Is SaaS dead? What's different about building SaaS marketing in 2026 versus five years ago?

Nick Lafferty: I'll start. I feel like it's different now than when I started at Profound, which is almost exactly a year ago. A year ago, Claude Code didn't exist, Claude Cowork didn't exist, Anthropic wasn't eating into markets like financial services or legal services in AI. Things have just changed so much even in the past couple of months this year compared to when I was the first marketer at Profound.

A lot of what we're finding is that we're a product that helps companies understand how visible they are in ChatGPT, and then create content and marketing agents to scale their output to be more effective. A lot of what I found is that we sell to enterprise companies, and enterprise companies still want to buy SaaS software. They still need support, humans, a team behind them. I think every team is vibe coding their own AI tools internally, but there's still a need to buy software at the largest companies, and we still see that at Profound.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think SaaS is not dead. I think tools can come to market a lot faster, and as Nick said, people can vibe code things internally for use within their team or personally, but at a broad scale — we're on Zoom now, which is a SaaS platform. We planned this webinar on a SaaS platform called Notion. Sure, someone could use Claude Code to spin those up, but those products are there, and they're known, and they're used more broadly. My take is SaaS is not dead, it's just that tools can come to market a lot faster.

Julia Szatar: Yeah, I think we're all going to agree on this one. I don't think SaaS is dead. Obviously the model companies are eating into very generic SaaS tooling. But if I can add anything different, I actually think something that's under-discussed is that SaaS tools are basically a workflow. Unless you already know that workflow, you're not going to rebuild it anyway. And if you're new to the job, I think sometimes you learn what the workflow is through the tool.

So I don't think that's going away. And then just all the industries that have very complex workflows — we do not need to reinvent the wheel for everything. You don't need to be an expert in everything. Sometimes you just need to plug and play something. But it certainly is changing, and I think the bar is higher and the stakes are higher, so you have to just think more deeply, like, can Anthropic just build this, and will it take off in whatever you're thinking of building.

As the founding marketer on day one, how do you decide where to focus first?

Julia Szatar: Sure. For me at Tavus, this was kind of decided for me. When I joined, the company was a tool for marketing and sales people — it was a video personalization tool. And maybe two weeks in, we were like, "oh, we need to evolve" — AKA pivot. Through some insights, through thinking, through gut feels, we decided we needed to build an API for developers and sort of get into video generation, which sounds similar but is actually quite different.

The task was to launch this in probably a month, I can't even remember at this point, so it was all around preparing for that launch and trying to reposition as best I could within a very, very short timeline. There was no way to fix everything, change everything, lay the foundations for this completely new motion. I'll also mention we were evolving from purely sales-led and layering in self-serve. I know we'll be talking about that later probably as well.

So I had to pick my battles and do as much as I could. There was no time to redo a website. I decided to just do a landing page very focused on this new ICP. It was getting comfortable with cringe, because we had one page in dark mode appealing to developers, and the rest of the website was pink and yellow and white with lots of exclamation marks, a little bit more appealing to marketers perhaps. So it was, in a way, decided for me, and then it was just focus on the priorities, do what you can do, and be comfortable with it not being perfect.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, similar to what Julia was saying — someone has a job description up, they need marketing for something. Typically they'll know what they want first. In my current case at Shovels, it was very easy because they were asking for content, and that's my — I love building content marketing programs. They defined exactly what they needed. They wanted one-pagers, they wanted to update and add new web pages. So it was all kind of outlined for me very simply. But then it was crafting the process for making that faster moving forward.

They didn't have any marketers prior, so every time they built something it was a one-off. So just adding a little process to that and making it repeatable and easy to replicate moving forward. But then you layer on everything else — what about event marketing, what about social media marketing (they weren't doing anything on social), what about email marketing — you start adding all these other layers into it. But the initial need at Shovels was there, they were already asking for it, which is arming the sales team with collateral.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, I had a bit of a different experience than y'all. Before I started, I put together a master list of all possible things that we could do, sent it to my CEO like a week or two before I started, and he was like, "Nick, this is great, let's do all of those things." And immediately I was like, "oh, I messed up." Like, I gave him the kitchen sink instead of picking something — he'd said yes to "select all."

