How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman

Yeah, thanks for being here.

That’s a great question. I think, all of the startups I’ve worked with have been PLG, right? And I think in a world of agents, there’s definitely a layer where PLG still matters because PLG assumes you have a perfect self serve funnel to the human. And in the same way, you’re definitely to want to optimize it for how is an agent doing research? How is it picking the tools and the APIs that it’s actually using? And I think it just takes the same framing and diligence to why the product already worked from the human understand how are agents making decision making.

So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned in my opinion, for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks.

The taste making of what it means to create a strong product, that for me was born while I was at Superhuman. Because at the end of the day, no matter whether, you know, if you’ve used Superhuman, you’ve likely stayed using Superhuman just because every little element of that product is hyper refined to make you want to continue using it. But I think the difference of what was the early scale of Superhuman, it was super founder led of referral, there was essentially an asymptote that the product hit where they had to follow a different playbook.

Like this was three years ago, roughly. back then, what was SaaS, now we call AI SaaS. Everyone was running more of the, just PLG motion referral of without doing paid and they were laughing like, know, e Premium been been doing, you know, the UGC programs, hundreds of thousands of ads, like paid ad spend is the way to drive performance. And the resistance was definitely there while I was at Superhuman. But you know, seeing what I’ve been able to do alongside a great team at Whisper and now Viktor, my philosophy is that the ecom playbook is the right playbook for SaaS, because if you look at ecom, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an add to cart.

You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of channels that you’re essentially balancing to showcase the entirety of the brand. That’s the model that I took and applied at the end before the Grammarly acquisition at Superhuman to scale paid and then follow that exact same motion for Whisper Flow. That’s really what put it on the map and got it to where it is. Because like we were talking about before, distribution to me is the only moat. and you have to have that strong of a playbook when it comes to marketing.

Because in today’s world, that’s the only way to succeed.

Right away. Right? So like at the end of the day, paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form. Right. Like there’s a ton of narrative that like focus on brand, go organic content, build all that base. that just takes too much time. Yes, do that motion while also doing all of paid Because you can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, test your positioning, all within a week on paid.

How long is that to take you? If you do some content writing, you talk about it on a podcast, you see if it sticks, you’re to do some user interviews, Great. Do all of that. But then you have a much faster engine of validation on the other side on the paid paid amplification end.

Yeah, so I mean, would say it’s definitely start with what I say is the core two. I say there’s the core three of any acquisition engine. have Meta, Google and Lifecycle. And obviously like your site and all the rest is in the middle because you have your strong video intent platforms, both in Meta and and YouTube ads. You have the search intent of people not knowing your product exists, but they’re searching for something right, via the keywords.

And then I add in lifecycle lifecycle as well, because if you don’t have a net to like nudge people and show up in the right place, email, SMS, whatever it is, push if you have an app, you want those three things spun up because you can scale to your first million, ARR just off of those three things. And then obviously, you know, you’re you’re investing into the site, you’re investing into founder led content. There’s like the other things in there, but in paid, just focus on Meta and Google and you’ll totally be fine.

Everyone’s like, oh, we have to do TikTok and Reddit. there comes a time and place to add in a million things because in the same way that like a lot of people get lost with agents is they like start doing a million things with agents and they do them all poorly. Same thing here, right? If you do a million channels and you do them all poorly, it’s not to help you out.

Yeah, mean, I think it depends on like your average revenue per user and the unit economics, right? Because it depends how long is your funnel, what is that 100k going to give you? But usually I’d say like, yeah, if you raise, let’s say 3 to million, that’s like a good start budget to essentially validate that we put money, people are to actually want my product.

Yeah. So I’ll also frame, I think, a massive gap in the SaaS space where like I’m waiting for startups to be made that fill this gap. So I’ll zoom out and if you look at ecom, there are companies like Triple Whale and Elevar that have existed for many years. And what those tools do is Whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you, okay, you add a pixel to your website, it’s out of the box, you plug in all your ad spend, and then it tells you, because there’s usually overlap.

If you run Meta ads in Google, they’re double counting, right? And then Lifecycle is also triple counting at that point. So what a tool like that does for ecom is say, I plugged in all my variables, tell me exactly what is driving revenue from a new customer basis. And you have that out of the box. You don’t have to set anything up. And the other side is conversion tracking, which is like add to cart, purchase, server side, there’s like a ton of technical stuff on on tracking that’s just like a massive headache.

But there’s a solution in ecom that is out of the box. takes fifteen minutes to set up, and it’s done. You don’t have to think about it. For SaaS, completely different world, because you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch, right? When it comes to analytics, there’s a DB, there’s a BI layer, so maybe you’re using Clickhouse and hex, last click, know, first click attribution. All of this is homegrown at every single startup. There is no out of the box SaaS that fills that.

And that’s why all of the companies that struggle don’t do that first, that you have the right MarTech stack to understand if we’re spending, what is actually moving the needle? Because the platforms won’t tell you because you have the wrong setup for conversion tracking, you don’t have measurement and you’re spending into the air. And I’d say 90% of companies don’t do that as a first step before you spend your first cent, have everything set up.

This is what I essentially did both at Superhuman and Whisper Flow, now at Viktor, is essentially coming in and defining what that looks like, right? And And it comes to have a strong analytics leader, as well as like a strong analytics dev that can essentially set up all of that on your website, set up all of that inside of your product to make sure that you are. because most people stop at the, we have analytics to track our product. Are all the marketing platforms getting the same signals? like there’s a thing called match rate on like Meta, and then there’s like a enrichment score on on Google.

If you’re not maxing that out, you’re like missing 50%, like It’s it’s just ghost people. Meta doesn’t see them. It’s not attributing conversions. And the way that the platforms work in today’s environment is each platform’s algorithm does what you tell it. So let’s say we we have poor conversion tracking that doesn’t track when someone subscribes to our product. And it’s like a 5050 match, right? And if I optimize for that subscription, the higher volume amount of events I have, the more data it has of what a subscriber looks like.

And when I optimize for that, Meta will give me more of those people. But if you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn’t know who those people are, and it just randomly targets people. And you’ll you’ll have a super high CAC, You’ll say, paid doesn’t work for me. I’d say most of the time people haven’t done the actual setup correctly before they can say pay doesn’t work for me.

