Growth After Headcount

Yannick Dillen teaches entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School and watches students kill good startup ideas over a 1,000 euro token bill. Meanwhile, Belgian scale-ups that fired their software engineers are quietly reposting the same vacancies. His argument: the zero-employee startup is not the cheap startup. Salary cost became token cost, and the pendulum between AI and software will settle in the middle.

Three claims carry this episode. There is now an extra chasm before the innovators, because every market is flooded with lookalike vibe-coded products, and that is pushing B2B companies back to trade fairs and billboards. The "beautiful-weather entrepreneur" who sets up an AI company and waits on a terrace will fail the way 97% of dropshippers did. And the companies that win will be the ones that remove complexity, not the ones that add features.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro
00:15 — Zero employees, not zero costs: the token bill that kills student startups
01:45 — Cheap wins: open-source models and how long corporate AI budgets last
04:16 — Belgium re-hires its fired engineers: the pendulum ends in the middle
06:44 — The rising water: which human peaks does AI submerge next?
08:04 — The beautiful-weather entrepreneur will not survive
10:46 — Swan's seven-day weeks, RB2B's seven months hands-off, and the dropshipping déjà vu
14:27 — Crossing the chasm at AI speed: the new pre-chasm before the innovators
17:45 — "It has never been that easy to build the wrong product"
20:10 — Does founder brand matter? The Marple Data counterexample
23:07 — The rise of analog: trade fairs, billboards, guerrilla marketing
27:34 — Complexity kills: the parting advice

Guest

Yannick Dillen, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannickdillen/
Vlerick: https://www.vlerick.com/en/find-faculty-and-experts/yannick-dillen/

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.

More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/
X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris

Jacco van der Kooij has spent over a decade telling SaaS companies how to build revenue systems. His read on AI is not that it makes teams faster. It's that AI revealed what was already broken. Companies never trained their people properly, and their marketing and sales systems were built not to talk to each other. The tools didn't cause the problem. They exposed it.

The conversation runs from why the knowledge gap between buyer and seller has flipped, to why incumbents can't copy AI-native companies without rebuilding their data layer, to why the channels most GTM teams lean on for pipeline, SEO, cold email, and LinkedIn, are all losing their pull at once. Jacco argues for building systems over hiring people or buying more tools, makes the case that a real-time data system is the single most urgent thing a company can build, and pushes back on revenue per employee as a number that means one thing to a VC and something else to whoever has to run the business.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro: what a revenue system is

00:31 — Why AI hits the whole customer journey, not one tool

01:01 — The knowledge gap flipped: buyers now outknow sellers

02:41 — From people-led to system-led

05:09 — Why incumbents can't just switch: data and mentality

06:14 — When coolness beats brand, and when brand wins back

07:23 — Trust isn't relationships, and three channels are collapsing

10:21 — The rise of analog: a magazine with a paper route

13:54 — AI didn't make you faster, it revealed you never trained your people

20:04 — The most urgent build: a real-time data system

23:57 — Revenue per employee: VC metric or operating one?

26:43 — What stays the same: customers, systems, data

Guest

Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaccovanderkooij/

Winning by Design: https://winningbydesign.com/

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AIinstead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.

More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/

X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris

Adam Robinson runs RB2B at $8.6M ARR. His CTO has not touched the code in over a month, he posts on LinkedIn three times a week about something else entirely, and the business keeps growing. He did not get there by wiring together the most sophisticated agents. He kept the product stupid simple, designed the whole thing from first principles so AI could handle the work a team used to, and priced it below what it costs anyone else to acquire a customer.

The episode turns on one disagreement: what an autonomous business actually is. Adam's answer is a business built from the start to run itself, not a business with a pile of agents and three founders working around the clock. He lays out the three things that let RB2B outlast the copycats: awareness he creates for free through his own brand, a fixed-cost data asset that makes each new contact cost nothing, and a hard refusal to add features. He is also blunt about the ceiling. Churn is high, so he is not chasing $100M. He wants cash flow and a portfolio of sub-VC-scale bets, and his next one, MoltSets, sells contact data built for AI agents.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro
01:00 — Why he built the audience before the product
03:00 — The Labor Day test: three posts that found the market
05:00 — Keep the product stupid simple so the AI runs support
08:21 — What an autonomous business actually is
10:56 — The data asset that costs nothing per new contact
15:19 — Contact data for AI agents: the next bet
18:30 — Can incumbents catch up? The 6sense problem
20:44 — Retention.com: six people to $13M ARR
23:11 — The one-person billion-dollar company

Guest

Adam Robinson, CEO & Co-founder of Retention.com, RB2B, and MoltSets.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/retentionadam/
Retention.com: https://retention.com/
RB2B: https://rb2b.com/
MoltSets: https://moltsets.com/

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.