So when I came in I had to really prioritize and figure out, like, what do I do? And at that point it was basically: where was I most opinionated about what would work well? We sell to marketers, marketers live on LinkedIn these days, so one of the bets I made is that we should build a whole motion around amplifying what we're doing onto LinkedIn. Profound — we're kind of a data company in the sense that we send lots of prompts to ChatGPT and other LLMs and get a bunch of data back. So we aggregate and anonymize a bunch of it and then start publishing research stories. We're one of the most cited domains in AI search, and especially looking at what is a unique story we could tell that really no one else could tell, or no one else had the bandwidth or capacity to tell among our competitors.

Now every company in our space publishes original research, and we were the first ones to do it. That was one of the first early bets we made. And I'll never forget — I was on a call with the CMO of Notion who never inbounded to us, we actually got introduced to her via Sequoia, one of our investors, and she was like, "yeah, I've been seeing your research on LinkedIn all the time," and I would have never known had she not just told me that. Which is cool feedback to get, that something is working and someone who is smack in your target ICP saw it, remembered it, and then told us about it too.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, I think so. To piggyback on what Nick was saying about the kitchen sink — during my interview process for any company, I have just 10 top-of-funnel buckets, and I ask, "hey, how would you rate yourself currently on what you're doing with content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, partnerships and collaborations, paid advertising, trade shows and events, referral programs, and free tools and resources?" Just see how they answer those, and you really quickly find where there's big gaps or big buckets of areas that you could focus on or prioritize.

Julia Szatar: And I think I would add it depends on the maturity of the company as it relates to product market fit. We were a lot earlier than probably Nick and Morgan, and so product marketing — the real foundational "who are we, what do we do" — is a lot of what we had to focus on, because you can't go deep into channels until you have that figured out. And that's hard because people just want to make noise, but you kind of have to hold back a little bit and figure that out. That was a unique challenge for us.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things I'm picking up on is that all three of us have different backgrounds. My background is in growth and I was first. Julia is more product marketing and she was first. And then Morgan, I think, is content marketing and he was first. So all these different companies — maybe on purpose, or just by way of us being very talented — they picked where they wanted their first marketer to spike in, and I think that's maybe what helped drive some of those early choices too.

How do you go about figuring out the right positioning for your company?

Julia Szatar: I can kick this one off. For us it was definitely a moving target in the almost two years that I was there. We went through being in a crowded category of video generation and lip-syncing to eventually doubling down on live generated AI video. The reason for that was because it was a less crowded market and we found that our team had unique skills to build that product. So in a way I had to do both.

But I would say overall my approach to messaging from a structured approach is pretty consistent no matter whether you're in a crowded market or not. And it starts very — there's no rocket science here. Start internal: your sales team, your founders, your product team, your engineers in our case. They're the ones working on this day in, day out. They're the ones creating opinions on why we're building this and who for. For us, that wasn't crystal clear, we were kind of meandering around it. So everyone you talk to internally has a slightly different take. So it's literally interviewing people with a list of questions, capturing all of that, then trying to synthesize it. Then you layer in external things. What's going on in the market? What's your unique take on the market? How can you differentiate yourself? Why are we different? A lot of why we were different we found through what customers were saying and the inbound that we were getting.

And then everyone has their messaging template and matrix. I love to use — Make It Punchy is an agency that I don't know, we've all worked with. I'm a huge fan of Emma who runs that, and I use her matrix to fill out the messaging.

One thing I'll say is — I think when I was at Loom and earlier in my career, I had the perspective that you can't really, it's dangerous to iterate on messaging too much, because once you put one message out, people will get used to it, and then if you're constantly changing it, it can get confusing. I still believe that, but I think times have changed. If anything, the speed of change is so fast that you just have to get comfortable with updating messaging and you can't be too precious about it. And trying to get it perfect and doing 50 cycles is just a waste of time, because you're probably going to get it wrong anyway. So my biggest learning is just make it less good and ship it faster. It still has to be good, but for those of us who just have high standards, you have to find a balance.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, I mean, I think everything Julia said is spot on, there's not a whole lot I would add to it. Internal interviewing of the team, the sales team, the founder, the salespeople who are on the front lines — that's the biggest takeaway. And then summarizing and boiling that up to what the product is and the messaging.

Then there's the flip side, as Julia said — the external forces. Maybe the founders and the sales team call something a certain way, but how do the customers call it? What do they say? What is the terminology they use? You boil that all up together to create the messaging.

