un négociateur piégé par sa propre rhétorique, et de comment sortir quelqu'un d'une emprise sans jamais casser le lien.J'ai questionné Marwan sur les 6 mécanismes universels qui nous rendent tous perméables à la manipulation, sur la différence entre gain réel et gain perçu, sur la technique d'inoculation psychologique pour protéger quelqu'un qu'on aime et évidemment sur la manipulation.Citations marquantes"Je préfère gérer 100 psychopathes, 200 sociopathes, 400 pervers qu'un passif agressif. C'est pas une blague.""La clôture d'une négociation ne se fait que sur de la perception. Il n'y a rien de rationnel.""L'absence de résistance de ta part ne fera qu'augmenter le niveau d'exigence de l'autre.""On est tous manipulés, on est tous manipulateurs et on est tous manipulables.""Si vous ne décidez pas pour vous, les gens décideront pour vous. C'est le principe de l'indécision."Idées centrales Idée 1 — La manipulation n'est pas un défaut moral, c'est une nécessité humaine Marwan distingue l'influence de la manipulation par un seul critère : l'intention. Pas l'acte. On manipule tous dès l'enfance, avant même de savoir parler — dès qu'on oriente la réalité pour obtenir quelque chose. Ne pas exercer d'influence sur l'autre, c'est se soumettre à lui. Refuser cette réalité ne protège pas, ça fragilise. C'est pourquoi se réconcilier avec la manipulation, c'est le début de la liberté. Timestamp : 02:17 – 20:30Idée 2 — Distinguer position et enjeu : la clé de 100% des conflits Derrière chaque position affichée se cache un enjeu réel qui n'a, dans la quasi-totalité des cas, rien à voir avec elle. La prise d'otage de Munich en 1972 ? La position, c'est la libération de prisonniers. L'enjeu, c'est la cause palestinienne. Tant qu'on répond à la position, on ne résout rien. La seule voie, c'est de comprendre ce qu'il y a en dessous — et c'est toujours caché. Timestamp : 09:47 – 11:00Idée 3 — L'ICP, intérêt commun partagé : transcender le conflit plutôt que l'affronter Quand tout oppose deux parties, le seul levier est de trouver la chose sur laquelle les deux peuvent dire oui. En grande distribution, face à l'hyperinflation : le distributeur et le fournisseur s'opposent sur tout — sauf sur une chose, faire revenir le consommateur en magasin. Ça suffit à créer un espace de négociation là où il n'y en avait plus. Timestamp : 11:00 – 16:00Idée 4 — Les 6 mécanismes universels de perméabilité Marwan en a identifié six qui s'appliquent à tous, quelle que soit la culture : la mortalité (on agit pour ne pas mourir), l'émotion (qui prend souvent le pas sur la raison), le besoin de croire (donner du sens à ce qu'on ne comprend pas), la dissonance cognitive (les histoires qu'on se raconte pour éviter l'inconfort), le bénéfice supérieur (toutes nos actions sont guidées par lui), et l'économie des ressources (on choisit toujours le chemin le plus court). Ces six leviers font de chacun de nous une cible permanente. Timestamp : 23:39 – 27:08Idée 5 — Ce qui compte, c'est le gain perçu, pas le gain réel Une négociation ne se clôture jamais sur des faits — seulement sur un sentiment. Quelqu'un qui se bat quatre heures pour obtenir 1% sera plus satisfait que celui qui obtient 20% en claquant des doigts. Le travail du négociateur, c'est de provoquer chez l'autre le sentiment de satiété — lui donner l'impression qu'il a tout arraché, même s'il a tout perdu. Timestamp : 38:02 – 40:41Idée 6 — L'inoculation psychologique comme outil contre l'emprise Dire à quelqu'un "ton partenaire te manipule, regarde ce qu'il fait" ne sert à rien — le manipulateur l'a préparé à entendre exactement ça. En revanche, si on liste à l'avance les méthodes que le manipulateur va utiliser, sans cibler personne, la personne sous emprise fait elle-même le lien quand ces méthodes apparaissent. C'est l'électrochoc qui ouvre la fenêtre. Timestamp : 1:02:50 – 1:04:36Idée 7 — L'IA et la société sans friction : ce qu'on est en train de perdre Plus une technologie promet de réduire l'effort, plus on l'adopte silencieusement. GPS, ascenseurs, smartphones — et maintenant l'IA. Le problème : on perd les compétences que ces outils remplacent. Et les générations qui n'ont connu que l'après ne peuvent même plus se poser la question. La friction, c'est ce qui donne de l'expérience. L'enlever, c'est enlever le sens. Timestamp : 28:17 – 36:53Questions posées dans l'interviewLe titre L'élégance de la manipulation est volontairement transgressif — pourquoi choisir un mot que tout le monde fuit ?À quel âge commence-t-on à manipuler ?Qu'est-ce qui t'a amené à en faire une carrière — et quel rôle a joué ton histoire personnelle ?Comment passe-t-on de quelqu'un qui évite le conflit à quelqu'un qui sait le gérer ?Comment distinguer position et enjeu dans un conflit — et comment trouver l'ICP ?Que révèle Trump, lu à travers le prisme d'un négociateur professionnel ?Savoir qu'on est manipulables, est-ce libérateur ou anxiogène ?Comment repérer qu'on est dans une bulle de filtre algorithmique — et comment s'en extraire ?Quels sont les premiers signaux d'une emprise dans un couple, et comment sortir quelqu'un d'une emprise sans briser le lien ?Face à quelqu'un qui refuse de bouger, quelle est la pire erreur — et quelle question fonctionne vraiment ? Références citéesLivresL'élégance de la manipulation — Merwan Mehri (livre principal de l'épisode)The Art of the Deal — Donald Trump, cité pour illustrer la méthode du passage en force (16:11)Événements historiquesPrise d'otage de Munich, JO 1972 — exemple canonique de distinction entre position affichée et enjeu réel (10:30)Guerre du Liban, 6 décembre 1975 — le père de Marwan sauve la famille par la négociation face à un peloton d'exécution (03:35)Études et donnéesÉtude Universcience sur l'esprit critique : 76% des Français pensent avoir un bon esprit critique, 40% refusent de parler à des gens avec qui ils ne sont pas d'accord (52:28)Statistiques ONU sur la démographie mondiale : 8 milliards aujourd'hui, 10 milliards en chiffres médians d'ici 2050 (1:05:14)Références culturellesStranger Things (Netflix) — mentionné par Marwan pour évoquer la simplicité perçue des années 80 (1:05:14)Pyramide de Maslow — référencée sur le bonheur dans les sociétés riches (1:10:19)AutresFabrice Midal — cité en parallèle, discussion sur la société sans friction et l'expérience (27:08)Agence ADN — l'agence de Marwan, forme 3 000 à 4 000 personnes par an sur tous les continents (1:14:02)Timestamps clés (optimisés YouTube)00:00 — Introduction : manipulation, un mot qui fait peur Gregory se dit mauvais négociateur, Marwan aussi. Et pourtant. L'épisode s'ouvre sur une tension : pourquoi appeler un livre L'élégance de la manipulation quand le mot lui-même fait fuir ?02:17 — Manipulation vs influence : tout est dans l'intention Ce qui différencie les deux, ce n'est pas l'acte — c'est l'intention derrière. On peut manipuler positivement et influencer négativement. Le médecin qui te dit que c'est "le seul médicament" te manipule. On l'accepte parce que l'intention est bonne.03:35 — L'histoire personnelle de Marwan Né au Liban en 1975. Son père a sauvé la famille d'un peloton d'exécution le 6 décembre de la même année, par la seule force de la négociation. C'est là que tout a commencé.05:48 — Comment se réconcilier avec le conflit Le conflit n'est pas une violence. C'est l'expression normale d'un désaccord. Savoir le gérer, c'est un hard skill comme les maths. Ceux qui savent se battre n'ont pas peur de se promener à deux heures du matin. Ceux qui savent négocier vivent différemment.09:47 — La distinction position/enjeu : la clé de tout Derrière chaque position affichée se cache un enjeu réel — et dans 100% des cas, les deux n'ont rien à voir. Le mari en retard et la dispute qui s'ensuit : ce n'est pas le retard le sujet. C'est un besoin de respect qui n'est pas comblé.11:00 — L'ICP : intérêt commun partagé Même quand tout oppose deux parties, il existe toujours quelque chose sur quoi les deux peuvent dire oui. C'est cet espace-là qu'il faut trouver. Distributeur vs fournisseur en pleine hyperinflation : l'ICP, c'est faire revenir le consommateur en magasin. Sans ça, tout le monde perd.16:01 — Trump analysé par un négociateur des forces spéciales Trump est prévisible dans son imprévisibilité. Il pousse les curseurs au maximum, ça fonctionne face aux faibles. Mais face à l'Iran — qui ne se perçoit pas comme faible et n'a rien à perdre — il se retrouve dans une situation impossible. C'est le syndrome du tigre blessé.23:39 — Les 6 mécanismes universels de perméabilité Mortalité, émotion, besoin de croire, dissonance cognitive, bénéfice supérieur, économie des ressources. Ces six leviers s'appliquent à tout le monde, partout, toujours. Connaître les 250 biais cognitifs du codex ne suffit pas à s'en protéger.37:46 — La clôture d'une négociation : rien de rationnel Le gain réel ne compte pas. Ce qui compte, c'est le gain perçu. Battu 4 heures pour 1% = satisfaction maximale. Obtenu 20% en claquant des doigts = sentiment d'avoir laissé de l'argent sur la table. Le travail du négociateur, c'est de provoquer le sentiment de satiété.42:27 — Les 4 pouvoirs pour asseoir sa crédibilité Institutionnel (ton statut), situationnel (ce que tu sais faire que les autres ne savent pas), relationnel (ta capacité à créer le lien), personnel (ce que tu es, ton genre, ton charisme, ta couleur de peau). On n'existe qu'au travers du pouvoir que l'autre nous confère.44:44 — Le passif agressif : le profil le plus dangereux Marwan préfère 100 psychopathes à un passif agressif. Ce sont des gens qui sabotent le système de l'intérieur, qui retournent les équipes contre le patron, qui ne quittent jamais l'entreprise parce qu'ils savent qu'ils ne sont pas bankable ailleurs.51:41 — Bulles de filtre : impossible de s'en protéger seul Les algos confirment toujours ta pensée originelle. Connaître les biais ne suffit pas à les éviter. La seule vraie protection : ne pas rester seul dans ses décisions. L'isolement décisionnel, c'est ce qui nous tue.58:01 — Emprise dans un couple : les deux signaux à surveiller Privation de liberté et contrôle coercitif. Les deux s'installent si progressivement qu'au bout de deux ans, les gens ne se rendent même plus compte que demander la permission pour sortir, ce n'est pas normal.1:02:50 — L'inoculation psychologique Ne pas dire "il te manipule, regarde". Mais lister à l'avance les méthodes qu'il va utiliser. Quand il les utilise, la personne fait le lien elle-même. C'est l'électrochoc qui ouvre la fenêtre — sans provoquer de réactance.1:05:14 — Comment redonner envie du futur Pas avec de l'optimisme naïf. En apprenant à gérer l'incertitude. En choisissant quelle fenêtre ouvrir. L'alphabétisation a chuté, la longévité a augmenté, la pauvreté a reculé — les données existent. C'est un choix de regard, pas une certitude.1:12:06 — Ce qu'il faut retenir du livre Détourner un enfant d'un écran, libérer un proche d'une emprise, briser un discours radical : ça nécessite de l'expertise. Ça ne s'improvise pas. Et comme on manipule tous de toute façon, autant bien le faire.Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Find Zak: https://auralnauts.myspreadshop.com https://www.youtube.com/@ZaksGarbage https://www.patreon.com/cw/ZaksPlanetofGarbage Find Dirk: Patreon.com/vhus vh-us.com

