The GTM Engineer Podcast

In today's episode, I chat with Filippo Greco, GTM Engineer at Yellow Tech, about building one of Italy's first AI-first companies—running AI adoption programs for businesses across Italy (interviews, classrooms, workshops, full 360-degree rollouts) while also building agents, automations, and Clay-based GTM systems for clients who are just beginning to understand what AI can actually do for them. 

We explore two standout campaigns: a cybersecurity client where Filippo built a Lovable app that automatically attempts to breach a prospect's website when the link is submitted, then sends an email with a full report of every vulnerability found—reply rates through the roof because there is no stronger proof of pain than showing someone their site just got hacked; and a signal-triggered video personalization flow where a prospect interacting with a competitor on LinkedIn enters a Clay sequence that pulls their photo, their company logo, and the CEO's face, feeds it into a Lovable-built app via HTTP request, and generates a video of the CEO appearing to speak directly to that prospect about their specific problems—which the prospect then receives by email. Filippo's core philosophy: figure out what the average GTM engineer is doing right now, then ask how to beat it—because average gets average results. He also shares how Yellow Tech operates as a hybrid human-AI company, with AI agents living inside Slack alongside the team, talking to SDRs, and handling processes that would otherwise require multiple headcount. His prediction: his generation—what he calls AI natives—will enter the workforce already thinking in agents and automations, and that generational shift will be more disruptive to companies than any single tool release. Filippo shares his path from discovering ChatGPT 3.5 at 20, immediately understanding it would change everything, studying prompt engineering deeply, doing a master's in digital marketing, becoming an AI marketing specialist building some of the earliest AI agents before they were mainstream, and co-founding Yellow Tech at 23. His advice: be creative and get your hands dirty—prompt engineering is now one of the most valuable skills you can have, soft skills beat hard coding skills for GTM work, and you can build almost anything if you're willing to experiment. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What Yellow Tech Does: AI Adoption Programs and GTM Engineering for Italian Companies 
(02:11) Cybersecurity Client Campaign: Auto-Breaching Prospect Websites and Emailing the Results 
(04:48) Signal-Triggered CEO Video Personalization: Face, Logo, and Company Pain Points in One Email 
(07:00) Always Ask What's Average Right Now—Then Build Past It 
(09:19) Filippo's Journey: ChatGPT 3.5 at 20, Prompt Engineering, Digital Marketing Master's 
(11:23) Building AI Agents Before They Were Mainstream 
(11:32) Yellow Tech as a Hybrid Company: AI Agents Living in Slack Alongside the Human Team 
(12:58) The AI Native Generation: Entering the Workforce Already Thinking in Agents 
(14:19) Advice: Be Creative, Get Your Hands Dirty, Master Prompt Engineering First

🔗 CONNECT WITH FILIPPO

👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Thomas McCourt, founder at CalendarInvite, about running a B2B lead generation agency focused on small to medium marketing agencies—helping them build outbound systems through cold email and cold calling for clients who are great at marketing everyone else but have no formal offer or sales process for their own services. 