And going back to tooling and the first question we talked about — we have Claude Code connected to Fireflies, so it's super easy to do that. I can now look at all calls instead of just relying on a salesperson's memory of a call. So it's a lot easier now, I think.

Nick Lafferty: One of the most impactful things I did — someone who I bought Emma's book, Make It Punchy, before I started at Profound, I think I read about half of it, just wanting to up-level my product marketing skills. I got in, and a few months later — we sell to marketers — and our problem was that we had too many leads and not enough sellers to go talk to these people. They were in back-to-back demos for 12 hours a day, like 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. And leads were falling on the floor. As a growth person, that was driving me absolutely insane.

So I put myself in the lead round robin and started taking demos. I didn't ask anyone's permission. Profound is very much an "ask for forgiveness" kind of place — like, move quickly. I started ripping demos. I took like 70 demos with people. And to me there was no better way to understand what parts of my messaging were landing than talking to prospects and asking them questions: how did you find us, what's most interesting, why are you here, what do you know about Profound? We recorded all of them, and I downloaded that into a Notion doc I shared with our marketing team, our sales team. It was super helpful. But yeah, most applicable if you're a marketer and you sell to marketers, for sure.

Julia Szatar: Just to add — if you can't do what Nick did, but Morgan mentioned this as well, I think it sounds obvious if you do it, but sometimes it's easy to forget to just listen to sales calls. I don't think I did that enough, because sometimes the sales team thinks that you're looking for something and they'll try to translate a little bit what they're saying, but really you want to see it live. So watching those calls or actually being in them, I think, can be really key to finding some insights that are less obvious.

How do you think about positioning AI specifically?

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, we use AI. First and foremost, we're a data company, and we use AI to collect and gather data. We use AI internally. Our URL is .ai, so we're not shying away from it at all. But it is interesting just the explosion and the AI barf that I see. Like, I drive up Highway 101 and every billboard is AI this, AI that, and it's almost overwhelming. How many of those companies are actually AI, or what are they doing with AI? I don't know. But for us personally, we are AI first and foremost, for sure, just by the nature of our product that we sell.

Julia Szatar: Yeah, I would say — I think I've found this in my career in general. So what happened is AI exploded, everyone added AI to their messaging, everyone now ignores it to an extent. However, that doesn't mean that if you actually are AI, you shouldn't say it, right? Because there's a lot of people doing it wrong. So I think if you do it strategically, it's still relevant. I think plastering it everywhere is probably bad.

We kind of eventually found that we should be referring to ourselves as a research lab, because we kind of were like, wait, that's what we're doing. So we led with that in a way. But you don't have to put it in every headline and have it 100 times on a landing page. It's sort of more like how you're using it that I think is the nuance.

Nick Lafferty: We just added AI to our product a couple of months ago, and before that there was no AI in our product. Some of that is by nature of us — we were so AI-focused that, you know, we tell companies how they show up in AI search, so I think we could get away with it for a bit. One of our products is a workflow builder — almost like think Zapier, where you drag in different nodes and it runs top to bottom. It's super useful and very horizontal, but complicated and takes forever to make. So now we have a chat interface where you tell it what to build, and then magically it just builds your workflow for you. And everyone loves that. So I think if you do it in a way that's genuinely helpful and not just adding a, like, "ask AI" button to some part of your product, then I think that's the path forward that works for us.

What's your process for testing positioning and assessing if it's working?

Julia Szatar: I can jump in here. Like a lot of startups, early-stage startups, you don't have the luxury of scientifically testing it somehow — definitely not when you're first putting it out there. So you have to go with your gut, having done the rigorous process that we described before. And then you can do a series of things. I don't think you can know if it's right or wrong, I don't think it's that black and white, but it's like, do we feel like it's working? And there are signals — are things landing when the sales team is talking about it? When you go to an event, are the conversations resonating? Are you getting conversion on your landing pages, etc.?