When you’re first getting started, the main thing that you optimize for is like, it’s the most important event to you as a business. So SaaS it’s the subscription, or let’s say the start trial or in Whisper Flow’s example, it was the download, right? Super upper funnel event, because we had a desktop client and iOS app, made it super hard to track. But pick what that event is and essentially validate that, okay, we spend 100k, what is traffic cost? What is our acquisition cost per user? And just focus on acquisition cost because PLG and the product team are to focus on retention.

As long as you bring in the quality user, right? And that’s why over time, you’ll probably change the conversion action to be what the most important event is, right? So for example, at Victor, it’s like a pretty hard funnel to go through. You either be an admin in Slack or let’s say you’re a smaller team and anyone can add apps or you need to be a tenant in Microsoft Teams. You go through onboarding and then you add Victor into Slack or Microsoft Teams. That’s our conversion action.

Super down funnel, but we know that we’ve optimized for that. And like, because we’re super high ARPU, we can have a couple thousand dollars in CAC and the unit economics still work. But you need to like take the time to find that out, right? Like, what what does success look like at at the channel level? But it’s just acquisition in the beginning.

Exactly.

I I think it depends how much you’ve raised, to be honest.

Yeah, Yeah, Because I mean, like like like we were saying, right, distribution is everything in today’s market. There’s, you know, you open up X every day and there’s like like 100 new products, five that are in your category, two that have absolutely just cloned your website, right? This happens every single day. And the only way you out-compete them is distribution. Essentially, you want to run one to one to essentially get as many users using your product and believing in you as soon as possible. You don’t to do it below that because then then you are burning money.

And then you have to analyze the website, the funnel, and and try and get it to that one to one. And then I think there comes a room of scale where you have enough other channels, sponsorships, you’re you’re pumping on AEO and all this other stuff starts to lift your your LTV to CAC ratio. And I think everyone in terms of economics is trying to shoot for like a three to one. And it also changes depending on what kind of SaaS you are. right? Like LTV to CAC is usually not enough.

You want to probably look at like LTV gross profit, specifically if you you have token cost because because the biggest cost item is is usage at the end of the day. So the economics are a little different depending like a whisper and a Victor.

The biggest differences are first in that like Meta and Google are not optimized for B2B SaaS usage based products. Like they go absolutely nuts with a So you’re telling me there’s a predictive revenue of a one person could be a 50,000 annual contract while another person will be 50. Right? There’s just like huge variance depending on single person can be a high user and like the the algorithm has no idea what to do with that. But But the other side of it is we obviously have way higher average revenue per user, but average average cost per user is also higher.

Right? So you essentially to make sure that you actually have a good grapple on what cost is. And a lot of people were like, oh, that’s my Anthropic bill. But what about modal? What about inference costs? What about all the other things that is allowing you to service your products and like, have a good finance leader that’s to be able to essentially gut check, Yeah, you’ve been missing these cost items. This is what you should be optimizing for so we don’t burn money. And that’s a lot.

I think a mistake a lot of people make is not doing that analysis at first.

Yeah, I would say you probably to be spending not at scale, but in the beginning as much in ad spend on creative because creative is everything in today’s environment. And like people have heard heard this buzzword thrown around. There’s an update in Meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what Meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. We’re to analyze the creative. And based on who we know you’re trying to target, we will find those people for you.

So essentially, that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies plugged how to do it. that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy. So in the beginning, you’ll see this for Viktor as well as Whisper, we have hundreds of creators that are doing different demos, different use cases to different audiences, and that’s the only way you can scale spend. Let’s say you have have 100k meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month.

Otherwise, you’re to plateau. You’re get out competed.

You have a creator program where, like, at at Viktor, have our own creator program where we give a percentage of ad spend to people to essentially create ads for us. We obviously have have have some storytelling and they use the product, so it takes, you know, a little bit to acquire them. But once they do that, they create three to four videos a week and we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies. We also have our in-house creative team. So again, ecom model.

Ecom has been doing this for over a decade. That is how the entirety of Martech has functioned. UGC, creator programs, hundreds of thousands of variations of creative, and they’ve been doing that, and that’s like in their DNA. SaaS had to grow up to this, and like, because I come from that world, that was the instilling factor that I always brought in.

There are a million agencies now, right? Like in all of these gaps and opportunities, the sheer amount of aggregation service based businesses, there’s hundreds of thousands of UGC agencies.

Yeah, I think it comes from asking peers, who do you use? And that’s the nice thing about creating UGC. it doesn’t actually go on their page. So they can represent every brand, right? And they can do ads for every competitor as long as you know.

I

pump a million dollars on that ad. And it never shows up on channel, It’s just pumping creative videos. And then yeah, can also run partnership ads. Those work really well. Like you should have probably 30% roughly of your spend going to someone posts in collaboration with, put spend behind that. But yeah, like it could be someone that has no experience, like the kids are making bank nowadays doing UGC for brands that will pay them a percentage of ad spend. Like we have kids that are like 17, like that that are making 30k a month, just making a couple ads for us.

And like the nice thing is if we keep spending on it and it’s a great ad, they don’t have to make another one for a while.

Yeah, 100%. Right. And that’s also just how the algorithm also works, is it finds the best ad and it pumps all the spend it.

Yeah, Yeah, So I mean, think pattern disruption as well as like getting you to stop because like the sheer amount of content that we digest in a day, if it all looks the same, then you’re gonna get drowned out. So the best creative essentially is like a rough shake of the camera that like seems like it’s a mistake, but it got your attention, right? And stuff like that works really well where it’s just like a messy start and like, oh, hey, yeah, like what’s up? Like, and then talk about the product.

But at the end of the day, the key thing around creative is not the one creative. It’s the package of all of your assets together. They have to be different to the algorithm. They have to look and feel different. So different ages, different genders, different settings, different hooks. If you only focus on this is what works and you pump just that, performance will crater. You need to constantly be creating net new, completely wild, weird ideas. Otherwise, your acquisition costs will start to rise.

