Unicorn Marketers

Newspack — Automattic's all-in-one CMS, audience engagement, and reader revenue platform for independent local news — operates in one of the more unusual GTM positions in B2B tech: their buyers are professional journalists and editors, people trained to interrogate every claim and catch every error. In this episode, Stephanie Lottridge, Head of Content & Comms at Newspack, breaks down how she built a content and community strategy nearly from scratch, how she turned monthly publisher calls into a compounding GTM asset, and why consistent repetition to a small, stretched-thin customer base works better than most sophisticated content plays.

Topics Discussed:

• Selling to journalists: how scrutiny from your audience changes your content approach

• Building Newspack's content strategy from bare bones — no social presence, no blog, demo-only YouTube

• How monthly publisher calls evolved from a support function into a community and content flywheel

• Using Slack as a structured community channel, not just a support queue

• Repurposing a single customer story across newsletter, blog, video, LinkedIn, and event assets

• Why mission alignment eliminates the cross-functional resistance most marketers fight daily

• Newspack's 2026 content bets: newsletters, video production, and YouTube

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Your existing customer touchpoints are an untapped content pipeline. When Stephanie joined, Newspack already had monthly publisher calls — but they were being run as a training and support function, not a content or community one. She reoriented them: publisher innovations surfaced on those calls became newsletter features, blog posts, customer story videos, LinkedIn content, and event booth material.
• Repetition to a small audience is a feature, not a liability. With a relatively small customer base, Stephanie was initially cautious about over-communicating — posting the same update across Slack, the newsletter, and publisher calls felt redundant. The reality: her audience of independent news publishers is stretched across multiple Slack channels, advertisers, community members, and their own editorial deadlines.
• Selling to sophisticated buyers means your content operation has zero margin for slop. Newspack's publishers are journalists. They will catch the typo. They will notice the imprecise claim. Stephanie's answer wasn't to slow down and over-polish — it was to build a culture of care while accepting that momentum matters more than perfection.

• Community infrastructure should be built before you need it, not after. Newspack's publisher community started in 2019 as a byproduct of onboarding — a Slack channel, a call cadence. By the time Stephanie joined, it had grown organically to the point where it became a selling point in its own right. The mechanism was simple: a bi-weekly newsletter, monthly publisher calls, and a Slack channel with consistent moderation and announcements.
• Mission-connected content strategies don't require internal selling. At most B2B companies, getting product, engineering, or sales to participate in content is a negotiation. Stephanie explicitly noted she has not had to pull teeth at Newspack — people share LinkedIn posts, contribute to customer stories, and support event strategy without resistance.

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Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Webflow has spent over a decade earning the loyalty of designers and freelancers. Now, with enterprise demand pulling the platform upmarket and AI reshaping the marketing function from the ground up, CMO Dave Steer is navigating one of the harder brand transitions in B2B: expanding your ICP without losing the community that got you here. In this episode, Dave gets specific about how Webflow is repositioning against legacy CMS incumbents, what co-hosting the first-ever AEO conference revealed about where enterprise marketing is heading, and why the most dangerous move a marketer can make right now is throwing out the old playbook entirely.

Topics Discussed:

• Why developer marketing was the bridge from consumer (eBay, Facebook, Twitter) to B2B — and what consumer brand-building still teaches enterprise marketers

• The structural reason B2B marketing became a "sea of sameness" — and what it actually takes to break through when a buying committee is 18–20 people

• How Webflow is moving upmarket while protecting the designer and freelancer community that built the brand

• Co-hosting the first AEO Conf: what the 1,200-person waitlist signals about where enterprise marketing anxiety is concentrated right now

• Why AI is collapsing marketing's internal silos — and why Dave frames this as "marketing becoming a verb, not a department"

• The specific trade-offs of integrating AEO vs. abandoning SEO — and why the SEO is the most valuable player on the team right now

• Why first-touch and last-touch attribution are becoming relics — and what to replace them with

• Dave's take on category creation, April Dunford's positioning framework, and why "agentic web marketing platform" is the right umbrella for where Webflow is going

// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Rishi Mallik joined Workato when it was fewer than 10 people. Today, as Chief Growth Officer at the $5.7B enterprise integration and automation platform, he leads the GTM strategy for a 1,000-person company that just raised $200M. In this episode, Rishi pulls back the curtain on how Workato combines B2C marketing principles with B2B pragmatism, rebuilt their SDR team for messaging consistency, and cracked the code on generative engine optimization (GEO) to increase organic attribution from under 10% to 25% in six months.