But I think if you continue to see a problem, you have to ask the question: is it the messaging? Is it the audience? Or is it the product? Because sometimes those things are unclear and you might think it's a messaging problem, but it's like, actually the product's not resonating, or we've been marketing the wrong use cases and the audience needs tweaking. I think there's no real playbook. It's just having lots of conversations with product, sales, founders, and — to Nick's point — being in those conversations yourself. When you're an early-stage marketer, you're really doing a lot more kind of product and sales work, because unless you're hearing those things directly as well, it's not really hitting you.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, same thing. Just having the continuous feedback loop from the conversations. Are they landing? Does it resonate? If yes, you're good. If not, try something else. I've never had a huge messaging failure or, like, flop or anything that comes to mind. It is kind of just incrementally testing things and changing things. And as a company grows, as we talked about earlier, the positioning and messaging should also change anyway, so you're always changing as it goes and grows.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, I think the challenge that we're having now is that we were one product before, and now we're two products. We were AI visibility, now we have actions. So everyone knows us for one but not the second, and we'll have third and fourth products too. For us, the challenge is how do you educate current customers on a new thing and then not water down your messaging and become like the all-in-one platform for whatever, which I think is like the dreaded messaging final boss, basically. You become like the Rippling of your space, which is very hard to navigate, I think.

Julia Szatar: I can also jump in with a fun example. So we started out kind of referring to what we do as building an avatar — actually, people were calling us that, like, "you create an avatar and then you generate videos with it." And our founder hated the word avatar because it's kind of a dumbing down of what we were actually doing, and it was not differentiating — differentiating, different, I can't say that word — differentiating us from some kind of overlap — not direct competitors, but people that were overlapping.

So we were like, okay, let's try something new. We tried digital twin, we tried replica, we tried human computing, human-like AI. And the funny thing was, we understood kind of the founder's vision, and in many ways I think he was right, but where the market was at is — we are introducing so many new ways of working with our APIs that using the word avatar was a shortcut to help people understand, and people were still struggling like, "how can we even use this?" And so this intense debate, like — sales really wanted to use it, it was working from an SEO perspective, emails were getting higher open rates when we used that word.

So we ended up moving away from it in terms of company positioning and stuff like that, but we were like, we have to be able to use this as a feature. When we were putting up things on, you know, software websites — what are they called, little aggregators that sell software — we would use that word, because we would automatically be put into that category. And then eventually, as the product evolved, I think we were able to more confidently call ourselves human computing because actually the product could back that up eventually. We were doing much more than just generating an avatar. And that vision wasn't clear all along. So there was a lot of back and forth, and I don't know that there's a way to have done it better. It's just the nature of the ambiguity and growing quickly.

What's driving pipeline for you right now?

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, we took the somewhat controversial approach recently to create a job title, which is literally my title — marketing engineer. You've seen other companies do this — I think Clay did it the best with go-to-market engineer. Really only one company in a category I think can do this, and luckily Profound, we were first, and we're biggest, fastest growing — we were the ones to be able to do it in the first place.

It's honestly been amazing to see the pickup from it. Even when we announced it a couple of weeks ago, we had a massive uptick in inbound contact sales and pipeline creation, which is kind of strange because we didn't announce product, we didn't announce new funding — those are kind of the two big spikes that drive a ton of pipeline for us from a social media perspective. Instead we launched a job title — it's like, you can't do anything with that. We had a training course and a university that we run, but that has driven immediate pipeline for us. And it's driven a ton of inbound to me from people at Google and Block and Whisper Flow all saying, like, "hey, we think about the future of marketing in the same way, can we talk and see what does marketing engineering look like for Profound versus how we're doing it internally?" So it's kind of a non-traditional approach, and we can't do it again really unless we invent another new job — you have one shot to make it work, but it's been very, very good for us.

Morgan Friberg: We don't do any paid media. When I came in, the founder was just not interested in it. We're kind of where it's seed stage, so watching the budget is one thing, but also they were converting leads — like, why would we waste money if we're already getting new people in the door? So for us, the biggest thing has been just building out more content, working on SEO, working on AEO, organic growth, and just having someone focused on that because they didn't prior. So for us, I'm in a lucky position where that's what the role is right now. I do want to introduce paid media, I do want to cast a wider net eventually, but for right now, the steady growth has been really awesome to see just based on organic content.

Julia Szatar: Yeah, I think if I can give a non-scalable example — and there's a lot of chatter around this now — but I think events are back, events are cool again. We went through this long period where they were considered expensive, the pandemic happened, but now because digital is so noisy, even organic digital, people are trying to find ways to break through. And with marketing, it's kind of — if one channel becomes saturated, you just have to switch, and either it's a brand new type of channel like AEO or it's an old channel reinvented.

So we found events to be pretty successful — both small dinners that are super targeted, but also just showing up to conferences I think can work. If you pick the right conferences, we landed some of our biggest early deals at conferences. It feels very unscientific and it feels serendipitous, and maybe at one event it happens and another it doesn't, but I think just showing up over and over again can be effective.