Yeah, I mean, think that’s the superpower of AI in creative is spinning up variations. But if you look at the like full videos that are AI, they’re slop. Like you can tell immediately that it’s an AI video. I think there’s a place for it. Maybe 5% of your account is kind of just like a weird AI videos that just like are diverse. But I think that’s that’s, the secret sauce is being able to create variety in no way, shape or form is anything in creative to the point where you can replace real people.

Yeah, you’re 100% right.

Yeah. I mean, you’ll you’ll usually be able to say that like, if you just get started, the campaigns have to warm up. There are like certain things you have to have already in place. So like we said, you have your analytics, you have your conversion tracking, let it just run. And of course, you already have to have customers coming in the door. And ideally, that’s that’s why like PLG and product excellence is still the beginning step, right? Like have a product that people genuinely love and they want to tell their friends about. that’s already happening, then your conversion tracking is working on your website or your app or whatever, and you get to 50 conversions.

Then you can start paid because that’s like the minimum line of whatever your conversion action is that the algorithm is to say, okay, I have enough data to understand who your target best customer is. And then I’d say within two to three weeks, if you launch a campaign and go through a couple like you’ll do two or three iteration cycles of we launched some creative, this worked, this didn’t. Why? Okay, let’s throw some diverse stuff, let’s do some variations.

You probably want to give it a full three months, but you’ll be able to say, yes, can start printing money today in like two to three weeks, or I have to go to the drawing board on all of these things because there are a lot of moving pieces. right? It’s the ad creative, the ad copy. What is the landing experience? What is your messaging on that landing experience? Is your page speed good? Are your screenshots in the app store actually sensible, right? Like all of those things are micro levers that compound.

So like you also, you need to be refining everything along the way as you spend. Otherwise also things will plateau.

Yeah, so I mean like a lot of people have really poor UI UX or website designer branding, like absolutely awful. right? And like I don’t to

The thing is, is, that’s like a pattern disrupt thing for them and they know who their target audience is and the target audience appreciates the weirdness.

I just look at it and go. No. predictive revenue I mean, one on the flip side, it’s just like, okay, do you know what your traffic mix is? is? your site mobile optimized? The sheer amount of sites I see that the main CTA is like a scroll and a half away. Come on. that’s the first thing that you start with that a basic audit will show you. Right? And that’s what I mean by the landing experience. If I read nothing else but your headline, do I know what you do?

Like it’s hard sometimes to explain what this crazy crazy AI SaaS niche product does. Focus on your messaging. Actually have something that tells the user if they didn’t move their thumb, they didn’t do anything, I to try that out. Right? Like go through that proxy. Same thing with the creative, same with the copy. like that’s a that’s a frame that you to take throughout the entire kind of funnel.

So page speed matters because it depends obviously who and where your target customers are, right? So like US, UK, we have good data and it’ll be fine. But like where page speed really starts to matter is both AEO and SEO. It is one of the core elements in what gets your site to rank in, let’s say, a top position on Google. And then same thing, If, for example, a bot crawler goes to your website and it’s a cheap call to say, how long did your page come to load?

And if you’re on a low, essentially ranking from like A to F, the average person in the world will probably not load your site immediately. So like any any second improvement is a drastic jump in conversion. And just just the numbers show that. Right? And even though it seems like, oh yeah, like it loads in half a second versus milliseconds, it does make a difference.

You to chart your total spend to your acquisition and how elastic it is. There’s always be a lag where like, I spend today, and then I convert to paid in 14 days, right? Let’s say, right? And that’s like, we’re looking at two main things. like revenue is the most important thing from an ARR standpoint, because we’re in SaaS. As I spend up, does that ARR also spike? right? And how elastic that relationship is, we’ll immediately tell you oil on the fire, or let’s pump the brakes because as we spend up, this is a very common thing that you’ll hear.

How incremental is your spend? It’s a question you should ask relatively early because once things are working, it’s really easy just to like dial it up to 13 on a scale of 10. Sure. And what ends up happening if you’re not very diligent, all that additive spend could have not been there and you would have gotten the same results. And then you’re just giving money to Meta and Google, right?

And there’s that fine line. and that’s why I’d say like true people that understand this and growth are on the rarer side because like, there’s usually like I am a expert in Meta or I’m an expert in some other channel, but being able to sit above the whole thing and say, okay, here’s how the interrelationship of this much spend here, this many sponsorships, this many podcast features, this is how, you know, how how much PR we’re pushing. All of that interrelationship is how you essentially ensure the most elastic spend to revenue impact.

And that’s like further down the 100k k, but that’s like the that’s the end state. are everywhere all at once at the right moments.

At the end of the day, it was very much a premium product, immediate paywall, and the core ICP is founders. Right? And And we also experienced this at Whisper. right? Like the early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it’s an ever growing audience because everyone can be a founder. Right? But if you look back even two, three years ago, the TAM of that is is finite. right? And And that was the first asymptote. So essentially, you know, going after additional ICPs like sales and how do we turn Superhuman to be more of a sales engine for people.

Looking at the recent opens on the right, that’s my favorite feature. right? I can see who’s creeping on my emails send them a reply. So like stuff like that, like adapting the product to more ICPs is where you get those additional step changes. But the asymptote is because it was hyper focused on one ICP. and if you don’t proactively open up the layers of the onion, you’re you’re to hit, some kind of level.

Well, well. yes. Right? Like Fixer followed the ecom playbook. UGC, tons of ads, strong on Meta. The thing is is slightly different value proposition in that Different market. Different market, different consumer. Right? This is This is someone that like, wants a simple tool that adds labels to their Gmail.

Well, what I know, their scale was both on the B2C side through Meta, but also they made big revenue jumps through the Outlook consumer that was hyper frustrated big enterprise deals. Right? And that’s like and that’s also where know, Superhuman, Superhuman Mail did the same thing where going after big logos and ensuring that you can essentially have sales led growth alongside PLG. I think Fixer did that also super well. They pushed hard on the sales side because that that was also their background relationships they had from the email space.

And that’s why like same thing for for Whisper, right? Like it was really interesting to see that, you know, we were B2C B2C B2C PLG, but like a very large component of our ARR was enterprise before we had a single AE because it was self-service enterprise adoption, team licenses and that kind of stuff. So you also want your product to be like adoptable easily by enterprise. I think that’s a nice unlock as well.