Rylan Foltz went from JP Morgan analyst to independent wealth advisor to co-founding WealthFeed — a marketing and prospecting platform helping financial advisors find better clients faster using predictive analytics and behavioral data. In this episode, Rylan walks through the full arc of that journey and unpacks the strategic decisions that took WealthFeed from zero to thousands of advisors in just two years.Jeff and Rylan dig into why the wealth management industry is so underserved by marketing technology, the power of building bottom-up before going enterprise, how to make a SaaS product genuinely sticky in a regulated industry, and why your distribution moat matters more than your product moat in an era where anyone can spin up a competing product overnight.Whether you're a first-time founder trying to crack product-market fit, or a scaling SaaS leader thinking through enterprise sales cycles, pricing strategy, and team-building, this episode delivers actionable insight on all fronts.Key Takeaways3:47 — The Origin of WealthFeed Rylan realized as a practicing advisor that organic growth was the hardest part of the job — and that the wealth management industry had almost no structured approach to marketing. That gap became the business.6:15 — Why Finance Is Marketing's Last Frontier Advisors can name the big firms but not their local competitors. The industry is dominated by aging, lifestyle-mode advisors who stopped teaching growth tactics — leaving a giant opportunity for a niche marketing platform.10:39 — What's Old Is New Again WealthFeed offers machine-written handwritten notes that look like wedding invitations. In a world saturated with digital communication, old-school physical outreach is standing out again.11:22 — Stop Thinking Leads, Start Building Assets Advisors shouldn't buy leads — they should build a database audience the way Budweiser buys Super Bowl ads: consistent, compounding, ROI over time.13:01 — Niche Marketing Builds Trust Generic messaging ("I help with retirement planning") signals you don't know your prospect. Hyper-specific messaging ("I work exclusively with SaaS co-founders on RSUs and equity comp") creates immediate trust and relevance.14:12 — The All-in-One Platform Advantage WealthFeed layers CRM, outbound marketing (LinkedIn, email, direct mail, handwritten notes), and proprietary data into one workflow — so advisors don't stitch together five point solutions.17:41 — Simplicity Over Power at Launch Early on, feature overload slowed adoption. The lesson: launch with one compelling use case (for WealthFeed, inheritance lead data), get users in the door, then upsell from there.20:55 — Your Moat Is Your Distribution AI lets anyone copy a product in a weekend. What can't be copied overnight is your relationships, your user base, and the custom integrations you've built into a customer's workflow.25:03 — Bottom-Up Enterprise Strategy WealthFeed got traction by signing individual advisors first, letting the grassroots demand bubble up to management — which created enterprise deals without having to wait in long procurement queues.27:09 — Don't Hunt Elephants Until You Can Afford To Enterprise deals can drag for three years. Without revenue from individual and SMB customers, a startup can starve waiting for that one big contract to close.29:28 — Hybrid Pricing: Access Fee + Usage Credits Flat subscriptions don't work when one advisor sends 20,000 handwritten notes and another logs in once a month. A hybrid model lets you charge for scale without penalizing light users.31:28 — Price High, Discount Down Starting low and raising prices creates churn and resentment. Starting at a premium and offering a promotional discount sets expectations — customers know the real value from day one.33:19 — Balancing Founder Vision vs. Customer Feedback A 50/50 split: take customer input seriously, but don't become a yes-man. The most successful founders — especially those who've lived the problem — trust their forward vision even when customers can't yet see it.35:59 — Build Infrastructure Before You're Drowning WealthFeed hired sales, dev, and customer success earlier than felt necessary. That foundation is now why their customer success "outperforms anyone else in the industry."38:30 — Flatten the Org to Connect Dev and Customer Tech teams that never see how the product is used build the wrong things. WealthFeed has engineers sit in on sales calls so they understand why features matter, not just what to build.39:45 — Let Compliance Work With You, Not Against You Instead of pitching firms on new compliance workflows, WealthFeed integrates into whatever compliance process already exists — dramatically speeding up enterprise approvals.Tweetable Quotes"Your moat is your distribution. Go-to-market has gotten extremely valuable because you could almost create the product overnight." — Rylan Foltz"Stop thinking about leads. Start thinking about building an audience, a database, an asset for life." — Rylan Foltz"No one wants a generalist. Everyone wants the best knee surgeon in the country. As an advisor, you've got to become really niche-focused." — Rylan Foltz"Start your pricing high. You can always discount down. It's really hard to raise prices." — Rylan Foltz"It's easier to sell one flavor of ice cream and say it's the best than to offer 32 flavors and create option overload." — Rylan Foltz"What's old is new. Everything shifted to digital, so old-school processes are how you stand out now." — Rylan Foltz"You'll be most successful solving a problem you personally went through. It comes across in your sales, your fundraising, everything." — Rylan Foltz"Don't get too caught up in enterprise until you build up the user base. Get revenue first, then you can afford to chase the elephants." — Rylan FoltzSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Niche down relentlessly — and mean it. Rylan didn't just say "we focus on financial advisors." WealthFeed built every feature, every data layer, and every compliance workflow around that single ICP. The more specific your niche, the stronger your trust signal, the better your retention, and the harder you are to displace. Generalist products get commoditized. Specialists get embedded.2. Distribution is the real product. In a world where a working SaaS product can be replicated in a weekend, your go-to-market is your most defensible asset. Relationships, user base saturation within target firms, custom integrations, and compliance workflow ownership are what prevent a competitor from walking in and saying "we do the same thing." Build distribution as intentionally as you build product.3. Start simple — layer complexity after adoption. Feature-rich doesn't mean better. WealthFeed launched with one use case (inheritance lead data) and expanded from there. Getting a user in the door on one powerful idea is vastly easier than selling a full platform. Upselling to an existing user is far more efficient than converting a prospect who's overwhelmed at first glance.4. Build your team infrastructure earlier than you think you need it. Founders often hire only when they're already underwater. Rylan and his team built out sales, dev, and customer success before they felt the pressure — and that head start compounded into top-tier customer outcomes. Infrastructure built under stress tends to crack. Infrastructure built with intention scales.5. Price to your value, then offer strategic discounts. Starting low might feel like a growth hack, but it sets a price anchor that's almost impossible to raise without friction. Starting at a premium gives you room to discount strategically, run promos, and still maintain perceived value. Customers who came in knowing the "real" price won't balk at renewal the way customers who got a surprise price hike will.6. Close the gap between your builders and your buyers. One of WealthFeed's most impactful structural choices: having engineers sit in on sales calls. When the people building the product understand how it's actually used — and why it matters — they build better, faster, and with more empathy. Kill the wall between tech and go-to-market. Your roadmap will thank you.Guest Resourcesrylan@wealthfeed.comhttps://www.wealthfeed.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/rylanfolts/Episode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group –

