In today's episode, I chat with Lucas Paiva, GTM Engineer at Scient, about building Brazil's GTM engineering ecosystem from the inside—Scient is a go-to-market consulting firm founded by Silicon Valley alumni who brought frameworks like Winning by Design to Brazilian companies doing 50M+ ARR, and Lucas sits at the intersection of their education arm, running a six-week GTM Engineer Certification program and growing the community of practitioners in a country where they've mapped only 20 people with the actual GTM engineer title and around 150 doing similar work without the name. 

We explore Lucas's first real GTM engineering win: launching an AI SDR for Scient's new certification course, hitting 70 sales against a target of 50 in the first week—learning lead enrichment, lead scoring, and ICP segmentation on the fly, and applying everything he was going to teach before he'd even written the curriculum. He also shares how he manually mapped the entire GTM engineer landscape in Brazil to get precise data on how fast the role is growing, and what their projections look like for the next few years. His prediction: the role will grow very fast in Brazil and become standard at startups—one person who can sit between sales, marketing, and customer success and say "we can automate this, and here's what that frees you up to focus on" is going to be indispensable. Lucas shares his path from Link School of Business entrepreneurship program, to community and content manager at Scient translating GTM newsletters into Portuguese, to spending four weeks of university vacation studying n8n every day, to his founder-teacher Giovanni coming back from Bali, seeing the transformation, and immediately asking him to become their GTM engineer. His advice: understand which AI is best for which task—Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic all have different strengths—study automation to build workflows that do many jobs repeatedly rather than one at a time, and keep a close eye on how established platforms like HubSpot are integrating AI into their core products, because they have to ship something genuinely good for small businesses to adopt it without a consultant army. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What Scient Does: Go-to-Market Consulting and Revenue Architecture for 50M+ ARR Companies 
(01:33) First 30-60-90 Days: Getting Marketing, Sales, and CS Speaking the Same Language 
(03:17) Lucas's Role: Growing the GTM Engineer Community and Running the Certification Program 
(04:01) Lucas's Journey: Business Student to Community Manager to GTM Engineer 
(05:32) Four Weeks of Studying n8n Every Day During University Vacation 
(06:03) First GTM Engineering Win: 70 Certification Sales Against a Target of 50 
(07:54) Manually Mapping Brazil's GTM Engineer Landscape: 20 With the Title, 150 Doing the Work 
(09:11) Future Predictions: The Role Will Become Standard at Brazilian Startups 
(10:01) Advice: Match the Right AI to the Right Task, Build Repeatable Workflows, Watch HubSpot

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