So I mean, it’s a totally different type of creative. So if you look at Meta and YouTube, they have like similar but slightly different like hook curves where like the hook happens slightly later on Instagram and Facebook. You You want that immediate validation while on YouTube, you’re kind of there to spend the time digest the video. So you have a little bit more of a longer attention span. And a lot of people actually are terrified of YouTube because you the best performing YouTube ads are by So So they’re landscape.

And most people are like, well, I have a UGC program. I just have story placements. What am I supposed to do? So we did a really cool thing at Viktor. We had Viktor build an app for us that takes any story video and adds it into a static template that has like logos that use us, G2 G2 rating, and then a CTA, and the video is the replaceable asset. And we turned all of our story ads into YouTube ads. Every single one ended up on YouTube.

Not all of them work the same. We had to edit them a little bit to fit the format, but that’s usually people are like terrified to get started with YouTube because of that reason. But just like go into Figma, make a template that’s a static asset, throw your video in that and just export that. Welcome to YouTube. Right? Like you can ads that way. there’s also just like a different storytelling where you want it to feel like a organic YouTube video. So like someone talking about a hack or use case of like, yo, I just started using this and it absolutely changed my life.

I’m gonna show you how. right? Like you’re not to say that in a meta ad, right? It’s a very different script and framing and filming. So we have a separate team that does the scripts, films, the YouTube videos. It’s an entirely separate program from our UGC. We use some things from UGC in YouTube, but it deserves its own focus.

Yeah. I mean, I I think it’s all dependent on that elasticity that we defined. So, like at Whisper did what I think everyone should do is go as hard as you absolutely can and then see it blow up and then understand where and how it blew up, pull back and use that as information of now we know what is incremental. We know where our ceilings are. We know that we hit audience saturation or we need more creative. So we did that last year at Whisper. Right?

Like, we We like 5x x the budget from one month to another. And where the pieces fall through? Right? But the thing is, the reason why we did that instead of trying to figure it out over time is like, you don’t have six months to say, okay, we need to be growing 30%, 40% month over month over month. And the only way that we can do that is, okay, let’s see where our ceiling is, because maybe maybe we would have been surprised that we would have been scaling infinitely, which didn’t happen.

Right? But we then knew, okay, Meta needs to be second to Google. Here’s why. Here’s how all these things worked together. These newsletters were shit. This This podcast podcast doesn’t work. How do the pieces fit together? So, I mean, in my opinion, go hard to understand what doesn’t work and where your mix needs to be adjusted. Then bring things down and then scale back up with those learnings, and then you can get a repeatable ramp.

I would say it depends on how poor the metrics are, right? Like if there’s no world that this is ever going to make sense, turn it off immediately. Let’s say like some leading indicators are saying, it’s pretty crap, but like, let’s give it a little bit of time to see if there are other things that are impacting this. Because like I said, there’s a million dials, Like, from the ad from the ad to the conversion, there’s a million things that you can tinker along the way, and that’s why you to give it time, right?

Like, this asset is going to the homepage. What if we had a hyper personalized landing page that says the exact same thing that is being said in the ad, and even includes the creator’s face on the page? Random idea. Right? Does that move the needle? and test some things to give it some time and then scratch it off.

Definitely Google in terms of

Google Ads. Yeah, Google Ads. Google Ads is still the main driver just and it was surprising across literally everything. Non branded search, PMAX, YouTube ads, everything prints there. The reason why it’s like, it’s it’s the middle of the funnel, but you have essentially all top to bottom right in one platform. And if you have like all the right conversion tracking, Google is a big marketplace with a a lot of surfaces and just optimizing for app download because it’s a freemium product, We have a lot more fine tuned control than we do in Meta when it comes to like CAC and how much we want to spend in India versus in the US, because of different price in those markets.

We don’t have as much fine tuned control in Meta because like I said, it’s like they’ve removed all the manual settings. Creative is your targeting either works in a geo or it doesn’t. You just iterate on creative. It’s a completely different job than like, you have a pretty structured beast to essentially understand how to scale there. So it was Google. that’s it’s also because longer form video for like a pretty difficult product to explain. Like, okay, I talk, it turns to text, but where in like text boxes?

Like explain that to like the the average Joe that’s walking on the street, it’s gonna be like, they’re gonna look at you weird, yeah, voice notes. Like what do you mean? I send them in WhatsApp. right? Like, there’s there’s that education that needs to happen. So like the 30-second to one minute videos in YouTube that educated the base ran for a while, got millions, hundreds of millions of impressions. Then fed into non branded search, pmax, different placements and display. and then eventually those people converted. right?

Those all those pieces work together.

It gets better over time. but again, it has its own scaling laws where like, there’s a point where you have to diversify into other platforms before you see an additional unlock. When you hit like some kind of audience fatigue of like whatever you’re targeting. But in the beginning, it’s always shit because you’re waiting for the conversions.

Well, you want unlock the next audience, right? So like, you know, for example, when when we’re looking at at Viktor, when we launched, we purposely had the, you know, the AI employee for everyone. And we did this to see who came in the door. And we had, you know, agencies, e-commerce brands, and SMBs that first showed up. And essentially what we did is we went through in order, right? We went, okay, have evergreen stuff, we’ll continue continue that running. But now let’s go agencies. Can we acquire them?

What does the funnel look like? What does the creative look like? And then once we unlocked one audience and it seems like the economics work, now there’s a repeatable process to refine it, then we can go on to the next audience. So you essentially want to you’ll hit audience fatigue in what you’re currently targeting. marketing now is very ICP specific. We have all the latest and greatest tools that can tell you in a prompt, whether using Viktor or whatever tool, simulate this person, like, what do they read?

What do they think about decision making? Run that prompt. and then you have like the richest ICP research you possibly can have Create for that person, create an experience from a landing, onboarding, and product experience for that person. You You can continue scaling by just going down to the niche audience by audience

So I mean, I think because the category is so wide, and I wouldn’t say we’re the first, but we’re the first to say AI employee and actually deliver on that promise where work is being given and the usage is actually ROI positive, actually valuable. And we started with that because it’s again, like how else are you to frame it as being different than Claude or ChatGPT and these other players where like, you have to like, for us, it’s the positioning around knowledge work. Like was nothing other than AI coworker and AI employee, Like there’s no other positioning that like really makes sense.