More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/
X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris

Ascend grew from zero to $25M ARR with no growth team. No growth marketer, no ads manager, no paid engine. Word of mouth, referrals, and a small set of partnerships. Then Omar Ismail joined as COO and built the entire go-to-market stack himself, orchestrated end to end in Claude Code. The target now: $100M ARR without meaningfully scaling headcount.

Omar calls the second half of his job CRO 2.0: one person owning strategy and the machine that executes it. He argues the real trust problem with AI is not hallucination but software bugs in the systems it builds, which is why his next hire is a go-to-market engineer, not a marketer. And when everyone has the same tools, differentiation moves back to taste, judgment, and the things AI can't do at scale: physical mail, conferences, human relationships.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro

00:35 — Banking, VC, and a music-tech exit before Ascend

03:08 — Zero to $25M ARR on word of mouth, now going AI native

03:46 — No growth team: one COO owns the whole go-to-market

07:18 — Claude Code as the orchestration layer

08:48 — The trust problem is bugs, not hallucinations

10:24 — The next hire: a go-to-market engineer

11:22 — HubSpot backbone, natural-language dashboards on top

13:15 — Where humans stay: taste, judgment, 14 usable hooks out of 20

15:24 — When everyone runs AI outbound, mailers and conferences win

19:08 — $25M to $100M without adding people

20:44 — The KPI that never changes: retention

Guest

Omar Ismail, COO at Ascend.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarismailb/

Ascend: https://www.joinascend.com/

https://omarismail.com/projects/growth-engine

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI

instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.

More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/),

a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum

(https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the

way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/

X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris

Amos Bar-Joseph built and scaled two B2B startups on the old playbook. Raise big, hire to forty people before the first million in revenue, then spend years fighting the bloat you created. With Swan AI he threw it out. In 2025 Swan went from zero to over 200 customers and seven figures in ARR with three founders and no additional hires.

The number he's aiming at is ten million dollars in ARR per employee.

This episode is about how that actually works. Amos started where most teams start, building a specialized agent for every task, and it didn't hold. Swan now runs its entire go-to-market on a single coding agent with a file system and a knowledge base it updates itself. We get into why data is not context, why the job that's left for humans is specification and review, and why he'll never let AI write his LinkedIn posts.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro

00:21 — Two startups on the old playbook, and why it broke

01:10 — The autonomous business: scaling ARR per employee, not valuation

01:39 — Zero to 200 customers with three founders

02:54 — Why Swan killed its specialized agents and runs one

04:54 — Data is not context: what your CRM teaches an agent

06:40 — Context engineering, and why it's the core RevOps skill now

10:29 — Fully automated, semi-automated, human-first

12:19 — Different beats better: don't give AI your edge

14:17 — Personal brand, and the rise of the analog

18:14 — Scaling one seller to 100x instead of hiring ten

20:41 — What this means for VC and bootstrapping

23:03 — Talent, compensation, and widening inequality

25:09 — A software revolution, not a labour revolution

Guest

Amos Bar-Joseph, co-founder of Swan AI.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amos-bar-joseph/
Swan: https://www.getswan.com/

About the show

Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.

More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/
X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris

The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. That playbook is dead.

A new generation of companies is running on AI instead of headcount. Small teams, serious revenue, and org charts that would have looked impossible three years ago. This podcast goes inside those companies to find out how they actually work, from the founders building them.

Each episode is a conversation with someone running an AI-native company: what they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers really look like. No hype, no "AI is transforming business" filler. Just how these companies are built and what it means for everyone still hiring the old way.

The podcast runs alongside the book of the same name, Growth After Headcount: How to Scale a Company with AI Instead of People.

New episodes coming soon. Subscribe so you don't miss the first one.

🔗 Website & newsletter: https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/

About the host

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

Connect with Haris:
LinkedIn &  X

The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. A new generation of companies is throwing it out.

I'm Haris Odobasic, and this is Growth After Headcount — a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of headcount.

I come from revenue operations, where the whole job is aligning people, process, technology, and data into one efficient revenue system. It works, but it's still people-dependent. Plug AI into that system and something changes: a handful of people can run work that used to take a hundred. That shift is creating a new kind of company, built lean from day one, and it's putting pressure on incumbents who grew the old way.

Over the coming months I'll talk to the founders, investors, and operators building these companies. What they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers actually look like. We'll get into the big questions too: can there be a one-person, billion-dollar company? What does a truly autonomous business look like when marketing, sales, service, and even the product improve themselves?

New episodes weekly. Occasionally it'll just be me. Everything feeds the book, out in 2027.

Follow along and build alongside me.

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

Connect with Haris on LinkedIn or X