CJ Gustafson sits down with Marten Abrahamsen, CFO of Vercel, at the NYSE to talk about running finance inside a hypergrowth AI company. They cover AI use cases in finance, rev rec, forecasting, KPI dashboards, PLG, consumption pricing, and Marten's “speeding tickets vs. parking tickets” framework for moving fast without losing control.—SPONSORS:Brex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metricsAleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/runRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartupsSpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cj—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNGuest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martenabrahamsen/Company: http://vercel.com/CJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets3:21 Visa IPO in the financial crisis5:09 Going public has changed6:45 Private market: 22–24 trillion9:03 More or fewer public companies?9:48 Sponsors — Brex | Aleph | RightRev13:04 KPI dashboard on your phone14:12 Revenue flux via Slack and Notion15:37 RevRec tool: green, yellow, red17:56 V0 is a job requirement19:43 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets20:33 Sponsors — Rillet | EY | SpendHound23:49 Very few one-way doors25:02 Finance in hypergrowth25:39 Three-scenario planning27:00 Honest with the board31:00 PLG + consumption at Vercel33:32 What Marten checks every morning34:03 Why RPO doesn't work here35:36 Holiday usage is up37:10 ICP shifted to solo developer39:22 Capital allocation in a fast market41:32 Growth compounds; margin can't43:22 SaaS gross margins: spicy take44:24 Cash-burning AI: 2026 vs. 202147:29 Are some hypergrowth cos destroying value?50:00 Lightning round50:11 Bank of Ireland mix-up51:10 Don't punt problems forward52:04 Finance software stack52:38 Expensed an oven53:12 Credits

What this episode is about Most salespeople are pointed at targets without being taught to think about them. That gap — between knowing who to call and understanding why it matters — is what Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns set out to close with their book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook. The book is unusual. It teaches through illustrated comic strips drawn from real sales disasters, using the Aesop's Fables principle: story first, lesson second. The goal isn't to lecture. It's to help salespeople recognise themselves, laugh at the madness, and do the work better. What Marcus, Peter, and Tom cover Ideal Customer Profile as a foundation — not a filter. The ICP chapter opens the book because everything else depends on it. ICP isn't just demographic targeting. It's understanding the four to six data attributes that signal your solution is genuinely right for a specific buyer — and then thinking critically about what those signals mean in context. Why AI won't solve poor prospecting judgement. Tom shares a cautionary story: he built an AI-assisted prospecting tool for a team, fed it the right signals, and watched conversion rates fall. The problem wasn't the data. It was that automating the research broke the reps' critical thinking. They stopped trusting the information because they hadn't processed it themselves. They started dialling without thinking. Conversion rates recovered only when the reps were given time to verify and reason about the signals themselves. Pre-call planning is a non-negotiable. Hundreds of touchpoints go into booking a meeting. Showing up without reviewing the notes, researching the company, and forming a hypothesis is a dereliction of the role — not just poor practice. The post-call debrief most organisations never do. Standardised post-call analysis is almost universally absent. Marcus describes his red-teaming process: everyone hears the call, debriefs individually, and lessons feed directly into the next pre-call plan. It's how losses become assets rather than embarrassments. Multi-threading vs single-contact selling. SDRs are frequently incentivised to book a meeting with one person and move on. The result is account executives walking into rooms they don't understand, recapping conversations the buyer has already had. Tom and Peter describe pod structures where SDRs and AEs share long-term account ownership — so the knowledge doesn't evaporate at handoff. Meeting buyers where they actually are. Marcus introduces a staged buying journey framework — from centre of dissatisfaction through passive and active looking, to deciding — and maps this against persona data. A buyer who started a new role four weeks ago is in a different conversation than one who looks like they're planning their next move. Timing, relevance, and personal value determine whether a rep gets championed internally. Honesty, pipeline integrity, and what managers actually owe their organisations. Tom shares a pipeline audit story where redefining stage criteria caused the pipeline to drop by two-thirds — and the leadership committee was relieved. Peter and Marcus discuss the cultural cost of managers who manage upwards rather than telling the truth to the people who need to act on it. Key quotes from the episode Marcus: "Haste is different from speed. Most people prospect with haste." Tom: "I don't even care about your product in the first week of onboarding. We're going to focus entirely on your buyer's world." Marcus: "Buyers don't hate being sold to. They hate being sold to badly. And more often than not, the problem isn't laziness or stupidity — it's lack of self-awareness." About the book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook by Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns. Available at all good bookstores. About The Inquisitor Podcast Hosted by Marcus Cauchi. Produced by Principled Selling. The show examines what commercial dysfunction actually looks like from the inside — and what honest, buyer-centred selling requires.

Learn how to leverage B2B thought leadership, adapt to the new LinkedIn algorithm, and survive the rise of AI filters to outpace your competition. The game of B2B marketing has completely transformed. It's no longer just about pushing content out into the void; it's about navigating a shifting ecosystem where buyer discernment is at an all-time high and AI algorithms act as the new gatekeepers. If you think you can simply drop a link, log off, and watch the leads roll in, you're missing the massive shift happening right now. In this episode, Charles Gaudet sits down with Justin Rowe, founder of Impactable and one of the most brilliant minds in digital advertising, to unpack the exact playbook for building authority on LinkedIn and YouTube. From navigating the newly updated LinkedIn algorithm to understanding how "AI filters" are vetting your business before a human ever does, this conversation breaks down the high-level strategies needed to capture demand and scale your business beyond seven figures. KEY TAKEAWAYS: The Rise of the AI Gatekeeper: In enterprise sales, a staggering 75% of RFPs now pass through an AI filter before ever reaching human eyes. If your digital footprint lacks frameworks, original thought, and proof, you risk being suppressed by the "AI gods" before you even get a meeting. Cracking the "LinkedIn 360 Brew" Algorithm: Pushed in February 2026, LinkedIn's newest algorithmic update heavily penalizes "post-and-bounce" behavior. To maximize organic reach, leaders must treat the platform like a physical networking event: engage for 20 minutes before posting, publish, and linger for another 10 to 20 minutes to reply to the community. Organic Amplification to Evergreen Ads: Stop guessing what content to put money behind. Spend six months building an organic motion, identify the specific posts driving DMs or comments from your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and pluck those out to sponsor as evergreen client-acquisition assets. Drowning Out the "AI Slop": AI has made it easier than ever to churn out surface-level content, resulting in a wave of generic digital slop. Real competitive advantage belongs to leaders who focus on the "white space"—sharing unique points of view, contrasting frameworks, and real operational experiences that competitors can't replicate. Curating an ICP Network vs. Accepting Hodgepodge Requests: Growing an audience organically isn't enough if it's filled with people trying to sell to you. True channel growth requires intentionally sending 15 targeted connection requests a day to your exact ICP while maintaining a strict filter on who you let in. The Bingeable ROI of YouTube vs. The LinkedIn Feed: While LinkedIn is ideal for text-based text posts and high engagement, its feed eventually buries even your best work. YouTube demands a harder, longer grind for B2B channels, but its playlist structure creates a "bingeable library" where a single discovery can lead a prospect to consume 10 videos in one sitting. RESOURCES MENTIONED: Impactable: Learn more about scaling B2B results via Impactable.com Impactable YouTube Channel: Access the free, high-value LinkedIn Ads Beginners 101 Playlist. YouTube Channel Follow Charles Gaudet and Predictable Profits on Social Media: Facebook: facebook.com/PredictableProfits Instagram: instagram.com/predictableprofits Twitter: twitter.com/charlesgaudet LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlesgaudet Visit Charles Gaudet's Wesbites: www.PredictableProfits.com www.predictableprofits.com/community https://start.predictableprofits.com/community Enjoyed the episode? Growing a business can be hard, but it shouldn't be a struggle. Make sure to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode of top-level growth strategies! Mixing, editing, and show notes provided by NEXT DAY PODCAST