And because it hasn’t been used a lot, I think it’s confusing. But now that there are more use cases and stories to back it up, then we can shift the framing to be a, I hired Viktor and here’s what he did. And then it’s a, oh, it’s a guy’s name, it’s an employee. Oh, it’s an AI tool. Right? There’s you can invert the process now, but we had to start with something to essentially build those use cases.

I think it’s one of the core things, like we talked about Meta Google Lifecycle. When you think about PLG, have that referral program set up and it be very front and center and easy to discover in the product to make it effortless for someone to share the product and get something for doing that. And at Superhuman it was, give one month, get one month. And we had people that had hundreds of referrals, hundreds of months. they were never to pay for the rest of their lives. because delightful and it was easy to discover, but it was very tactile, where like, I’m getting something, right, for doing this.

So it was a similar thing with with Whisper when you hit your, let’s say, 2,000 word limit. Now So that that we’re changing a little bit of how that trial works, but essentially finding the right moment to show the referral program and make it tangible. So like, you’re right about, you’re like, you’re right about to hit your your word limit. Hey, did you know that if you share this with your friend, can get the next month free? Okay, I’m take five seconds and go and do that. and I’ll tell one friend, hey, sign up for this.

And if they sign up, I get that one month. And now I have another person that can spread the word. And And that k factor is what makes or breaks that. So

If that is your product, right? Like what is the thing that if you have more of, won’t frustrate you, So like for Viktor, the referral program that we have, so it’s all token based, you get credits to essentially use in Viktor. Whenever you’re near the limit, we give you essentially a decision tree depending on who you are of what you could do to earn free credits. We have a creator program. So if you just post on LinkedIn about Viktor, we give you a payout via CPM directly to your account in credits to any user.

And that gives us social and virality that we can essentially push forward on. Or you can be a part of the the actual referral program where you can invite companies and you get a percentage revenue share of the referred company’s paying plan in credits every month. So if I’m a company and I know another cool company that should be using Viktor, and I know that Viktor is expensive. you know, we have we have, like eight person teams that are spending a dollars a month to use Viktor. and it replaced all their hiring.

We can go into that later. But like, for example, that’s a cost item, and I know that if I can bring I have another friend that has an agency, they’ll probably spend 5k k, and I’ll get 20% of that as rev share, and that lowers my cost. But to us, that makes sense from a CAC basis. You know, we’re willing to spend depending on the cohort to acquire a customer. We’d rather have our customers finding those best customers for us.

I mean, either not making them tangible or just like a, hey, refer your friends and it’s a, but what am I getting for it? Or it’s just like some like you get swag or just like things that don’t really matter. Or they create these like hyper complicated 20 tiers, like do these actions and like gamifying the referral program and then no one wants to use it because it’s just like, it’s a pain. So I think it’s somewhere in that spectrum of like, you’re either doing that or that like you need to hit the sweet spot of what that looks like.

I think even before the paywall analysis, the main thing you want to adjust for is when that magical moment happens. And you want that magical moment happen as soon as possible, but you also don’t want like, you want the paywall near that moment where like that moment is either your first discovery of wow, this is amazing, but you to kind of continue that over time. So like you have that magical moment and then you’re kind of, you stay in that kind of like honeymoon phase of like, this is just amazing.

And then within that phase, paywall. Right? And that’s like, whether it’s words per week or how many credits you get in Viktor. This is a big game that we’re trying to hyper refine now is, how many free credits should we give you, and how do we nudge Viktor to show you really useful workflows? Because the moment you have one that goes, this is game changing, paywall. Because then you want open up your pocketbook because you’ve felt something magical that you haven’t felt before. And because there’s so many products, there’s true unique magic, this is this product is insane moments.

And like this happened at Whisper for like when we had that first rocket ship moment when like LinkedIn was going absolutely nuts of like, there’s this thing Whisper, and I’m not typing anymore. And a lot of that was organic, right? But that’s because people hit that magical moment. and that’s like similar like with the amount of posts that are happening about Viktor. A lot of like, I’d say half of them are organic, half of them are like the creator program that I said, you post and you can get credits. it’s all genuine, right?

But it’s that magic moment that matters. Should credits go in marketing budgets? So we call this fully loaded CAC. So our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you’re not doing that, then you’re not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah, trial credits or anything free that you’re giving away is cost and it goes under, it is a marketing cost item.

AEO in general followed the the core tenets of SEO in general, where what used to be old school SEO, like pumping out thousands of pages came back again. Because Google, because they own the SEO algorithm, essentially penalized people that were just pumping out pages for SEO. So over the last couple of years, people stopped doing that. But the sheer amount of pages that you have in AEO, that is also changing a little bit. But if you look at, you can ask any agent to analyze the sitemap and essentially do like cron.

So we do this with Viktor. We look at every competitor and we look at their sitemap. We see how many pages they’re making. All these companies are doing like to 200 pages a week. It’s all like a lot of it is just like generated AI slop. So that’s also what you don’t want to do at scale. You actually want valuable content that says valuable things because the AI crawler essentially ingests that. And then what you’re saying there is what gets written about you when like, what is the best tool for this?

Or like, I’m trying to do this and it’s it’s doing these citations. So the things that I’ll say that are the most important AEO now it’s like, yes, have an engine that you send content through your website on specific things. But the most important thing is YouTube, Reddit, and like the the social narrative. So like one of the early levers that every founder should should do when they’re first starting with scaling scaling is investing in good YouTube reviews. Because YouTube reviews, because they’re long form, they rank long tail.

They’re one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you’ll have your website PR, external sources talking about you. And one of the biggest, best external sources are how many reviews and videos do you have on YouTube. There are really high citation on ChatGPT, and that’s like one of the early, I’d say, strong things that every founder should focus on.