We explore his campaign for a non-agency client selling into care homes, construction, and schools—where Apollo couldn't build the list so they scraped an online care home directory, enriched the domains in Clay, used Clay's AI to find care home managers, and chained the whole workflow together—only to find the carefully segmented industry campaigns barely scraped 1% reply rates, until Thomas had a simple idea: drop the industry segmentation entirely, search Apollo by job title across all industries, use messaging that had already shown positive signals, and run one broad campaign—jumping to 3% overall reply rate and 10% positive reply rate overnight. The lesson: there's a time for creative workflows and a time to stop ignoring what's right in front of you. Thomas also shares his take on cold email deliverability: he started in 2022 when the channel was more forgiving—buying dodgy cheap domains, skipping warmup, ignoring bounce rates, sending seven-step sequences—and got away with it, but anyone starting today has to get everything right from day one because ESPs and AI spam filters have made the margin for error much thinner. His prediction: infrastructure will keep tightening, agencies that survive will be the ones building their own tools and software rather than depending entirely on third-party platforms, and adaptability at speed will be the defining skill. Thomas shares his path from a manual business development agency in 2022 working with creative agencies and brands, to moving in-house at a communications and events agency, to stumbling across an automated lead gen account on Instagram, discovering Smartlead, Clay, and the whole new wave of sales tech, running his first campaigns just to see what was possible, accidentally landing a client, and building CalendarInvite from there. His advice: follow the right voices on LinkedIn and podcasts, absorb everything, but more importantly put it into practice—and don't be afraid to cold message people you look up to and ask for advice, because most of them will say yes. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What CalendarInvite Does: Lead Gen for Small to Medium Marketing Agencies 
(01:20) How Thomas Chose His Niche: Comfort and Familiarity Over Grand Strategy 
(03:48) First 30-60-90 Days: Auditing Current Sales Process and Building the Offer 
(06:47) Care Home Campaign: Scraping Directories, Enriching in Clay, Chaining Workflows 
(09:44) The Pivot That Worked: Drop the Segmentation, Search by Job Title, Watch Replies Jump 
(11:02) When Simple Beats Creative: The Lesson Thomas Is Taking Forward 
(12:15) Thomas's Journey: Manual Business Dev Agency to In-House to CalendarInvite 
(14:44) Discovering Smartlead and Clay on Instagram and Accidentally Landing a First Client 
(17:00) Why Starting in 2022 Was More Forgiving Than Starting Today 
(19:24) Future Predictions: Infrastructure Tightening, Agencies Need to Build Their Own Tools 
(22:14) Advice: Follow the Right Voices, Test Everything, Cold Message People You Admire

🔗 CONNECT WITH THOMAS

👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

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

🔗 CONNECT WITH WALTER

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Ritesh, founder at InsightsTap, about running a GTM agency that works primarily with large enterprise tech companies—because companies with organized data infrastructure, proper CRMs, and data warehouses are the ones actually extracting value from AI, while companies still living in spreadsheets aren't ready for it yet. 

We explore two client stories: a large enterprise company that watched its organic traffic drop from 250,000 to 120,000 monthly visitors in under a year as people shifted from Google search to AI chat tools, scrambling to figure out what replaces SEO-driven lead flow; and a Canadian warehouse hardware company where Ritesh brainstormed the right signal with them—companies hiring warehouse managers—and built a list of every company posting those roles, enriching and sequencing them into outreach within days instead of months of manual research. Ritesh shares the big idea running through his whole philosophy: the shift from campaign-first to signal-first GTM, where instead of launching campaigns and waiting for people to come to you, you detect dark signals—G2 profile visits, website pricing page views, job postings, social listening, reverse IP—and reach out to decision makers before your competitors even know those buyers exist, the same way Amazon built its entire infrastructure around knowing what you want before you ask. His prediction: B2B enterprise companies are being forced to think like e-commerce companies—proactive, signal-driven, personalized at scale—and the monopoly that big budgets on Google and LinkedIn used to buy is dissolving as attention fragments across Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT and dozens of other platforms, creating a genuinely level playing field where a small player with a clever GTM strategy can out-execute a Fortune 500. Ritesh shares his path from SAP ERP developer writing code for 10 years, to freelancing in Facebook and Meta ads during the pandemic, to becoming a top-rated Fiverr Pro across enterprise marketing categories, to founding InsightsTap as a GTM agency focused on large tech companies. His advice: don't chase the shiny tool—learn the fundamentals of the industry you want to serve first, because tool shelf lives are short but marketing principles aren't, and being a Clay expert who can't diagnose a business problem is a much weaker position than being an industry expert who knows which tools to deploy. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What InsightsTap Does: GTM for Enterprise Tech Companies with Organized Data Infrastructure 
(02:54) Which Companies Benefit Most from AI: The Data Readiness Question 
(05:46) Campaign Story: Enterprise Client Losing Half Its Organic Traffic in Under a Year 
(08:58) Warehouse Hardware Campaign: Hiring Signals as Purchase Intent Triggers 
(10:53) From Idea to Campaign in 24 Hours: What AI Orchestration Actually Enables 
(14:31) The Shift from Campaign-First to Signal-First GTM 
(17:43) Dark Signals: G2 Visits, Pricing Pages, Reverse IP, Social Listening, Job Posts 
(20:05) Run Your B2B Company Like an E-Commerce Store: The Amazon Mental Model 
(24:50) Democratization of Marketing: Small Players Can Now Crush Big Budgets 
(27:57) Advice: Learn the Industry and the Problem First, Tools Come Second