We sit down with Bridget Winston to unpack what separates a real Chief Revenue Officer from a bookings-focused sales leader, and why the org chart tells you the truth faster than the job title. We get practical about SaaS metrics, AI-driven go-to-market, and the leadership habits that keep teams performing as the playbook keeps changing.• Evaluating a CRO remit by reporting lines and revenue accountability• Using GRR and NRR to diagnose product-market fit and ICP clarity• Treating revenue as a lagging indicator of customer centricity• Preparing for LLM-driven discovery with brand, PR, and earned media• Testing AI tools that shrink territory and quota planning cycles• Shifting budget from paid ads to community-led growth and local events• Turning customer testimonials into repeatable social proof loops• Managing humans and AI agents with specific, camera-ready feedback• Fixing incentives and systems before blaming the team• Creating urgency with day-five impact expectations instead of tired 30-60-90 plansYour org chart can tell you whether you're hiring a true Chief Revenue Officer or just renaming a VP of Sales. We sit down with Bridget Winston, CRO at Patient Now and a three-time CRO, to get brutally clear on what revenue ownership actually means and why “bookings” is a dangerous north star when retention and expansion are what compound.We dig into the SaaS metrics that expose reality fast: GRR, NRR, LTV to CAC, and how boards interpret dashboards when product-market fit and ideal customer profile are still shaky. Bridget shares a sharp reframing that stuck with us: revenue is a lagging indicator of customer centricity. From there, we zoom out to the “SaaS-pocalypse” conversation and what happens to pricing, planning cycles, and revenue per employee as AI turns some companies into dinosaurs and others into cheetahs.Then we get tactical about the LLM era of B2B discovery. If buyers are finding software through ChatGPT-style answers, Reddit threads, G2-style reviews, and YouTube, we need consumer-grade brand building, PR, and community-led growth that creates earned media AI can't ignore. Bridget also breaks down AI tools she's used to compress territory planning and quota work from months to weeks, plus AI coaching that improves call quality and handoffs without blowing up day-to-day operations.We even take a fun detour into Spark Tank wine trivia, then bring it back to leadership: how to give feedback with real specificity, fix systems before blaming people, and set expectations for day-one impact. Subscribe, share this with a revenue leader, and leave a review so more builders can find the show.Bridget Winston:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridgetwinston/Bridget Winston is the Chief Revenue Officer at PatientNow, leading go-to-market and customer-facing teams across a rapidly growing vertical SaaS platform in the fast-expanding $20 billion aesthetics and wellness industry.  A three-time CRO with over 20 years of experience, Bridget was formerly the CRO at Chief, where she led membership growth and helped the company reach a $1.1 billion valuation. During her tenure, Chief was recognized by TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies and by Fast Company as one of the Most Innovative Companies. Before that, Bridget served as the CRO at Shutterstock, growing revenue to $300 million.Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/Email us with any feedback for the show: sparkofages.podcast@position2.com

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the sixteenth and final track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP, "I'm Coming Home"! Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss ICP final album tracks, talk about Coney dogs and a little smog, and tackle important topics like J singing like John Lennon!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

Getting hung up on by any leader hurts, but it's the grind. Jason Bay flips the script and shows you how to bounce back and book meetings. In this episode you'll learn:

Here's the knot almost every founder hits. Things are working. Money is coming in. And then everyone around you starts chanting the same advice. Niche down. It sounds smart. It feels terrifying. Because the second you try it, it feels like you're about to fire the people funding your life. So I ran the question through The Room. I convened a council session inside Invisible Council AI with cognitive models of four people who have actually built fortunes on this exact decision. Alex Hormozi. Dan Kennedy. Dan Sullivan. Frank Kern. They did not politely agree. They collided. And the collision is where the gold was. Hormozi separated the two decisions everyone blends together. Kennedy reframed a niche as a farm you can dominate, not a smaller crowd to starve in. Sullivan made the call that your current clients are evidence, not your identity. Kern added the filter that changes everything. Pick the client you could win for even if you only got paid after they succeeded. The Third Mind that emerged from all four was simple and sharp. You don't announce a divorce to find a better date. You build a revenue-safe front door for the proven buyer while the old book of business quietly funds the transition. Tighter front door. Same cash register. This one is for any founder sitting on revenue they're scared to risk and a focus they're scared to commit to. Listen all the way through. The open question at the end is the one that decides whether your niche becomes a farm or a trap. What You'll Learn The two separate decisions you're accidentally blending, and why that blend is the source of the fear. Why cash flow is not the thing you protect at all costs. It's the thing that buys you time to get smarter. How to choose your ideal client from evidence instead of preference, using the clients you already have. Why a niche is not a smaller audience. It's a market small enough to dominate and rich enough to matter. The difference between revenue and complexity wearing a fake mustache. How to reposition without sending a single client a dramatic "we've evolved beyond you" announcement. The 90-day narrowing test that turns a scary identity change into a measurable experiment. The exact first move you can run this week with your last 20 clients and a spreadsheet. Chapter Markers (Times are placeholders. Map to your final audio in your host.) 00:00 — The founder's fear: niche down without blowing up revenue 00:00 — Hormozi: the two decisions you keep blending 00:00 — Pick the niche the evidence is pointing at, not the one you like 00:00 — "Your strategy is what you say no to" 00:00 — Kennedy: a niche is a farm, not a smaller crowd 00:00 — The fantasy demographic test 00:00 — Third Mind: the Cash-Flow Airlock 00:00 — Sullivan: your clients are evidence, not your identity 00:00 — The 10x Client Test 00:00 — Third Mind: the Two-Bank Niche Test 00:00 — Kern: pick who you could win for if you got paid last 00:00 — Kennedy vs Kern: ease versus richness 00:00 — Third Mind: the Revenue-Safe Front Door 00:00 — The Council Brief and your first move 00:00 — The open question: farm or elegant trap Lines From The Room (Pulled from the live council session. These are the cognitive models speaking inside Invisible Council AI.) The Hormozi model, on the real lever: "Your strategy is what you say no to. Not what you put in the Google Doc." The Kennedy model, on choosing wrong: "If the answer is no, you don't have an ICP. You have a fantasy demographic." The Sullivan model, on the trap of revenue: "Complexity disguised as cash flow." The Kern model, on the filter that matters: "Don't choose the ICP you can sell. Choose the ICP you can almost guarantee results for." The Third Mind, on the whole move: "You don't announce a divorce to find a better date." The Frameworks Named In This Session The Cash-Flow Airlock — keep serving the messy back room while the new front door only admits the proven buyer inside a conquerable farm. The Two-Bank Niche Test — deposit into the future bank while making zero withdrawals from the current bank. The 10x Client Test — if I had ten times more clients like this one, would the business get simpler, more profitable, and more energizing, or collapse under complexity. The Revenue-Safe Front Door — test the narrow ICP in media the legacy herd doesn't even consume, while the back room keeps proving appreciation to the people paying now. Your Move This Week Take your last 20 clients. Put them in a spreadsheet. Score each one on: Did they get a measurable result How easy were they to sell How profitable were they to serve How easy were they to fulfill Did serving them drain you or energize you Would you take them if you only got paid after they succeeded Would you want ten times more just like them The overlap is your first farm. Then write one sentence. "I help [specific person or company] solve [specific expensive problem] so they can achieve [specific outcome] without [specific pain]." If it doesn't exclude people, it isn't finished. Then point your next 90 days of new marketing at that person only. Back room keeps getting served. Same cash register.

Imagine building one of the world's first cold email automation platforms, then deciding not to chase hypergrowth or venture capital but to grow profitably by serving a very specific kind of customer well. In this episode of Predictable B2B Success, Vinay Koshy speaks with Jeremy Chatelaine, founder and CEO of Quickmail, to discover how he prioritized product excellence and customer retention in a fast-moving SaaS landscape. With over 400 podcast episodes, an industry-defining book, and the trust of agencies managing hundreds of clients, Jeremy's story flips conventional SaaS wisdom on its head. He reveals how the internal calculus of “good fit” versus “bad fit” customers can make or break a business and why refusing a paying customer can sometimes be more profitable in the long run as opposed to customers who destroy value, the unusual economics of retention vs. acquisition, and why delivering exceptional customer results like, booking 4.22 times more meetings than the competition, is about much more than emails and automation. Jeremy also shares hard-won lessons from mistakes, killer feature inventions, and why an executive assistant could be the highest ROI hire you're not making. Tune in for an unfiltered, unconventional masterclass in SaaS success. Some topics we explore in this episode include: Bootstrapping vs Venture Capital: Jeremy details the benefits of building Quickmail profitably without VC funding.Customer Retention vs Acquisition: Why retention often outperforms acquisition for long-term SaaS growth.Defining Ideal Customer Profiles: How to identify and evolve good-fit and bad-fit customers over time.Product-Led Growth from Customer Feedback: Developing features driven by close interaction with customers.Educational Content's Role: The role of podcasts and books in attracting and pre-qualifying leads.Technical Differentiation: Email Deliverability: What sets Quickmail's deliverability and booking rates apart.Multi-Channel Outreach (LinkedIn + Email): Data on improved results from combining email and LinkedIn campaigns.Roadmap Discipline: Saying No: When and why to decline feature requests that don't serve the ICP.Scaling for Agencies: Tools and approaches for agencies managing many client accounts.Founder Leverage via Delegation: The value of executive assistants and reducing operational overload.