I still think it matters in the sense that like, I have the opinion that, you know, when you launch, do a product hunt, get featured in TechCrunch. Like that’s just like, it’s like founder initiation. Short table stakes almost. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I’d say like it it builds a level of credibility and trust that like you are on the map in the same way that everyone went through the process. But like the reason why it’s important, the PR is less of a like PR blows up and there’s like a traffic wave.

Really that PR is made for citations, right around AEO, like how many external credible sources are writing about you? Then you’ll see your AEO traffic significantly increase because the more of a not owned narrative is being talked about positively about you, the better off the product is.

I think there’s a time and place for it. it. depends on, you know, are you more B2C than anything else? Like

I’ve never. I think there’s a time and place to like do some audience diversification. But yeah, to be honest, in any of the the three kind of core companies that I’ve been at so far, it hasn’t worked yet. But maybe I’ll I’ll I’ll get a chance to change that at Viktor.

That means you have other problems, right? Like, I think the sweet spot for organic mix should be around like 35 to 45% of acquisition is of organic, and like truly people just discovering it based on everything else that you’ve built. In the beginning, because you just started and there’s not a lot of stuff out there about you, it is entirely tied to paid. But in the later stage, if you turn everything off, that means you have forgotten about the other half of the job, which is the SEO, the AEO, the reviews, everything being written.

So like you sometimes want dial down and see how elastic it is, again, to the previous part that we were saying, because that’s like, you definitely want a strong model and incrementality. and you’re the moment you start spending north of million a month, definitely have a model that says, this channel is incremental, this is not. And like, the model in the beginning always be wrong. Make some changes, dial things down, do holdouts, whatever, and then see if the model proves true. Model gets better over time, and then you have you’re less in the dark, right?

Like you actually understand what levers go up and down and where you can actually spend a lot. So I think spending down to understand how much drop off you have is actually a good, very strong learning moment.

Not a lot. Yeah. If I’m be honest.

I I think I’ve had, like, I’ve had an interesting kind of like, grow up through marketing is because I started I started in corporate consulting, which was an absolute life suck. I hated it. And that got me to found my first agency where I had to learn how to do everything myself from zero. Right? And because I had to do that, and I did that in both e SaaS and enterprise B2B, B2B, my my agency is still around today and not involved in the day to day But like, because I had to do that, I understand how to launch a meta ad.

I’m not a you know, head of growth or CMO that like has no idea how to do execution. This is why also as head of growth at Whisper, up until December of this past last year, I was the only person doing execution on a three million budget. I was doing everything myself.

I think a lot of people have been saying this, I definitely echo that. like hyper specialists are dying a slow death. Like you need to be like, I’ve always seen myself as a specialized generalist and like the way that, you you have to pick something that you are better than the rest at, but like get your hands dirty and learn how to do a little bit of everything. And that’s like a lot of growth leaders actually get lost in the marketing analytics, the conversion tracking, like that stuff is usually where they don’t understand how that works.

And if you don’t understand the fundamentals, you actually don’t know what makes the system tick. We also live in a world where like ChatGPT, Claude, Viktor, right? Like they the best learning vehicles ever in the history of humanity. If you don’t know how to do something, goddamn ask it. Have it tell you, give me everything step by step that I need to do and go and do it. and then see where things break, see what you don’t understand. Like there’s there’s agency. If you are hungry and a learner, those are the best people that win are the people that are, that are nerds, that are curious.

Right? Like that’s the line for me.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s complete 180. I’d say now a year ago, I’d be looking for someone that has years of experience in, let’s say, Meta ads. They’ve scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars and they’re, let’s say, the best in the world as a Meta ads media buyer. that And would be the main thing I’d be looking for. Let’s say that’s the person I’m hiring. now. I’m looking for that, but they don’t necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they’re AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job that person plus experience will outcompete someone that just has experience and is not AI native.

And that’s like I’m seeing that happen where like, I’m gonna have a hot take here. I think a lot of teams are trying to make their teams AI native and they’re failing. Why are they failing? The people that are in those roles are not systems thinkers. Like if you’re in a marketing or let’s say ops role and you’re not a systems thinker, you don’t know, you actually don’t know.

To me, that’s being able to step back from, let’s say, a task that is a part of my job. Being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say, in my role, what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day to day basis? What are the interrelationships? Where’s the boring admin? Where’s the reporting? What’s all of that? And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works. Because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part, and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job.

A lot of people go and go to ChatGPT and ask it a question, and then they go on still doing their job the manual way. If you take a step back and say, what would it take for me to fully automate, let’s say, all of my job? Of course, it’s not gonna work, things are gonna break apart. But run yourself through that thought experiment. And the thing is, is, if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don’t really understand their job. because they’re not systems thinkers.

They don’t they don’t actually know what are all the inputs and the outputs. So that’s the line for me. So like when I when I interview people to fill in the team, it’s like partially like an engineering interview where like systems thinking is the bar.

Yeah. I mean, core question is more of like, how do you use AI as a workflow in work? But I’m actually more curious, how do you use AI workflows in your personal life? Like, do you have any systems that you feed through AI that make you a better person outside of work? And like, maybe the line blurs of like, what you do is also work is personal, whatever.

bad answer would be, I mean, a bad answer would be, you know, I I have a skill or like a a chat thread that’s like a a project in ChatGPT that I talk to and it has like some context because it’s like, yes, that’s factually correct. That’s how you should use, let’s say, a memory layer and a context layer. And you have one proactive chat conversation. So it works. Chatting with the thing is not a workflow, right? Where if there’s no feedback loop, like one of the core things that I always test for is, let’s say an AI gives you slop. slop.

What do do with it? So a lot of people, what they’ll do is they’ll take the slop and then say this is slop, change changes and they get frustrated, then they take the doc and start writing it themselves. And if you don’t go through the pain of giving feedback, like that’s the first kind of feedback loop that I test for. But the next thing is is from, let’s say you have a loop. And like I used this example before of like, I built like a sponsorship system as Whisper, but essentially the workflow is a self self-improving loop where like if a, you a newsletter sponsor emails me, my agent essentially knows that this is a newsletter request.

It asks them for their rates. It does research on what their audience is. It does the first part of negotiation for me. I step in to approve the like, yes, we want to work with them. We get a contract. and that’s where my manual step in newsletter ends. I throw the contract into the agentic system. It ingests all of the cost data into the file system. It does copywriting. It does all of the email sending. It creates all the links. It creates all the conversion tracking.