What's your hypothesis on why the "marketing engineer" title worked for Profound specifically?

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, I think the audience was ready. We have a good audience in general who's receptive to what we do. We're seen as a market leader — I mean, we are. And selfishly also because I was the face of it too. I had this gigantic LinkedIn post that was like, "I don't want the head of marketing job, I want to do this instead." That popped off. James, like, referenced me — our CEO referenced me directly in his post. So I think not only did we launch a title, but we backed it up with someone who's been in the space for a long time, I think added a lot of credibility to it.

How do you approach events as an early-stage marketer?

Julia Szatar: For us, it was more experimental. Because we had a developer audience, we did hackathons, we tested conferences. That's harder because it's more expensive and the lift is really big. Dinners are easier to put on, but they're still a pretty heavy lift. So we just deliberately tried to do lots of different types. I wouldn't say it was very scientific, but we would try to find out — and in many ways they don't always give you the list, so you have to kind of just analyze it by looking online, asking around. That's an underrated strategy — ask your peers, "is this a good event?" Because we're in this new space — HumanX is a good example that we went to and got a big deal at. I was actually bearish on it, and it was our founder who really pushed for it, and he turned out to be right. It has ended up being like a leading conference in the dev tool or AI tooling space.

Another thing I would add is, when you're early — to Morgan's point — and you don't have huge budgets, partner events is another thing. Your partners might be bigger than you with a better budget and a more established brand, and piggybacking off that — and they could even be your vendors, right? So you can do a case study for your vendor. ElevenLabs is one of our vendors, and they have obviously a huge brand. We did a hackathon with them, and that gives your brand a halo effect.

When I was doing this — at this point this might be old news — we were deliberately trying to spread ourselves to test different types of events. We hadn't dialed in the event strategy, it was more in the experimental phase, like, "let's just do different types of ones and see where they go." Actually the hackathons did not drive pipeline, but they probably drove a bit of brand. So it's kind of like, is the juice worth the squeeze? I don't have a clear answer.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, we run a lot of events at Profound too. I always hesitate giving examples about Profound because I feel like we're kind of like a one-of-one example — how replicable is this given when we launched and just the industry that we're in being super hot last year? We fundraised three times — we did A, B, C all in one year, which is just not normal.

We made our own conference. We did 300% — we ran our event in New York City last year, and it was so successful, we did it in London a month later, we did it in SF — Julia came to that one — and then we're doing it in New York next month. So we've done four of them in the last eight, ten months I think, and they pretty much print pipeline for us. In the beginning, we weren't sure if anyone would show up. We had a line around the block. It looked like an influencer event — like, "what's going on?" "No, it's a conference, it's an AEO conference." Like, "what are you talking about?" Yeah, we way under-expected how many people would want to come and be in person and talk to other peers about this new industry that everyone is curious about.

Our only regret is not going bigger the first time. We had 300 people in New York the first time, 100% free, no cost, waitlist, we approved people to make it kind of feel more exclusive. 400 in London a month later, 700 in SF, and probably 800 in New York next month. And it's honestly cheaper to do your own thing than to sponsor something else. So kind of underrated, and it seems scary, but it worked out for us.

How did you arrive at doing your own conference?

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, our CEO is ambitious, and he was like, "I want to create the world's first and leading conference on AI search." And then he was like, "okay, you guys go figure it out." And there were four of us at the time, and none of us had an events background. So step zero was finding an events contractor to help us with all the logistics. Step one was find a venue. We used — one of the co-founders of Ramp is an angel investor in Profound, so we were able to use an auditorium in their New York City office for free, which helped with cost there. I mean, we spent a lot of money on branding, design to make it happen, but yeah, it was our CEO's idea. And that's a common theme for all the big stuff we do — he's like, "what if we did this?" and everyone does the like Ben Affleck smoking meme thing of like, "here we go," and then it somehow works out.

Julia Szatar: I would say it's actually a really interesting point, because we internally also discussed using our own conference, and I pushed back very, very hard on it. I think the difference between the stage that we were at and where Profound is, is that Profound has a big groundswell and a very clear audience and a solution that's like obviously valuable and just has traction. And so the job is to capture that, right, and an event — a really cool event where you innovate on vibes and have amazing speakers and everything — can be super effective, as they've seen.