Most recruiters treat their client list like a closed account. You made the perm placement, the fee hit, and now you wait six months until they need you again. Dawson Henis looked at that same client list and saw six figures of recurring revenue nobody was collecting, so he picked up the phone.  In this episode, Dawson, the founder of the Atlanta-based Henis Group, walks Benjamin Mena through what happened in the four weeks after he bolted a staffing division onto the perm search firm he started at 24. Seven contractors. Two existing clients. Roughly ten thousand dollars a month in gross profit, built entirely off relationships he already had. His first two orders filled in 48 hours, a pace he would never touch on the perm side.   But the contractors are only half the story. Dawson hasn't made a cold call in two years. He breaks down the lead-gen system that replaced it, the ICP work, the messaging that doesn't sound like creepy automation, and the exact stack he runs, and why he fired three lead-gen agencies charging him thousands a month before building the whole thing himself. If you have ever paid an outside firm to book your meetings and gotten nothing back, this part will sting in a useful way.   This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and get answers instantly across your whole database, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com   He is also honest about what it cost him along the way: the hires that didn't fit, what recruiters get wrong when they hire for their own shop, and the four-question screen from coach Diane Prince that finally fixed it. And he goes deep on the why, how he lost it chasing other people's playbooks and how he got it back.   Whether you are a perm firm owner sitting on contract revenue you haven't tapped, a newer recruiter wondering if you can really do this on your own, or someone who just needs the reminder that the opportunity is already in your book, this one delivers.   Connect with Dawson Henis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawson-henis/   Resources and links:

In this episode, we break down category entry points and how to use LinkedIn ads to plant your brand in buyers minds way before they're even ready to buy.We cover:→ What category entry points actually are and why they matter for B2B demand gen→ Why LinkedIn ads is such a strong fit for targeting these key buyer moments→ Real examples of category entry points you can build campaigns around→ If you are a B2B marketer trying to build pipeline and stay top of mind with your ICP before they enter market.Tune in and learn:→ How to identify the moments that trigger buyers into market→ How to use LinkedIn ads targeting to reach the right people at the right time→ Why cataloging your market beats relying on intent data platforms→ How to turn category entry points into ad creative and thought leadership content-----------------------------------------------------

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the fifteenth track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP, "The Killing Fields'"! Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss spooky songs from Bloody Sunday, talk about attractions in the Dark Carnival, and tackle important topics like ICP's HOF bids for both music and wrestling!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

For twenty years, marketers chased lowest-common-denominator search traffic by repackaging the same information everyone else was publishing. AI just made that playbook worthless. In this episode of Content Amplified, Stacy Shelley, a 20-year B2B cybersecurity marketing veteran who has led marketing at startups that scaled to hundreds of millions in ARR, explains what marketers should be doing instead. Stacy walks through why generic high-volume content is getting swallowed by AI overviews, why your website's job has narrowed to making an unforgettable impression on people who already know who you are, and why the awareness stage of the funnel now happens in Slack groups, Discords, social feeds, and the communities your audience actually trusts. He also reframes how to measure content success, away from raw traffic and toward ICP-account engagement and pipeline influence. If you are trying to figure out what content marketing looks like after SEO stops carrying the weight, this conversation gives you a clear path forward.About StacyStacy Shelley has been marketing in B2B cybersecurity for about 20 years, starting in the early 2000s post-antivirus era before security became its own industry. He has led marketing for multiple startups, including some that scaled into the hundreds of millions in ARR and others that had strong early exits. His entire career has been spent marketing to security buyers, an audience he describes as smart, skeptical, and full of trust issues, which means the playbooks that work everywhere else rarely translate.Show Notes- Connect with Stacy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacyshelley/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most sales teams are reactive — waiting for buyers to fill out a form, book a demo, or respond to an email. Tal Peretz, co-founder and CEO of OnFire AI, is building the infrastructure to change that. OnFire monitors millions of public signals across Reddit, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, Slack, and technical forums to identify high-intent buyers before they ever contact your sales team.In this episode, Tal breaks down how AI is transforming go-to-market for companies selling to technical buyers — CTOs, CISOs, and engineers — who notoriously resist generic outreach and respond only to context-rich, well-timed conversations. Tal shares his journey from engineer to CEO, how he and his co-founder interviewed 275 revenue leaders before writing a line of code, what it's really like to raise a $20M seed round, and the hard-won lessons of learning to sell as a first-time founder. From ICP discovery and outcome-based pricing to the future of AI in sales, this is a masterclass in signal-driven, intent-based revenue growth.Key Takeaways0:00 — Why most sales teams miss buyers who are already signaling intent publicly2:07 — Intro to Tal Peretz: Co-founder & CEO of OnFire AI3:56 — The origin story: 275 revenue leader interviews before building the product4:36 — How OnFire works: Capturing public web signals, de-anonymizing prospects, and delivering real-time context to sales teams6:25 — Why selling to CTOs, CISOs, and engineers is uniquely difficult — and uniquely valuable7:36 — The 50-million-engineer insight: Turning public technical conversations into revenue intelligence10:04 — What true AI ROI looks like: efficiency gains + directly attributed pipeline11:15 — The 4X pipeline result: What customers see in their first quarter with OnFire11:52 — Speed + personalization + human touch: Why all three are required for signal-based outreach13:03 — Raising a $20M seed round and what hypergrowth pressure really means13:47 — What makes a great investor: shared values, chemistry, and true partnership in hard moments15:59 — Managing pressure: Working backwards from a 24-month North Star to break goals into milestones17:07 — Building vs. selling: What was harder in the early days17:59 — An engineer who learned to love sales: How Tal found his passion for closing deals19:21 — The ICP trap: Why selling to everyone early is the most costly mistake a founder makes20:51 — The outbound playbook: Cold calling, LinkedIn, and the "stealth company" message that landed their biggest customers22:10 — The consulting approach: Why leading with curiosity instead of a pitch built their enterprise pipeline24:41 — The three-layer go-to-market machine: Brand, field/events, and outbound working together26:45 — Selling six-figure enterprise deals: Going on-site, acting as a partner, not a vendor28:51 — Staying focused in a crowded AI market: The "build on top of the platform" rule30:02 — Building go-to-market teams as a technical founder: The hardest challenge32:14 — The biggest AI pricing mistake: Why outcome-based pricing is the future35:03 — Sales-led vs. product-led growth: How Tal thinks about when and how to make the shift38:09 — The future of go-to-market: How AI eliminates the 80% of busy work reps do today40:53 — The one thing founders must nail to break through from product to real revenue41:38 — Where to find Tal and OnFire AITweetable Quotes"We monitor the public web for signals — competitors, pain points, product mentions — and surface them to your sales team in real time. Your buyers are already talking. You just have to listen." — Tal Peretz"It's not about quantity. It's about the quality of the data. Act fast, personalize based on the pain point, and always keep the human touch in the loop." — Tal Peretz"We take your existing team and infrastructure and make the pipeline 4X better — not by adding headcount, but by giving them the right signal at the right moment." — Tal Peretz"Every revenue is not good revenue. Nail your ICP first — where you see the biggest pain, the best retention, and the growth potential — then press the pedal." — Tal Peretz"The best investors aren't just writing checks. When something breaks — and something always breaks — that's where you find out if you have a true partner." — Tal Peretz"AI will eat the 80% of the sales rep's day that is busy work. The reps who win will be the ones who know how to leverage those tools and still build real relationships." — Tal Peretz"Outcome-based pricing is the future. Align what your customer pays with the value they actually receive — then you're never fighting about ROI again." — Tal Peretz"We started with outbound and a simple message: 'I'm a stealth founder. I want to learn from your experience.' No pitch. Just curiosity. Our biggest customers today came from that exact message." — Tal PeretzSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Validate the market before you build the product. Tal and his co-founders interviewed 275 revenue leaders before writing a single line of code. They didn't fall in love with a solution — they found the problem first. For early-stage founders, this discipline separates products that get traction from ones that get ignored.2. Your ICP is not a marketing decision — it's a survival decision. Selling to every prospect early feels like progress, but it's a trap. Tal's hard-won insight: identify the customers with the biggest pain, the highest retention potential, and the best growth trajectory early, then build everything around them. Chasing the wrong customers burns runway and muddies your product roadmap.3. Great investors are chosen for the downside, not the upside. When everything is working, any investor looks great. The real test comes when something breaks. Tal defines great investors by shared core values, authentic chemistry, and willingness to engage as a true partner — not just a capital source — when the hard moments arrive.4. Act like a consultant before you act like a vendor. OnFire's biggest enterprise wins came from going on-site, meeting the full revenue team, mapping the customer's strategic goals, and co-designing a plan — before ever talking contract. For founders selling complex, high-ACV solutions, acting as a partner rather than a vendor changes the entire sales dynamic.5. Outcome-based pricing aligns your success with your customer's success. Charging by seat or token puts you in constant translation mode — always proving value. Pricing tied to outcomes (pipeline generated, conversations resolved, deals influenced) makes the value self-evident and creates a partnership, not a vendor relationship. The companies doing this best in AI are winning stickier, larger contracts.6. The future sales rep is an AI orchestrator, not a data processor. Today's reps spend ~80% of their time on research, sourcing, and admin — not selling. AI will progressively eliminate that 80%. The reps who thrive won't be those who resist the change, but those who master AI tooling and redirect all of their energy to the irreplaceable human skill: building trust and closing deals.Guest Resourcestal@onfire.aihttps://onfire.aihttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-peretz/instagram.com/peretztalx.com/TalPeretz13Episode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains

In this interview, Matt Pierce, co-founder and CEO of Immediate, shares the story behind the company and its mission to give employees early access to wages they've already earned through a simple, flat-fee alternative to payday and title loans. He discusses Immediate's growth since 2019 to nearly 700 employees nationwide, and how the company is staying mission-driven while scaling in a competitive earned wage access market. Matt also talks about how they're building alignment through shared ownership and stock education, shifting toward strategic partnerships and larger clients, and learning from a past hiring mistake in sales. He closes by reflecting on his own leadership growth, especially around delegation, coaching, and developing stronger leaders across the organization. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 3:10 Immediate's Earned Wage Access 4:38 Fighting Payday Loans 6:40 Growth With Purpose 11:31 Building True Ownership 15:48 Scaling Through Setbacks 20:30 Learning to Let Go Key Takeaways Fast growth only works when the mission is actively reinforced through stories, not just stated in strategy documents. At Immediate, customer impact stories (avoiding late fees, accessing earned wages) keep teams aligned and motivated. Ownership is strengthened by structure giving employees equity changes how they think, decide, and act. Rapid sales expansion without clear ICP or territories created inefficiency and overlap, requiring a strategic reset. The company shifted toward strategic partnerships to scale more efficiently and improve enterprise reach. Founder leadership must evolve from "doing the work" to "coaching the team" to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Trusting the team and stepping back is essential for sustainable scale. This episode is a must-listen for CEOs and executives looking to lead innovation with purpose, scale responsibly with AI, and build cultures where people feel empowered to think boldly and grow. About the Guest Matt Pierce is the co-founder of Immediate, an earned wage access company helping employees access wages they've already earned, offering a responsible alternative to payday lending. Under his leadership, Immediate has scaled rapidly while focusing on mission-driven growth and financial wellness for workers across the U.S. How to Connect with Matt Pierce: LinkedIn: Matt Pierce https://www.linkedin.com/in/piercmb/ Company Website: https://www.joinimmediate.com/ – to learn more about his work and platform Get In Touch with Matt: https://www.joinimmediate.com/contact-us Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance.

Sean and Andrew stop by to chat about what happens when you build a client website live on a sales call 20 minutes into the presentation. We get into Andrew's cold outreach restart for MetaMonster, the report card angle they are testing with SEO agencies, and somehow end up debating whether Astro or Next.js is the right call for a SaaS marketing site.Links:Andrew's Twitter: @AndrewAskinsAndrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/Slackletter: https://slackletter.com/Sean's Twitter: @seanqsunMiscreants: http://miscreants.com/Margins: http://margins.so/Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.Transcript: 00:01.20SeanWhat's up?00:01.85AndrewThree, two, Oh, shit. Sorry. ah Awkward.00:05.68SeanAll good.00:06.14AndrewEmbarrassing.00:07.26SeanAll good. Jesus. ah00:12.34AndrewDude, every day that goes by without Metamonster closing a new customer, i just get more and more insecure about my abilities to be a SaaS founder.00:25.30SeanIs that like...00:27.14SeanLike every day, like you have a sales call and they don't buy right away or like, I see.00:31.78AndrewI'm not even like having sales calls is the problem. Yeah, I we we do actually like you know, we've been working on the product when I when I started like breaking it down.00:43.58SeanYeah.00:44.04AndrewI'm like, okay, it makes sense. um It's not like that shocking, but I'm still just like, ah like, is there demand for this thing? Are we wasting our time? What's going on?00:55.96Andrewah um but01:00.21AndrewLike, so what we're doing right now, I do think the product has gotten a lot better.01:06.46SeanYeah.01:06.55AndrewIt still, like, has rough edges, but it is, like, it is way better than it used to be.01:06.56SeanOK.01:15.31Andrewum And um I think it's, like, in a sellable place now. What we're doing right now um is we're trying to spin up cold outreach again and start doing cold outreach.01:33.04Andrewum And i think we've gotten clearer on our ICP. I think we've gotten clearer on like the problem we're trying to solve. um And so hopefully clearer on like the kind of signals we can look for to find good fit customers.01:52.44Andrewum and so and'm like cautiously optimistic about this round of outreach that like and then jade's also almost officially on board so like i will have her to work with and to like help hold me accountable and i think we make a good team bouncing ideas off of each other and just like pushing building momentum together yeah um they02:04.33SeanNice.02:13.65SeanYeah, wait, didn't last time when we spoke, didn't Jade have like 25 demos lined up though or something like that?02:23.19AndrewThey haven't really been converting. um She's only done, i think she's done eight or so, and one may turn into a customer.02:34.04Andrewum But she also hasn't really been pitching and because they're it's largely just like friends of hers, and so she didn't want to come in pitching too hard.02:38.21SeanYeah.02:42.84AndrewIt was more like more approaching them from a feedback standpoint.02:43.16SeanRight, right. but Yeah, I meant like how is how's the feedback going?02:49.49AndrewFeedback has been good, I think. i think But it's it's again, it's that like kind of mom test. it's the kind of It's a lot of feedback that kind of fails the mom test where it's like it's like people like the tool, but they're not adopting the tool.03:01.93SeanHmm.03:07.44Andrewum And I think there's like a million reasons that can be. so like one of the one of the simple things that Jade's starting to do is um when people tell her like hey i'm interested in using this she's going to start scheduling a follow-up meeting to be like great why don't you use it for two weeks and then we'll talk again in two weeks and like create some accountability create a little bit of social pressure um and then in that second call i think we can more think she'll feel more comfortable asking for a sale03:36.05SeanRight. Right.03:44.02SeanYeah, I mean, that makes sense.03:45.17AndrewYeah, because like at that point, they've shown interest.03:45.69SeanYeah.03:47.29AndrewAnd it's like, OK, now it's time to ask for a sale.03:47.81SeanRight.03:50.23Andrewum03:50.31SeanRight. Right. I mean, at that point, they've like actually, if they've actually used it and found it useful, and if they haven't, it's also useful to just know.03:57.68AndrewFigure out why. Try to figure out why.03:58.76SeanYeah.03:59.50AndrewYeah.04:00.44SeanYeah,04:00.47Andrewum And then we're trying to, like, it's like, OK, we also need to prove we can get demos outside of her network. And so let's...04:12.30Andrewbut scale up cold outreach, get that going again. We're doing it manually. When I say scale it up, I just mean, i basically just mean turn it on. I mean, start doing it.04:22.26Seanyeah yeah04:22.96Andrewum We're not like worried about scale. We're trying to do it very manually, very personably do it. My friend also challenged me to do not just like email or LinkedIn, but cold call people.04:39.08SeanOh, cool.04:40.31AndrewWhich, which is terrifying, which probably means I should try it.04:45.20Seanah Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I have a cold call video video to send you. like04:49.72AndrewOkay. Send it to me.04:50.52Seanyou know there's a lot of scammy like this is how you cold call people and whatever i forget his name he's now with like a cold calling sas product but like he like live records his cold cold calls about like sas apps or like trucking whatever and like you you hear the guys go like no you or like whatever um like he's using it a demo the platform but like04:50.76AndrewMm-hmm.04:54.92AndrewMm-hmm.05:01.25AndrewMm-hmm.05:15.12SeanIt's probably one of the better, like repeatable sales motion type things that he follows. And it's, yeah, I want to say the app is called Glen Coco, but I don't remember if I'm just making Uh,05:29.70AndrewIsn't Glen Coco like some pop culture reference?05:33.96Seansure. Uh, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Oh yeah. Glenn Coco for, for you, Glenn Coco, you go Glenn Coco. All right. Uh, uh, Mean Girls.05:43.98AndrewWhat's that from? Mean Girls. Okay, that's right.05:47.04SeanUm, yeah, it is, it is, it is, it is from, it's yeah, it's Glenn Coco.05:47.58AndrewThat's right. That's right.05:53.72SeanUm,05:54.35AndrewWell, he named his app after a Mean Girls reference.05:56.98SeanI guess so. I don't know if if it's his app or if he's just, it probabl...

Neste episódio do Vamos de Vendas, Gustavo Pagotto recebe Pedro Rodrigues, CRO da Alice, para uma conversa sobre saúde, tecnologia e os bastidores da construção de uma das healthtechs mais inovadoras do Brasil.A conversa passa pelos desafios de vender em um setor altamente regulado, a complexidade do canal de corretores e a importância de encontrar o product-market fit antes de escalar vendas.Pedro também compartilha os erros e aprendizados na definição de ICP, e como dados, CRM e pós-venda se tornaram peças-chave para retenção e crescimento sustentável. Além disso, o papo explora o impacto da inteligência artificial na saúde e como o comportamento do consumidor está mudando rapidamente.

