In today's episode, I chat with Walter, Senior Partner at Silvergreen, about running a GTM and revenue operations advisory for post-seed and Series A companies in the "teenage phase"—past the little leagues but not yet in the big leagues—where small operational mistakes are costing them massive growth and one person with the right systems can do what used to take a seven-person team. 

We explore two standout campaigns: scraping the entire US government SBIR loan applicant database via a public API, pulling millions of rows into Clay to find under-awarded applicants as outreach targets, and closing multiple deals in two weeks in a space where B2G sales cycles are notoriously slow; and a SOC 2 compliance client whose TAM was essentially every SaaS company on earth until Walter narrowed it to listeners of a specific niche podcast, getting double-digit reply rates just from the shared context of that community. Walter goes deep on his philosophy of finding non-obvious data sources—IRS filing data, chamber of commerce registries, political campaign FEC filings, government APIs—because the companies fishing in Apollo and Clay's standard sources are all competing in the same dry pond, while the companies using public but obscure APIs are reaching prospects nobody else is touching. He also makes the case for attributable revenue as the only KPI that actually matters to a business owner: not bounce rates, not reply rates, not cost per lead—dollars in minus dollars out, tracked from first email touch through CRM close. Walter shares his path from SQL database developer for the city of Aspen, to digital marketing agencies, to e-commerce and Etsy with a serial entrepreneur girlfriend, to eventually going fully independent after his last employer saw him making double on his own, with Silvergreen now clearing over half a million in profit between two partners. His prediction: the future belongs to people who can engineer systems—integrate APIs, flatten messy data, automate workflows in n8n—because the barrier between what you can envision and what you can build is now a tenth of what it was a year ago. His advice running through the whole conversation: find the weird niche API nobody else knows about, prove revenue not metrics, and automate your own operations first so you know what you're actually selling. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:19) What Silvergreen Does: GTM Advisory for Post-Seed and Series A Companies 
(01:44) Client Up 1900% Year Over Year: What the Teenage Phase Actually Looks Like 
(03:08) SBIR Government Loan Database Campaign: Millions of Rows, Multiple Deals in Two Weeks 
(05:24) Stop Fishing in Apollo's Pond: Find the Niche API Nobody Else Knows About 
(07:14) SOC 2 Compliance Campaign: Niche Podcast Targeting for Double-Digit Reply Rates 
(09:08) IRS Filing Data, Chamber of Commerce Registries, and Political Campaign FEC Data as Lead Sources 
(13:19) The $6M Bootstrapped Client With No CMO, No Automations, No Email Infrastructure 
(17:24) Attributable Revenue Is the Only KPI That Matters: Dollars In Minus Dollars Out 
(20:05) Building a Reporting Dashboard That Proves Value in Dollars and Cents 
(21:47) Walter's Journey: City of Aspen SQL Developer to Agency Life to Full-Time Independent 
(23:36) Future Predictions: GTM Engineering Is Now Systems Engineering 
(26:38) Building a Daily Lead Scraping System in an Afternoon That Saves 100 Hours a Month 
(28:20) n8n in Three Afternoons Beats What Used to Take a Computer Science Degree

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