Topics Discussed

• How B2C DNA changes B2B go-to-market strategy
• Why Workato moved SDRs from sales to marketing (and why it works)
• The five-minute SLA that transformed inbound lead response
• Warm outbound only: engaging prospects after they signal intentUsing AI for first-touch emails while humans handle nuanced responses
• Generative Engine Optimization: rewriting content for AI Overviews and ranking differently
• Building community ownership: the CIO Council Podcast and CIOsNews.com
• Attribution models for owned media in the age of generative engines

Key GTM Insights

• B2C Principles, B2B Execution Rishi believes the best B2B marketing borrows directly from consumer playbooks. The foundational principle: "let's market how we would want to be marketed to. Let's sell how we would want to be sold to." This isn't just brand voice. It means respecting the buyer's time, being concise, and reaching out only when there's a genuine fit.
• The SDR Organization Hack Moving SDRs from the sales organization to marketing was a turning point. Rishi explained the logic: when SDRs report to sales, they optimize for volume and close rates within their own pipeline. When they report to marketing, they optimize for message consistency and inbound quality. This shifts SDRs from pure prospecting machines into a feedback loop that sharpens messaging across all touchpoints.
• Warm Outbound Only Cold outbound that ignores intent signals is a relic. At Workato, "we do what we call warm outbound, which is you've engaged with us in some way, shape or form." Rishi's team only reaches out after observing engagement: a content download, a website session, a search query, a social interaction.
• AI as a Composing Tool, Not a Decision Maker Rishi highlighted a critical mistake that leaders make: "the number one common mistake from go to market leaders in leveraging AI is that you use a stochastic model to make deterministic decisions." Translation: AI is great for drafting emails and suggestions, but humans must make the final call. At Workato, AI generates first-touch emails based on intent signals, but humans review, adjust, and handle all responses.
• Generative Engine Optimization Changed the Game Workato's Head of SEO changed his title to Head of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) 1.5 years ago. The insight: AI Overviews in Google favor certain content formats. Rishi noted: "it seemed like AI Overviews was really into content that was written as bullet points, top five FAQs, really easy to decipher and really easy for the LLM to understand." Workato rewrote swaths of content to match these patterns. The result: "we leveraged AI to outsmart AI."
• Community as a Moat Workato invested in building a space where CIOs could convene and learn from peers. "one of the projects that Alex sort of took on was one is that we made sort of a CIO council podcast where CIOs actually would, one or two at a time would come and talk about some interesting challenges that they worked on. And it was like one of the top streamed podcasts on Apple podcast for a while, not just in tech, but in general." That community evolved.

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Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

HUMAN Security processes 20 trillion interactions per week — a quadrillion per year — making them one of the most data-rich vantage points on how AI agents are reshaping the consumer journey. John Searby, Chief Strategy Officer, breaks down how HUMAN is evolving from bot detection to agentic trust, and what that means for security, commerce, and GTM teams accountable for growth in an automated buying environment.

Topics Discussed:

• Why HUMAN is expanding bot detection into the category of "agentic trust"

• How AI agents are compressing the traditional consumer journey into a single interaction layer

• The new buyer personas (commerce, marketing, digital teams) now entering the security conversation

• A specific three-layer playbook: crawler visibility, data optimization, agent verification at transaction

• What 20 trillion weekly interactions reveals about agentic commerce in the wild

• How to build a partner ecosystem strategy when your buyer persona is fragmenting fast

• The signals that tell a founder it's time to hire a Chief Strategy Officer

Key GTM Insights:

Expand the category, don't replace it. HUMAN had a defensible position in bot detection. When agentic AI arrived, the temptation is to pivot. John's framing: it's an expansion, not a revolution. Existing customers still need bot mitigation. New buyers need agentic trust. Running both in parallel lets you grow into new personas without abandoning the base. "It is the natural evolution. It is expected from our customers that we give them insights into that automation.

Your security buyer is now pulling you into the CMO's office. HUMAN didn't go looking for new personas — customers sent them there. Security buyers started saying the CMO needed this data immediately. That inbound pull is the signal to expand GTM motion before you've built the full story.