In this video, I sit down with B2B YouTube specialist Samu Kovács to break down why YouTube is one of the most underrated and untapped channels in B2B right now.We cover:→ Why YouTube beats LinkedIn for cutting through the noise in B2B→ How to rank your videos and attract your exact ICP without needing thousands of views→ The YouTube-first content strategy that actually drives inbound leads and pipeline→ How to convert views into booked calls with the right CTAsIf you are a B2B marketer or founder looking for a channel that builds trust, drives pipeline, and compounds over time.Tune in and learn:→ Why 300 views from your ICP beats 30,000 random views→ How search-based YouTube content creates evergreen traffic for years→ What actually makes a video rank (hint: it is not the tags)→ How to turn YouTube into your number one lead gen channel-----------------------------------------------------

If your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is still built on broad categories, instinct, and a little wishful thinking, it may be more aspirational than operational.  An ICP like that leaves too much room for interpretation. Marketing, sales, and ops start working from different definitions of the right account, and the business keeps chasing customers that look right on paper but don't behave like winners.  In this episode, Drew talks with Drake Lenhan, Sitecore's Sr. Director, Global Market Intelligence & Portfolio Strategy, about what it takes to turn ICP into a source of focus that the whole business can work from.  Drake walks through the progression from validating where you actually win to building a scoring model, securing cross-functional buy-in, and creating a system that stays steady as the market shifts.  What You'll Learn:  How to spot gaps between assumed fit and actual fit  How to turn raw account traits into a practical ranking system  Why use case fit matters as much as segment fit  How to keep ICP from going stale after launch  If you're a B2B CMO ready to revisit your ICP with win data, sharper focus, and stronger cross-functional alignment, this episode gives you the blueprint.  For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcasts/ To learn more about CMO Huddles, visit https://cmohuddles.com/

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the fourteenth track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP, "12'"! Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss capital punishment, talk about the ABK Tour, and tackle important topics like ICP's history with judges!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

Does everyone on your revenue team actually agree on who your ideal customer is? Daniel sits down with Hailey McDonald, the new VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social, on day one of her new role. They get into one of the most expensive mistakes in B2B Marketing: building campaigns before your ICP is truly locked in across every team. Hailey breaks down why most companies are doing ABM in name only, how to tell within five minutes that a team's ICP is broken, and why getting Marketing, sales, CS, and rev ops aligned on a single definition is the foundation everything else is built on. She also explains the difference between ICP and total addressable market, and how pipeline hitting while revenue misses is one of the clearest signals something is off with your targeting. Daniel makes the case that personalization at scale is really just personality at scale, and why the brands that stay consistent with their messaging even under pressure are the ones that win long term. Plus, Hailey's marketing hill she would die on: you can't have demand without brand. If you're looking to actually understand and identify who your audience is, this episode is for you.  Wrike brings structure, visibility, and accountability to work, so companies can make better business decisions, improve efficiency, and reduce risk. Learn more at https://wrike.com/tmm Follow Hailey: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haymcdee/ Follow Daniel: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingmillennials/featured Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Dmurr68 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: www.workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: www.workweek.com

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

We just launched our new book! You can grab The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things on Amazon or at ForthRight-People.com It seems like everyone is talking about the role AI should play in just about everything. You guessed it! Strategic action planning is no exception. You can prompt your favorite large language model aka LLM - ours is ChatGPT - to do some incredibly helpful things for your strategic action planning. Things like asking it to run a competitive analysis for your business, asking it to run industry trends, and asking it to give an ideal customer profile aka ICP. As with anything, there are some watchouts. Enjoy this special look at Anne's Tint World franchise in Cincinnati-Newtown on Round Bottom Rd. For more about ForthRight Business by ForthRight People or for 1:1 consultation, check us out at ForthRight-Business.com And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don't hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/forthrightpeople.marketingagency INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/forthrightpeople/ LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/company/forthright-people/ RESOURCES https://www.forthright-people.com/resources VIRTUAL CONSULTANCY https://www.forthright-people.com/shop

In this episode of Fullerton Unfiltered, Brian and Adam break down how branding directly impacts the type of customers your business attracts. From websites and social media to trucks, uniforms, and messaging, they unpack why some companies attract premium clients while others constantly battle price shoppers. This conversation dives into positioning, trust, perceived value, and how to build a brand that attracts the right ICP and helps your business stand out in a crowded market.

This week, former Forrester Research Director, Jeff Clark, is back in the studio with our host Ian Truscott to discuss an article from Anthony McPartlin, Principal Analyst at Forrester, Agentic Prospecting: Seven Reasons The Hype Falls Short. Demand generation and prospecting have changed, with sales teams now armed with tools that allow them to run lead generation campaigns across LinkedIn and email, which was traditionally the role of marketing, but now this role is being handed to the robots, with agentic prospecting handling everything from deciding the ICP, buyer personas, to executing the campaign.  Picking 5 f'in' things from the article, as is the editorial policy of the podcast, Ian and Jeff discuss: Agentic Prospecting Assumes Signal Quality That Doesn't Exist The Assumption that Sales is a Numbers Game Accuracy is Fragile Due to Heavy Reliance On LLMs & External Data The Fallacy of End-To-End Autonomy Claims The Spam Problem Ian then joins Robert Rose in the virtual bar, The Rose & Rockstar, to discuss Robert's recent article from The Content Marketing Institute - Content-Led Marketing: The Essential Strategy for the AI Era. They discusses the evolution of marketing strategies from campaigns to content-led marketing, and the impact of AI and community building on brand storytelling. Enjoy! — The Links The people: Ian Truscott on LinkedIn  Jeff Clark on LinkedIn Robert Rose on LinkedIn Mentioned this week: Agentic Prospecting: Seven Reasons The Hype Falls Short Tuesday 2¢ - The Cost of the Easy Button Content-Led Marketing: The Essential Strategy for the AI Era Robert's podcast: This Old Marketing  Robert's newsletter: Lens, his websites, robertrose.net and seventhbear.com Rockstar CMO: The Beat Newsletter that we send every Monday Rockstar CMO on the web and LinkedIn Previous episodes and all the show notes: Rockstar CMO FM. Track List: We'll be right back by Stienski & Mass Media on YouTube Piano Music is by Johnny Easton, shared under a Creative Commons license The Miracles - Love Machine You can listen to this on all good podcast platforms, like Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the thirteenth track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP , "Ol' Evil Eye'" and all of the versions and interpolations! Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss Edgar Allen Poe and the Telltale Heart, talk about Plaxico Burress, and tackle important topics like inflation affecting the price of cookies!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

The Bougie Executive Podcast | Episode 2: The Identity Shift That Took Me From $650 to $12,500 Per MonthFor years, I was the bottleneck in my own business. Waking up at 5 AM, working through lunch, answering client emails at midnight, over-delivering on $650 retainers, and making less than my old corporate salary. I kept telling myself it was a hustle problem. It wasn't. It was an identity problem.In this episode of The Bougie Executive Podcast, I'm walking you through the exact mindset shift that took my luxury digital marketing agency from $650 monthly clients to $12,500 monthly retainers in less than 18 months, and I'm being honest about how scared I was the whole time.This is the conversation about money your favorite business coach probably isn't having with you. It's not about marketing. It's not about closing. It's not even about pricing strategy. It's about who you believe you are when you walk into a sales call.In this episode you will learn:Why "service provider energy" is keeping you broke and how to recognize it in your contracts, proposals, and sales callsThe Sunday night client text that broke me and forced me to raise my prices 4X overnightThe one question to ask yourself this week that will change how you price every offer going forwardThe 3 identity shifts every female entrepreneur needs to make to scale from low-ticket to luxury pricingWhy luxury clients aren't paying for deliverables, strategy, or even results, they're paying for decisivenessHow to identify the client on your roster the future version of you would not takeWhy undercharging is a trauma response, not a pricing strategyThe 3 identity shifts covered in this episode:From service provider to strategist, service providers get paid to do the thing, strategists get paid to think about the thingFrom strategist to authority, strategists compete on quality, authorities eliminate competition entirelyFrom authority to decisive leader, the shift that unlocks $10K+ monthly retainersTopics covered:How to raise your prices as a service-based business owner, identity-based pricing, mindset shifts for women entrepreneurs, scaling a marketing agency, fractional CMO pricing, luxury client acquisition, how to charge more as a woman in business, Black women entrepreneurs raising rates, social media management pricing, agency pricing strategy, six figure entrepreneur mindset, seven figure entrepreneur mindset, scope creep, ideal client profile, ICP, premium positioning.About The Bougie Executive Podcast:The Bougie Executive is a weekly podcast for ambitious women building wealth, leadership, and legacy. Hosted by Kareesha Carter, the founder and CEO of The Bougie Executive Agency, a luxury digital marketing firm serving six and seven-figure brands. This show is for the CEO mom, the faith-driven entrepreneur, and the woman who refuses to choose between her family and her ambition because she knows she was built for both.New episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9 AM PT.Mondays: business strategy, pricing, sales, scaling, and systems for women entrepreneursWednesdays: motherhood, burnout recovery, work life integration, and the real life of a CEO momFridays: faith, mindset, manifestation, and the spiritual side of building wealthConnect with Kareesha Carter:Instagram: @therealk.carterThreads: @therealk.carterLinkedIn: Kareesha CarterWebsite: thebougieexecutiveagency.coSubscribe, rate, and review The Bougie Executive Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. Tag the host on Instagram or Threads with your favorite quote from this episode for a chance to be featured in a Friday episode shoutout.If you have ever wondered why you keep undercharging even though you know you're worth more , this is your sign. You are not underpriced because the market is hard. You are underpriced because you have not yet decided you are the woman who charges more.