It sends everything out to the partner because like a newsletter is like a boring antiquated email. I will email you and you will tell me the performance. And then based on the copywriting and based on the cost, it will essentially also know what performance looks like and then say, do we continue on with the partner? That’s also an agentic decision because I have CPM should be this, conversion should be this, let the run fizzle out if it didn’t work out, right? And again, that’s a workflow, right?

Like I have a couple human touch points, but the things that I know that if it analyzes the data and same same thing, if it generated a copy, it knows all of every link’s performance and can say, this copy works, this doesn’t. So the next time it generates copy, it’s based on all historic data. It’s not a. and and that’s like a self improving What

So this was first the like marketing OS I built at Whisper. So it was like Claude code on a computer. That’s just the the folder system and like skill and MD files. That was the beginning of of that system. So it would essentially be that right where I have Claude plugged into my email with with Cron cron set up to essentially check at nine, check at noon, check at six, Are there any new newsletter requests? Do a workflow to respond to those things. And then bubble up to me a message in Slack being like, hey, these need your decisions.

Here’s some contracts that got sent over. and then that system evolved. So that was like my own OS. I had to then get control that folder to share that with the team so other people can use the workflow. So then for essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product took it over, right?

Onboarding. But then add Meta, add newsletters. at a given point, I was working with between 70 and 120 unique newsletter providers that would send me emails, ask for copy approval. I needed to create unique images. So I said, why are newsletters still in the in like the stone ages? There’s no platform, like, it’s all through email and you’re negotiating and haggling with these people trying to get you on a CPM. right? So that was one of the first things that I created a workflow around. And like, I don’t code, right?

Like I learned how to do this by doing it. I want to automate this Claude code. how would you do this? And I started by, I built the OS asking how to build an OS, right? Like, and then every single day, I would say 90 to 95% of my work through the entire day was fed through the AI. So like, I to optimize the ads. Can you pull the reporting? Right? What are the keywords? And I I would make all the changes, see all the copy through Claude code in the terminal, because that allowed me to give feedback to the feedback loop.

So every day got a little better. Got a little better. And there came a point where I could, like the models also got good enough. Like was an early adopter of cloud code. So like December ’25 was when, you the cloud code moment happened. I I adopted it in September before it was good.

Like it was wrong a lot. Like, there was like the the copy was poor. Like, the things broke. It was early days, but like, I was curious. Like, I’m a tinkerer. and I use that to essentially learn how to do the whole thing. And like, I know we deviated from the team question, but the that as me having to learn how to do the workflow essentially because I had to do it, not knowing how to make that work, going from A to Z, that’s what I test for, is can you take a hard problem and build a system around it that you have solved?

Less than 1%.

So that’s the thing, right? Like I think the team composition of today and tomorrow is way leaner than it was before. So like we likely will like for Grammarly, know, say bigger startup in SaaS, startup is air quotes there, big corporate SaaS. They have a influencer marketing team, right? They have like three, four five people. Today and tomorrow, that is one really good person with an amazing suite of agents that will only ever touch like imagine you scale to a 100,000 influencers that are posting on you in a month.

If you have an agentic system and you know how to weed through the data, understand where you need to be plugged in, you could do that. And that’s why even though it’s 1% of candidates, it’s fine. If I find that one person that is to be able to fully own that, build the systems, and like right now, and this is like my bet for the next three, five years, know, 80% of our work is still manual, 20% is agents. Hence why like my bet into Viktor, it’s like essentially solving all of knowledge work.

I think in three years, companies will essentially be like board of directors, where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, and then agents just do 80% of the execution. Right Like Right now, it’s still we’re still editing is manual, sending an email is still manual, even though we have the tools, like, there’s still a human layer into that. I think that will change as quality gets better, usage and like actual adoption towards an ROI basis gets there. That’s my bet. And that’s also why this stuff is so important, right?

Because if you can’t understand how the systems work, you’re never to be able to see your agents.

They hire those people around themselves, which I think like there’s. Do they really? They try to. I mean,

Yeah. I mean, that’s also why I think the companies that do will quickly gain market share against those that don’t. Right. And that’s why I think we live in very interesting times in terms of competitive environment where the incumbents that don’t adopt this at the senior level will essentially, their growth rates will stand still while the hyper growers that are doing exactly this framing will essentially gain that market share and outcompete them. So I think you’re right. I think leadership needs to change. And like I said, I think a lot of teams, and my hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team.

That is not a systems thinker. stop brute forcing people in, hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed. The JD is no longer the same what it was a year ago, right? And And people are still brute forcing people into these new JDs. I think there needs to be a bit of a shakeup.

When you’re not looking and you come back and they’re suddenly now systems and that one person is 10x x themselves, you’re not to fire that person. But then you will very clearly see who hasn’t done that. And that. that difference is being felt where like the A players are becoming S tier players and the people that were B players are becoming D players. And that that rift is created.

100%. I mean, that is also why people were questioning our initial marketing strategy at Viktor because we’re like, like, I said, super CAC B2B SaaS, right? Like you are hiring an employee into your team and you’re paying thousands of dollars for this thing. Right? That’s a B2B SaaS tool, but we approach the marketing like a prosumer app.

was at Whisper, right? He was originally at Whisper.

Yeah, he built the original UGC viral program at Whisper before he went to Polymarket. So I know Tobin.

Yeah, and I think in each lane, there are those people. And that’s also why like, from like an ML researcher standpoint, you’ll pay millions of dollars for a person that’s to move a model forward. I think we’re coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles, they’re unicorns, they’re rare, and you want them in your company. And I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe going happen over the next year in marketing acquisition side. are you ready for

It’s a channel we haven’t mentioned, and I think a lot of people do this poorly, and it it actually compounds if you do it well, and that’s affiliate, where you’re you’re paying, let’s say, a percentage of revenue or some kind of CAC to people that are not your customers, and they go out of their way to create content and reviews and all of that. And so like at Whisper and and Viktor, it is the highest ROI channel. And if you set up a strong affiliate program and you bring people into the door and they feel like they can earn money even before they’re your customers, they will become your customers.