The LLM optimization playbook has a specific mechanic. Most operators are talking about AEO/GEO at the content layer. HUMAN's product operates at the edge — meaning they can identify when an LLM crawler hits a customer's site, serve it optimized data, and then when an agent returns to transact, verify it, allow it, or gate it. That's a three-stage loop: crawl visibility, data presentation, transaction verification.

In a noisy AI market, deployment is the differentiator. Everyone is claiming AI capability. The credibility signal that cuts through is live customer data. HUMAN prioritized getting to nearly 200 deployed customers before leaning into broader category messaging. The sequence matters: build, deploy, collect real signal, then amplify. "Let's actually build it, right. Let's deploy it."

Integration strategy is the new distribution strategy. A standalone product requires behavior change. John's bet is inserting HUMAN's data as a trust layer into the tools customers already operate in — SIEMs for security buyers, web analytics for digital teams. The insight isn't just "meet buyers where they are" — it's that becoming embedded in existing workflows is what converts a point solution into infrastructure.

Hire a CSO when no one owns the cross-functional view. The signal isn't headcount or revenue stage — it's when your product strategy, data strategy, GTM, partner ecosystem, and integration roadmap are being optimized in silos. The CSO role exists to hold that full picture simultaneously. "Who's able to look at it from our product strategy, our data strategy, how does that relate to our go to market and our partner ecosystems and our integration strategy?
// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Evelyn Swaim is Vice President of Global Growth Marketing at Seismic, leading a 65-person marketing organization that ditched MQL reporting entirely in favor of owning pipeline, velocity, and revenue. Since joining over two years ago, Evelyn transformed marketing from a service desk generating top-of-funnel noise into a full-funnel growth engine with shared ownership of revenue targets. With experience across eight tech companies spanning startups to billion-dollar enterprises, Evelyn brings a no-nonsense approach to modern B2B marketing. In this conversation, we dig into her 18-month framework for eliminating MQLs, how she's deployed 30+ AI agents that now sit in her org chart alongside human teammates, and why she killed content syndication despite initial resistance.

Topics Discussed:

• The 18-month roadmap for transitioning from MQL reporting to pipeline ownership

• How to reverse-engineer bookings targets with RevOps to define pipeline requirements

• Why content syndication creates lead decay and wrong-persona noise (and what to do instead)

• Scaling back third-party trade shows in favor of curated first-party ABX programs

• Building 30+ AI agents starting with a custom GPT that eliminated thousands in monthly localization costs

• Assigning an "AI coefficient" role to systematically identify automation opportunities

• Measuring marketing on pipeline velocity, deal size growth, win rates, and sales cycle compression

• Why 21 touchpoints matter and how to instrument systems to track buyer committee engagement

  
  

  
  

  GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Reverse-engineer pipeline from bookings, not MQLs from activity: Evelyn started by partnering with RevOps to work backwards from bookings targets: "What are our bookings targets? How do we reverse engineer that to understand what we need to bring in? How many deals do we need? What does the pipeline number need to look like?" This approach forces alignment on what actually matters—qualified pipeline that converts—rather than arbitrary activity metrics. The shift required changing instrumentation in their systems to track pipeline progression, velocity, and conversion rather than lead volume. Founders should demand their marketing leaders start planning from revenue backwards, not activity forwards.

• Use velocity and quality metrics to prove the MQL is dead: Evelyn didn't just declare MQLs dead—she measured throughput. She showed sales leadership that a wide funnel full of noise converts poorly, while tightly-filtered, ICP-fit, intent-qualified pipeline converts faster and at higher rates. "What if what we bring into the funnel are more sales ready, tightly fit to the ICP in the right Persona with market-ready intent—how fast is that throughput?" The data proved the point: velocity and quality beat volume. Founders should push marketing to instrument conversion velocity by source and persona fit, not just top-line volume.

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Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire

Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Topics Discussed:GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

Attentive pioneered SMS marketing for enterprise retail brands — Crate & Barrel, Carter's, Dick's Sporting Goods — before evolving into a multi-channel platform spanning SMS, email, and AI-powered personalization. In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive, to unpack how she transformed a brand-and-outbound-centric marketing org into a growth engine, created a customer marketing function tied directly to GRR, and navigated the company through a critical multi-product narrative shift — all while driving 100% AI adoption across a 60-person team.