🔗 CONNECT WITH RITESH

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Daniel, RevOps Architect at justt, about running the entire GTM operation solo—supporting sales, customer success, and marketing simultaneously using Clay, Make, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong—at a success-based chargeback recovery platform that uses AI to build dispute cases for merchants across the US and UK. 

We explore his favorite initiative: a fully automated transcript intelligence workflow where every Gong call gets pulled into Make, sent to Claude via API with a structured prompt extracting objections, AE performance, expected close date, and buyer sentiment, then pushed directly into Salesforce fields—saving AEs manual logging time while giving marketing weekly content ideas and CS teams complete customer context before handoff. Daniel's insight: there is more gold sitting in call transcripts than most GTM teams ever touch, and the prompt is everything—once you know the right questions to ask, Claude does the rest. His prediction: smaller teams will do more than ever before, but you will always need a human managing the strategy and keeping all the tools and processes from becoming a mess—AI amplifies output, it doesn't replace oversight. Daniel also shares how he built a 200-person RevOps and marketing ops community in Israel after realizing the loneliness of being a one-person team, running webinars and in-person events so practitioners could brainstorm together—because when you're solo, you don't know what you don't know. He shares his path from a teaching degree he never used, to building freelance websites up north in Israel, to a startup founder handing him course after course until he'd learned SEO, ads, and Salesforce admin, to becoming Salesforce certified during two weeks of quarantine, to leading a three-person marketing ops team at Panarays, to his current RevOps role at justt. His advice: get hands-on with Salesforce or HubSpot first, join a team with other RevOps people before going solo, and set aside time every week to keep learning—because the tools move fast and staying current is non-negotiable. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:22) What justt Does: AI-Powered Chargeback Recovery on a Success-Based Model 
(01:48) Being a One-Man RevOps Band: Supporting Sales, CS, and Marketing Simultaneously 
(02:54) Transcript Intelligence Workflow: Gong to Make to Claude to Salesforce 
(05:16) Why Call Transcripts Are the Most Underused Asset in GTM 
(06:16) Using Close-Won Calls to Rewrite Website Copy in the Customer's Own Words 
(07:24) Daniel's Journey: Teaching Degree to Freelance Websites to Salesforce Admin in Quarantine 
(09:08) Leading Marketing Ops at Panarays to RevOps at justt 
(10:35) Future Predictions: Smaller Teams Doing More, But Strategy Still Needs a Human 
(12:38) Building a 200-Person RevOps Community in Israel for One-Person Teams 
(14:09) Advice: Learn Salesforce or HubSpot First, Join a Team Before Going Solo

🔗 CONNECT WITH DANIEL

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Filip Nakov, co-founder at Nakora, about running hyper-targeted GTM strategy and execution exclusively for AI, dev, and data SaaS companies—a niche Filip chose because developers hate traditional marketing, most growth agencies don't know how to speak to them, and technical understanding is non-negotiable for building strategies that actually land with this audience. 