But I think if you're still really defining your audience, it can be expensive in terms of time, because that takes a lot of time to put together. And if you don't have that organic groundswell already, it's too soon to do it. I think you have to pick the right moment for it to be successful. For the early marketers out there, I think it's so exciting to want to put on your own event, but if it's too early, you can feel confident to push back, because I don't think it would be successful if it's too early. Maybe in that case the better approach is to test at smaller dinners or more intimate events to start.

What's actually working today to make sure your company shows up in AI-driven search?

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, I think what's working a lot for our customers right now is honestly just focusing on it. I think some people, despite all the buzz — and like, I'm in the middle of this, so I think everyone's so focused on AI search — and the reality is most marketing teams have a million priorities, pressure to leverage AI in their jobs more, and probably fewer resources than ever to get those things done. So literally just trying and doing things is what works for our customers, which is a very unsatisfying, very unsexy answer.

From a mechanics perspective, we see that content velocity is a real advantage for some companies. What I mean by that is, we found that about half — sorry, about content that was published or updated in the last 13 weeks had 50% more AI citations according to our data set than older legacy content. By that we mean blog posts, website content, but it's the same for YouTube as well. YouTube gets cited — it's either the number one or number two most cited domain across all of the different Google AI models, unsurprisingly too. A YouTube video before 2023, we rarely get cited.

So there's a freshness angle to what's working in AI search right now. And I think freshness in AI search is different than freshness in SEO or like Google search, in the sense that ChatGPT will pick something up in a couple of days versus Google — in my take, months and months for something to hit page one. So the velocity that you move at and still publishing high-quality content, of course, is a real advantage that I think smaller companies have, that large legacy companies with lots of approvals can take forever. We work with one of the largest banks in the world, and it takes them three months to get approval to publish anything. So if you're a small startup, you can publish so much content in three months — and so I think that's an advantage for you.

Does updating existing content count for AI search, and what counts as a meaningful update?

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, every time I use that stat, people are like, "oh, can I swap a period for an exclamation point and that counts as being updated?" Like, I know this too — the answer is no to that. I think it's meaningful updates, product updates. In the background, I'm Claude-coding an agent for my own personal website that monitors the Profound changelog — any time something new happens, it stages a bunch of content to my website with any of the new product features that are new to Profound. So the answer is, a meaningful update I think is what qualifies.

We're also adding in more expert quotes and bylines and testimonials from people who are in the industry as well. So updating content does count in terms of "does AI search think this is new or not?" Whenever I see citations for my top pages start to decline, I will go and do some kind of meaningful update, and then it'll kind of uptick back up. So it's like part art, part science, of course, but I think it does work for sure.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, that's a good point. I think what you mentioned, like having something automated, like adding quotes should be ongoing — so just automate that process as much as possible. So that makes sense. Yeah, I was just curious because I haven't done it yet. I know I need to, but I just haven't done it yet. So thank you.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, the other thing that works too — even though Google just deprecated FAQ schema, this is like very SEO tech-nerdy right now — FAQ content still works well for AI search, because fundamentally you're asking ChatGPT a question and it wants to go find an answer. So the more you can write content that is question-and-answer formatted, that works quite well. Even changing some of your headings to be questions and not statements, we've seen upticks there. So lots of little things that compound over time.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, plus one to that. Our website — in my research, in going down this rabbit hole — that was the first thing I did was add FAQ schema to long-form blog posts, and immediately our AI search inbound just skyrocketed. Skyrocketed meaning from zero to something — not like crazy traffic, but before doing that we didn't have any or hardly any. So for me that was step one.

When no one knows you and you have a limited budget, what's your strategy for creating brand recognition that actually compounds?

Julia Szatar: Sure, I'll keep this short. I think founder-led marketing is really important here. It's cheap in terms of dollars, it's expensive in terms of will and time. But I think it's just really effective now. It comes across as authentic — if you see something posted by a brand, it's just not as real. People listen to it less. So I think founder-led marketing.

But beyond that, one of my biggest lessons is, if you're a one-person marketing team at the beginning, that doesn't mean you can't get help from the rest of the company. For us, our audience was engineers, and so really getting the engineers to help with content marketing can be really effective. Whether that's recording demos or actually writing content, even coming to sales calls — these things all count. I think those things can be underrated. They feel really hard, but once you can get in a rhythm, they can be really effective.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, those all resonate with me as well. Another thing is, as a marketing team of one — everything that Julia said, but also just keeping the branding that you do do consistent. Don't change it up. Don't get too crazy with changing brand. I know it's easy to do when you're a small company — you can kind of do whatever you want. But I think that goes a long way, just the consistency and having the beats consistent.