Topics Discussed:

• How Attentive's marketing operated as field enablement — and what Keri changed when she became CMO

• Building a customer marketing function from zero and attaching it to a GRR number

• The first 90 days as CMO: launching email and three AI products simultaneously into a skeptical market

• How Attentive operationalizes customer centricity using Gong and custom AI tooling — beyond the talking point

• The rebrand trigger: when C-suite buyers entered the deal and the whimsical brand stopped landing

• Structuring three distinct communities for three distinct buyer profiles

• The Attentive Commerce Council: a value-exchange D2C community running on WhatsApp

• AI adoption as a performance review metric — and how Keri is handling headcount requests with an agent-first answer

• What the first marketing hire should actually look like for early-stage founders

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

• Build the customer marketing function before you think you need it — and tie it to a number. When Keri stepped into the CMO role, Attentive had no customer marketing team. Lifecycle comms existed, but only for incident alerts and basic promotions — no expansion motion, no advisory boards, no voice-of-customer loops. Her first move was building that function and attaching it directly to a GRR number. The person she put in charge came from the internal growth team, knew the customers deeply, and has since been promoted to VP overseeing acquisition pipeline, web, and customer marketing. For any company moving from single-product to multi-product, the existing customer base is often the fastest expansion lever — but only if someone owns it with a revenue mandate, not a comms mandate.

• Operationalizing customer centricity requires accountability structures, not culture statements. Attentive uses Gong as the baseline, but their engineering team built custom AI products on top of it — giving Keri the ability to surface win/loss trends, call patterns, and competitive signals in roughly two seconds. But the harder part, as she put it, is making sure people actually use it: product marketers listening to beta calls, field marketers tracking what objections are surfacing. Her approach is to hire for customer obsession, model it visibly, and then make it a performance expectation — not an aspiration. If you don't hold people accountable for the minutes spent listening to customers, they'll default to servicing internal stakeholders.

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Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Rapyd operates across 190 countries, scaling from 30 employees to 1,500 and projecting over $1 billion in ARR. Marc Winitz joined as the first marketing hire seven years ago and built a 40-person global marketing organization. Rather than following the financial services playbook of trust signals and corporate aesthetics, Marc created a brand inspired by '70s and '80s punk rock and surf culture—complete with David Guetta concerts and "no guts, no glory" messaging. The result: a brand so differentiated that competitors can't replicate it, even when they want to. Marc shares how he executed three complete rebrands, created the "Fintech as a Service" category, and turned marketing into Rapyd's competitive advantage.

Topics Discussed

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders

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Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

//

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 

Subscribe here:

https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Huntress has carved out a unique position in cybersecurity by staying laser-focused on SMBs while competitors chase enterprise deals. With 70% year-over-year growth and a tripling of company size in just two years, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer Jason Marshall joined us to break down their unconventional approach to building a marketing engine that scales from $45M to $500M ARR. Rather than following the typical cybersecurity playbook of chest-pounding about AI and technology superiority, Huntress has built their growth on a foundation of customer education, community engagement, and an unwavering commitment to making customers the hero of their story.

Topics Discussed:

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

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Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.

www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.

www.GlobalTalent.co

In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, we speak with David Gales, Head of Marketing at Oyster. David shares how he's built a lean but powerful 12-person marketing team that punches above its weight in the competitive global employment space. Starting in lifecycle marketing and evolving to lead the entire marketing function, David reveals how Oyster leverages executive thought leadership, brand authority, and customer-centric strategies to stand out in a complex B2B market. From using N-gram analysis on G2 reviews to inform messaging, to building thought leadership programs that influence revenue pipeline, David's approach demonstrates how retention-first thinking can fuel sustainable growth.

Topics Discussed

Lessons For B2B Marketers

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Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.

www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.

www.GlobalTalent.co

Astera Labs is a key player in AI infrastructure, providing essential connectivity components for AI servers - including chips, modules, boards, and software. As the "nervous system" of AI servers, Astera Labs works with major hyperscalers and partners closely with GPU and CPU manufacturers. In this episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Paroma Sen, VP of Corporate Marketing at Astera Labs, to discuss her experience joining the company just before their IPO and building a marketing function from scratch in a highly technical B2B environment.

Topics Discussed:

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:

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Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.

www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.

www.GlobalTalent.co