In this exciting episode: It's all Aaron, all the time!First, we finally find out what Aaron thinks about the Super Famous Fun Time Guys playlist we made for him in the last episode. Haven't heard it yet? Give it a listen HERESecond, Aaron went to see ICP live in Dallas, and he'll share a recap of the entire show experience!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 us Fan Mail

In "Scaling with Intent: Removing the Constraints to Growth" Joe Lynch and Holly LaBoda, Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Formula L, discuss how logistics leaders can bridge the gap between high-level strategy and field execution by building a sustainable, system-led sales infrastructure. About Holly LaBoda Holly LaBoda is the Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Formula L, a sales operating system built for logistics, supply chain, distribution, and complex B2B service organizations. She has spent 18 years working inside these industries — including a decade at C.H. Robinson leading enterprise sales system design and go-to-market strategy — before building Formula L from the patterns she saw break organizations of every size. Holly holds an M.S. in Performance Improvement and certifications in change management and strategy — which means she doesn't just teach what worked once; she builds the system that makes it work consistently. She has worked alongside hundreds of sales leaders and thousands of sellers across logistics, freight, and distribution. Holly serves on the TMSA Board of Directors and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. About Formula L Formula L is a sales operating system built for logistics, supply chain, distribution, and professional services organizations that have outgrown how they operate. Most growth leaders hit a ceiling that isn't about strategy — it's about the system underneath it. Formula L builds the infrastructure that closes the gap between the strategy leadership decides and what actually shows up in the field: a proprietary diagnostic and competency model, the LIFT Method development process, and a full partnership model that delivers the operating system alongside the team. The result is sales growth that doesn't depend on heroics — just a system built to handle it. Formula L works primarily with founder-led and PE-backed organizations in logistics and complex B2B services. Key Takeaways: Scaling with Intent: Removing the Constraints to Growth In "Scaling with Intent: Removing the Constraints to Growth" Joe Lynch and Holly LaBoda, Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Formula L, discuss how logistics leaders can bridge the gap between high-level strategy and field execution by building a sustainable, system-led sales infrastructure. Move Beyond "Heroics-Based" Sales: Many logistics companies rely on a few "hero" sellers or the founder's personal book of business. Holly emphasizes that sustainable scaling requires a system-led growth model where results are driven by a repeatable infrastructure rather than individual talent alone. Identify the "Growth Leap" Constraints: Organizations often hit a ceiling when their current processes can no longer support their size. Common constraints include capacity (the leader becoming a bottleneck) and coordination (complex solutions requiring too much internal sign-off), both of which must be diagnosed to restart growth. Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap: A major growth killer is the disconnect between leadership's strategy and the field's execution. Formula L focuses on operationalizing strategy into daily sales behaviors so that the vision actually shows up in the field. Avoid the "Feel-Good" Training Trap: Sales training is often a "feel-good intervention" that fails because the underlying system is broken. Before implementing training, leaders must ensure the sales process, compensation, and ideal customer profiles (ICP) are aligned, or the training won't stick. Focus on Business Trigger Events over Raw Intent: While "intent data" (tracking website visits) is popular, the real value lies in understanding the trigger event—what changed in the prospect's business that made them look for a solution? This context allows for a more strategic, less "stalker-like" sales approach. The Importance of Leadership Alignment: Growth requires that all leaders are "rowing in the same direction." This often means making hard choices about role clarity, such as ensuring a sales leader isn't also burdened with customer support or operations, which creates a "split-focus" failure. Practice through Behavioral Coaching: High-level growth requires behavioral change, not just knowledge. Effective development involves learning labs and AI-driven practice to allow sellers to get "reps" in a low-stakes environment, similar to how elite athletes or military personnel train for high-pressure situations. Learn More About Scaling with Intent: Removing the Constraints to Growth Holly LaBoda | Linkedin Formula L | Linkedin Formula L The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

In this high-yield, no-fluff episode, Dennis is joined by Dr. Michael Falk, a pediatric emergency medicine physician, former academic, and combat-experienced relief worker who has run airways in Haiti post-earthquake, Mosul during the ISIS fight, Ukraine, and Gaza. They break down exactly why pediatric airways are a completely different beast in prolonged field care and give you field-proven tactics that actually work when you're the only one there with a BVM and a prayer.Key Takeaways You Can Use TomorrowPositioning is everything: One to two inches under the shoulders (or whole body) prevents automatic obstruction from the massive occiput.Adjuncts > early tube: NPA or OPA + side-lying (gravity is your friend) can keep you from tubing in the field.Tube sizing rule: Child's pinky ≈ ET tube diameter. Depth = 3× tube size. Always go smaller — you can ventilate, you can't un-damage a ripped airway.Intubation mindset: Kid airway is more anterior and cephalad. Slow down, work your way in, or you'll be in the esophagus.GCS decision:

I'm joined again by Imran Muthuvappa to walk through how to build your own AI Chief of Staff using a tool called Nebula. Imran shows me how to spin up specialized agents that handle the work a real chief of staff would do — surfacing team blockers, tracking project status, holding people accountable to offsite vision goals, running daily agenda briefings, and prospecting ICP leads. We also get into mini apps, model selection for cost efficiency, and why personal software is becoming a real category. By the end, the takeaway is clear: every role now has a "work on the job" component where you supervise yourself and offload tasks to agents. Links Mentioned: Try Nebula: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/nebula Precall Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/precall-agent Project Status Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/project-status-agent Lead Gen Agent: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/lead-gen-agent Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 02:13 – What is Nebula 02:54 – What an AI Chief of Staff Actually Does 4:26 – Nebula vs OpenClaw vs Hermes 06:09 – Building the Blockage Radar Agent 09:47 – Agent Features 12:04 – Choosing Cheaper Models for Simple Tasks 13:15 – Building Project Status Agent 13:53 – Connecting Tools to Agents 17:38 – Building Vision Tracker Agent 22:07 – Mini Apps and Personal Software as a New Paradigm 25:13 – Building a Daily Agenda Agent and Second Brain Integration 30:25 – Hours Saved vs. Anxiety Reduced for Founders 33:02 – Building the Lead Gen Prospector Agent 39:19 – Final Thoughts: Automate Three to Five Things Key Points An AI Chief of Staff handles the boring executive support work — calendar, email, LinkedIn, project status — so a human can focus on decisions. Nebula lets you build, deploy, and share custom agents through a Slack-like interface, where each agent has its own goals, tools, and system prompt. Voice input via SuperWhisper or WhisperFlow gets you to roughly 150 words per minute, which Imran calls the biggest productivity lift available right now. Cheaper models like the Nebula model handle most chief-of-staff tasks well — reserve frontier models like Opus or Sonnet for deep coding or reasoning work. Mini apps inside Nebula are spinnable web dashboards that connect back to your agents — a glimpse of personal software replacing off-the-shelf tools. The new skill is judgment: picking which three to five things to automate out of your week. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND IMRAN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/imranye Alif: https://alif.build/

This week, join Peter and Chris as they deep dive into the twelfth track off of RiddleBox, the almighty third jokers card from ICP , "Lil Somethin' Somethin'" and all of the remixes and uh, samples! Sit back and listen as they dissect the lyrics and content of the track, discuss the Hulk Hogan doc, talk about Twiztid 420 shows and Jamacia trips, and tackle important topics like students working at Dairy Queen!      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! You can join for free OR 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 still 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

Nicole Phelps shares her experience being pregnant while her partner, Michael Phelps, was training for the Olympics. She hired a doula and prepared to possibly give birth without Michael there. A few weeks before her due date, Nicole started experiencing extreme itchiness, especially on the palms of her hands, and was tested for Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (ICP). However, she went into labor before the results came back. Michael made it just in time, and her son, Boomer, was born healthy. The test result came back positive and she knew she'd have to be on the lookout for another ICP diagnosis with future pregnancies. On this episode, she also shares her second pregnancy and birth story and how her doctor monitored her for ICP leading up to her son Beckett's birth. Nicole wanted to share her story to raise awareness about ICP so other women can be on the lookout for the symptoms. Links: Airdoctorpro.com code BIRTHHOUR for up to $300 off! Know Your Options Online Childbirth Course - use code 100OFF for $100 off. Beyond the First Latch Course (comes free with KYO course)  Support The Birth Hour via Patreon! You can now gift memberships to Patreon here!