We explore his Clay build for a web scraping client where he mapped every competitor's alternative and versus pages across the market, identified which companies in the ICP didn't have those pages yet but should based on how well those pages convert, enriched each company with headcount, ICP roles, LinkedIn profiles, tech signals, and SEO gaps, and turned the whole table into a targeted outreach sequence that opened with: here's what your competitors have, here's what you're missing, here's how much revenue that gap is costing you. Filip also shares a personalization campaign he stumbled upon that stuck with him—someone who got a no-show created a Clay-generated image of themselves at McDonald's with two burgers and said they bought lunch for the meeting, which is the kind of B2C-inspired creativity he thinks will define where B2B outreach goes next. His prediction: GTM teams will increasingly function like engineers building systems rather than marketers running campaigns, signal-based growth will replace post-and-pray, and personalization at scale will reach a level that's hard to even picture right now. Filip shares his path from freelance copywriter for US clients, to head of growth at a New York marketing agency after going above and beyond his brief, to opening his own agency in Macedonia, to slowly attracting developer-focused B2B SaaS clients because of his technical background as a trained developer—culminating in Nakora, which launched a free GitHub visibility analyzer that pulled 700 users on day one. His advice running through the whole conversation: know your ICP pain points cold, because once you have those the targeting, messaging, and strategy all follow—right person, right message, right time is still the only formula that matters. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What Nakora Does: GTM Strategy and Execution for AI, Dev, and Data SaaS 
(01:53) Why Developers Hate Traditional Marketing and Most Agencies Can't Speak to Them 
(03:55) Clay Build: Mapping Competitor Alternative Pages to Find Revenue Gaps 
(05:32) Turning SEO Gap Research Into Targeted Outreach With Built-In Math 
(09:22) No-Show McDonald's Campaign and Why B2C Creativity Is Coming to B2B 
(11:55) Filip's Journey: Freelance Copywriter to Head of Growth to Nakora 
(13:03) Opening an Agency in Macedonia and Slowly Attracting Developer-Focused Clients 
(15:45) Why Developer Audiences Are Harder to Earn Trust From Than Marketers 
(16:03) GitHub Visibility Analyzer: 700 Users on Day One 
(18:00) Future Predictions: GTM Teams as Engineers, Signal-Based Growth, Personalization at Scale 
(20:34) Orca Security Mascot Campaign and the B2C Inspiration Behind B2B Outreach

🔗 CONNECT WITH FILIP

👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Sachin Singh, Fractional CMO at Cocorick, about building dedicated LLM products for B2B SaaS companies that give them a competitive edge over rivals—while running a lean GTM operation that uses AI orchestration to do the work of an 8-10 person team with a fraction of the headcount. 

We explore his webinar attendee campaign where he pulled a list of 346 companies that had attended the same online event, enriched them in Clay, and used the shared attendance as the icebreaker—hitting a 40% positive reply rate simply because the commonality made the outreach feel like a warm conversation rather than a cold one. Sachin breaks down his philosophy that strategy always comes before tooling, SOPs should be built for every step of the GTM process including appointment setting and FAQ management, and that once your SOPs are detailed enough the next person executing them doesn't have to be human—it can be an AI agent. He also draws on his time at Turing, where a 40-person team did everything manually, to make the point that if you haven't done something by hand first, you won't know what to automate or where the errors will accumulate—which is exactly why most end-to-end AI SDR deployments fail. His prediction: operations will be fully automated, but client-facing and cognitive roles will remain human territory for the foreseeable future, and companies that try to automate the human-to-human connection will be at a disadvantage. Sachin shares his path from an MBA at Banaras Hindu University to handling email deliverability and inbox management at Turing, to learning appointment setting and data enrichment fundamentals at ColdNC in the Netherlands under a founder who invested deeply in his growth, to his current CMO role at Cocorick while also pursuing a doctoral program in AI. His advice: learn LinkedIn and Gmail community guidelines cold, nail your technical infrastructure foundations, and always start with strategy—the tool is just how you execute it. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What Cocorick Does: Dedicated LLM Products for B2B SaaS 
(01:45) Webinar Attendee Campaign: Shared Context as Icebreaker Hitting 40% Reply Rate 
(03:14) Running a Lean GTM Org: One Person Doing the Work of Eight 
(05:10) Why Manual Experience First Makes Automation Actually Work 
(06:32) Why End-to-End AI SDR Deployments Fail: Automating Before Understanding 
(07:22) Building SOPs for Every GTM Step So AI Agents Can Execute Them 
(08:07) Sachin's Journey: Turing to ColdNC to Cocorick 
(09:55) Learning the Fundamentals Under a Founder Who Invested in His Growth 
(10:48) Future Predictions: Operations Fully Automated, Human Touch Stays in Client-Facing Roles 
(12:16) Advice: Strategy First, Tool Second, and Know Your Infrastructure Foundations

🔗 CONNECT WITH SACHIN

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Akio Aida, MD at Bridge City Advisory, about combining three things most agencies treat separately—messaging, data infrastructure, and deliverability—into one unified system, with messaging as the core multiplier: better data and better deliverability give you a baseline, but if you want 400-800% multiples on your outbound, the offer and the message are where that leverage lives. 