And it’s one that like, it’s a little bit outside of the referral program because you’re not, it’s not through the product. It’s how can you make this, sexy external program that someone that is just an affiliate wants to, like, they have a surface area, they have a website, they have they have some audience that they have, and they want to sell your thing to that audience, acquire them that way. And like that’s that’s one of the highest early ROI channels that if you start doing in the beginning, it ramps, right? so like for for Viktor, a good 10 to 15% of our acquisition on a monthly basis comes through our affiliate program.

People that want to earn money because we give them between 10 and 15% revenue share. So if that affiliate gets a company that pays 10k a a month, they’re making $1,500 a month from one sale as an affiliate. That’s also like, create a program that wants people to earn money. And this is the other thing we said. Can

Mom, I’m retiring. Yeah. I mean, we we have we have some affiliates that are making 20, month. a month.

Uh, I’m gonna say X in the sense of Just the launch videos are boring. That’s exactly what I mean. Right. Where like everyone is trying to do exactly the same launch viral thing. And it’s also polluted in the sense that X ads don’t work. And that to me just means the platform is They don’t work? have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print. So if someone someone someone has gotten X ads to print, please tell me because I would love to be challenged on that.

The formula of shock and awe launch videos, because to be honest, and then specifically those are the ones that like, well, we don’t really have a product. I’m not saying maybe in their example, but the sheer amount of like, we launched this for that and we spent way more time into our launch video than actually any time in our product. I see so much of that. And that’s why I say polluted.

Have more good growth leaders. But in honesty, I think.

I’ll go start another company. company. No, No, I mean, you’re 100% right

Because then you built the hyperscalers of tomorrow. I mean, super interesting. So like I went to NYU for college. And what’s interesting, I did not take a single, I mean, zero marketing classes. and I learned everything via doing. And I think what’s interesting is like the education around marketing, I think is also like still, again, I haven’t been into a college today, maybe that has changed, but like, are they teaching you how to install a Facebook pixel? No, right? Like the framing of how it works comes after you start doing the execution. right?

Like you can do and then understand understand and sit in a room and learn and then go and try to do the thing. you’re gonna learn so much faster just by doing. So I agree with you. I’ve yet to see like true A to Z boot camp of what it means to be a growth leader. And I mean, Reforge and Brian Balfour, they’ve tried to do this, but like it’s

still

right. In in that frame, I I agree as well. Right. I’m applying it to like do that in marketing, but the the grounding is people don’t know how to do the beginning step. You’re a 100% right.

Yeah. And I mean, to me, what I think is table stakes. I always forget is like people don’t set up things this way. So like I, for example, and this is when I was using cloud code. Now I’d say like 80 of my work is is Viktor. But for the people that are not using Viktor, if you’re you’re using cloud code and you do one thing is set up what I call as the session end skill. If you set up one skill that’s to like let your work compound, it’s what I call session end.

So I have a terminal or a cloud code session, and I’m doing some realm of work and it’s almost done or like I to end the session. So what is inside of that skill is essentially I have connected to my cloud code a Obsidian vault that is every day log of everything that I put through the terminal, all decisions, all open tasks, all learnings, know, notes and atoms all of everything that I’m doing in every session is being stored in Claude memory, but then you don’t have access to that, right?

So what session end does is it analyzes the session, distills what we worked on, what was the frame, you know, did we accomplish this thing? What are the outstanding items, and it moves that over into Obsidian, which is like a node based system, which lets me go back to any day and understand what did I work on that day. And you can see this web grow over time. And that’s like one massive hack to essentially turn every session to be compounding, because then that connects the node based system of Obsidian says says, a week ago you worked on this and then you hit a wall here, you worked on it again today, you solved it.

And because the agent also can analyze everything, it creates those interrelationships for you where like you worked on Meta ads with this creative type here in two places. and normally you’ll forget that, right? And like, so will the system. And if you have a place where like your work, your memory, that to me is also probably the most valuable resource for people is is if you can document every little thing that you’re building, tweaking and refining. That is like how social capital was the big thing. think like, what do you have on your computer that is saved in your AI output?

That I think as we walk into the next like couple years, is the treasure trove for a lot of people.

But if you put the thought into, here’s the decision tree of prioritization, and you put the thought into that, then you can trust the system, right? Because it’s based on your framing.

Times That’s pretty good.

it’s over a thousand companies. And like same thing, like I do this. So I use a botless meeting recorder that records all of my meetings, and at the end of the day, it ingests all of them and says, what did I promise to do on calls that didn’t end up in a to do software somewhere? And then it drops all of that. It says, did you do any of these? And then I have my to do list for tomorrow.

I think the craft of product and like the hypotheses, the deep experimentation and like building true user experience excellence. That to me is just like sexy. Because I think if you look at like the sheer volume of products that are coming out every single day, very few of them have product excellence. And the people that steer that craft are like true product leaders. I learn so much from them and apply those things into my world. But seeing the way their brains work and the way that they’re analyzing the data and how they understand the customers is really inspiring.

And I think a a a lot of people can learn how to do that Because I’d I’d say this is less maybe across the company, more like the people in companies. But I think, to be honest, like, I I think in terms of companies, I’m more impressed by the net new things that are starting from zero. And even at step one, they’re doing pretty well in the sense of we thought through the branding, we launched into this marketing thing. That’s what I appreciate that

I mean, again, this is more like tooting my horn a bit, but like just seeing like what the original launch was for for Whisper. Like, that was a, you know, like, it’s it’s like seeing that product correlation with marketing, even though I had a part in that, like that was truly like it entered the map because of that. And then same thing, like, yes, I was a part of the ride there, but like the adoption and the fact that a Polish startup that of course raised a big series A became massively seen on the map and was very quickly loved.

Those are the kinds of things that like make me want get up in the morning. We did a thing, we put a lot of thought into it and there was pickup around it. And I think that’s what fascinates me is like, what are all the moving pieces that like you go and finally launch the thing and it goddamn works. Right? And that’s like, I think that’s the beauty of why I do what I do, because those are some special moments.

this is an absolute blast. To To the next one, to to more nugs next time.