We explore his fleet insurance campaign where he scraped the entire Florida state commercial truck database—crash rates, fleet sizes, violation records, cargo types—vibe-coded a custom analysis tool using Cursor to find crash patterns across thousands of fleets, discovered the state average was around 15%, and built two-way messaging: if your rate is above average, your premiums are probably suffering; if you're below, you might be leaving savings on the table. The real insight: this isn't personalization, it's research—showing someone you know their world well enough to say something that actually matters to their business. Akio also shares the rule he's starting to track: the seniority of who shows up to the meeting is determined by how strategically the outreach message is framed—solve a day-to-day technical problem and you get a manager; speak to a C-suite initiative and the C-suite comes in. His prediction: GTM engineering salaries will balloon as engineers start impacting eight-figure pipelines, but the real inflection point comes when CAC becomes truly untenable for sales orgs and the shift becomes non-negotiable. Akio shares his path as a founding AE at four startups ranging from near-zero to $13B valuation, spending hours manually reading 10-Ks to connect value props to what executives actually cared about, selling the first gen AI policies to the federal government at Grammarly, and realizing AI would let him do at scale what he'd only ever been able to do manually as an individual rep. His advice: start learning now—the market is early, the information is everywhere, and one-year-out-of-school founders are already building agencies with real traction. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What Bridge City Advisory Does: Messaging, Data, and Deliverability as One System 
(02:43) Who the Clients Are: Companies Where Outbound CAC Has Become Untenable 
(04:37) Florida Fleet Insurance Campaign: Scraping State Database and Vibe-Coding the Analysis 
(07:23) Research vs. Personalization: Why Knowing Their World Beats Knowing Their Name 
(08:52) You Get Delegated to the Level You Sound Like 
(10:37) Akio's Journey: Founding AE at Four Startups, Reading 10-Ks Manually 
(12:23) Selling the First Gen AI Policies to the Federal Government at Grammarly 
(13:49) Future Predictions: GTM Engineer Salaries Will Balloon as Pipeline Impact Grows 
(15:23) The Real Inflection Point: When CAC Becomes Truly Untenable 
(15:28) Advice: Start Learning Now, the Market Is Still Very Early

🔗 CONNECT WITH AKIO

👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Tim, CRO at Agent F, about building a Berlin-based pre-seed ERP platform targeting the mid-market gap between small accounting tools like QuickBooks and enterprise giants like SAP—companies between 50 and 500 people that are too complex for the bottom and too cost-sensitive for the top, with AI now making that layer viable earlier in the company journey than ever before. 

We explore Tim's evolution from mass automated campaigns with 50%+ open rates but near-zero replies, to a signal-plus-manual approach that pushed response rates from 3-5% all the way to 30-40%—by switching from ICP thinking to ideal use case thinking, identifying specific life events like a founder transitioning out of founder-led finance and hiring a VP of Finance, then spending 15-30 minutes per lead doing real research that AI can't replicate (like spotting a shared VC connection in a website photo). Tim shares his trust-times-value formula: perceived value isn't fixed—it's multiplied by the trust level of the person delivering it, which means a human writing a genuinely personal message creates more perceived value than the same words sent by automation, and that in a world flooded with AI content the human brain still instinctively assigns more trust to real human contact. He also ran 10-12 small hypothesis-driven campaigns of 50-150 leads each across different segments and roles, using the data to narrow down exactly where in a startup's journey the ERP question surfaces—landing on Series A as the new sweet spot, not pre-IPO. Tim shares his path from mechanical and production engineering, to operations management at Berlin startups, to getting handed the sales team over a dinner and a bottle of red wine, discovering that sales is 70-80% human psychology, and eventually becoming CRO at Agent F. His advice runs through the whole conversation: do things that don't scale for your first customers, because trust compounds into referrals before you've even closed the deal. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:19) What Agent F Does: AI-Native ERP for the Mid-Market Gap 
(02:50) Early GTM: Expert Interviews, Network Leverage, and Hypothesis-Driven Campaigns 
(05:00) Switching from ICP to Ideal Use Case Thinking 
(08:00) Signal-Based Outreach Plus Manual Research: 3-5% to 30-40% Reply Rates 
(09:45) Why AI Can't Replace the 15-Minute Human Research Layer 
(11:09) The Trust-Times-Value Formula: Human Contact as a Multiplier 
(13:35) Do Things That Don't Scale: First 10 Customers Deserve a Human 
(14:12) Tim's Journey: Mechanical Engineer to CRO via a Dinner and Red Wine 
(16:13) How Sales Became Human Psychology and Partnership Over Pipeline 
(17:00) Future of Sales: Efficient Is Not the Same as Effective

🔗 CONNECT WITH TIM

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Michael Slawson, founder of Apero Advisors, about running a boutique go-to-market advisory that goes deep on a small number of clients rather than running the same cookie-cutter playbook for fifty—listening to past sales calls, mapping full prospect journeys from top to bottom of funnel, and figuring out who to target, what to say, and how to reach them before touching any tooling. 

We explore his Y Combinator client campaign where he used Disco to build a use-case-segmented list of companies that fit their universal API product, ran them through Clay to tag accounts and filter false positives, then pushed simple founder-led outreach on LinkedIn use case by use case—letting the co-founder's profile do the advertising so the message itself could stay short and direct. Michael breaks down why Disco fills a gap that Sales Navigator can't: semantic similarity search across companies that LinkedIn's algorithm simply doesn't do well, especially for businesses outside the well-funded venture-backed universe. His prediction: outbound channels don't die suddenly, they degrade slowly like banner ad click-through rates in 1999—and the smarter bet is positioning around complexity rather than any specific channel or tool, because go-to-market will always be complex and whoever can diagnose and solve that complexity consultatively will have durable positioning. He also flags a middle-probability scenario worth watching: in five years the attention economy shifts toward a community economy built on closed loops of trust, CRM data quality gets productized and commoditized, and there's meaningful agency consolidation as infrastructure complexity rewards scale. Michael shares his path from economics grad school and infrastructure finance consulting in DC, to naively jumping at the first tech company that messaged him on LinkedIn, to origination at a private credit marketplace talking to 2,000 founders, to leading GTM for a new vertical at a healthcare marketplace, to founding Apero after a mentor told him to learn Clay. His advice: go deep before going wide—work inside a single company for a few years, because context is what's scarce for a new GTM engineer, and no company will trust you with full-funnel thinking until you've earned it somewhere. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What Apero Advisors Does: Boutique GTM Advisory Going Deep on Few Clients 
(01:24) First 30-60-90 Days: Starting from First Principles on TAM, Offer, and Channel 
(04:08) YC Client Campaign: Disco + Clay + Founder-Led LinkedIn Outreach by Use Case 
(06:40) Why Disco Fills the Semantic Search Gap That Sales Navigator Can't 
(07:47) Michael's Journey: Economics Grad to Infrastructure Consulting to GTM Advisory 
(09:22) Talking to 2,000 Founders at a Private Credit Marketplace 
(10:20) Leading GTM for a New Vertical at a Healthcare Marketplace 
(11:25) Future Predictions: Channels Degrade Slowly, Community Economy on the Horizon 
(13:47) CRM Data Quality Gets Productized, Agency Consolidation Coming 
(15:44) Positioning Around Complexity Rather Than Any Specific Tool 
(17:00) Advice: Go Deep Before Going Wide, Context Is What's Scarce

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