Nick Lafferty: Yeah, one of the things that we did that was helpful, to add on to Julia's point of founder-led marketing — which worked well for us — is that we built an automation that anyone who inbounded on our contact sales form, we send them LinkedIn connection requests from me and both founders. The goal is, we just want them to get a drip of content from us on social. The caveat here is — be careful, anything automation on LinkedIn can go wrong for you very quickly, as companies like Apollo have found out the hard way. But yeah, the whole premise is that we want people to see our content, and it just looks kind of nice if you inbound to a company and their founder adds you on LinkedIn. All of those are little brand touch points that are basically free that start to compound over time too.

When's the right moment to invest more heavily into brand?

Julia Szatar: Sure. My new approach here is — with all these new tools where you can vibe code a lot of things, I think the quick and dirty website is going to be a bigger thing, because we are literally going to be empowered, or we are already empowered, to build our own. I think if you're still working things out, when you engage an agency, just naturally the back-and-forth makes the project go long. If you don't have clarity, that delays the project even further. So I think just taking the matter into your own hands, getting it to a place that everyone is comfortable with — but acknowledging it's not perfect, it's not something that we're going to keep for five years — but just getting it out faster, rather than — it's the same philosophy that I said before. Speed is more important than perfection here.

The other thing that I'll mention is, website and brand are not the same. Your brand is — sorry, your website is a piece of content in a way. It's your main piece of content, but that can change more rapidly, and your brand should be separate. Even though people often update these things together, you can have clarity on your brand without having figured out perfect product market fit or your audience, etc. So if you have clarity upfront, I think you can take a stab.

It can be expensive and it's hard, though. For us, the reality was we didn't redo the brand till we had Series B funding. And then we went really deep and it was a long project — it was like three months. It wasn't easy, there was a lot of back and forth to get to a place where we were really happy. And then we had to still do the website as well as part of that. So make sure that you keep those two things separate in your mind, even though you'll often do them together — but remembering they're separate, you can do one without the other.

I think the biggest risk is when you do a big new website but you haven't redone the brand, because I think there's an expectation that it's going to look and feel like a rebrand, but you haven't rebranded. That was one mistake that we made — we did a new website, not the one that's live now, and it went really badly because we didn't do a rebrand. The expectation was that this was going to be this amazing new thing, and it did a really good job at repositioning us, but the brand was the old brand and it didn't really align with the new positioning. We kind of went in knowing that, but I don't think we acknowledged it aggressively enough. You have to be comfortable with — like, that website didn't live for more than a year. I think we could have vibe-coded it instead of paying an agency a lot of money, and we would have done it faster, probably would have looked better, and then we would have thrown it away when we really had the time to go deeper.

Morgan Friberg: I was going to say, I just feel like all the companies I've ever been at for a length of time, it feels like every two years there's this itch to, if not refresh things or rebrand or whatever — but that seems to be just a marker point that I've experienced in 20 years of marketing. Just one of those things.

Nick Lafferty: We did our first brand campaign after our Series C. I feel like Series B you can start doing — you have more funding to do like more brand campaign stuff like out of home, subway buses, transit shelters, billboards on the 101 if you want to be the other AI company with the billboard there, which we were for a while too.

One of those is we make really vibey brand videos. Social is a big channel for us, and so when we announced the marketing engineer, we worked with a creative agency to make a very vibey brand video. This is about the role of marketing and how it's changed and evolved over time and all of this stuff. We put calories into that and now we use that thing everywhere. I just gave a big talk in London at an SEO conference and I opened my talk with it. It was like this gigantic stage, like 700 people in the audience, and every other company talked about data and stats, and I was like, "I want to show you a movie." It felt like when the teacher rolled out the TV in school for like movie day — but me on stage — that was I think really impactful and not that expensive to put on. We're getting so many ways to repurpose that same video.

Julia Szatar: Yeah, that stuff I think is also really interesting and not complicated to do.

Which marketing tools — AI-based or not — could you absolutely not do your job without today?

Nick Lafferty: Claude. I would be so lost without everything in Claude right now. I use Claude for everything. I'm literally Claude-coding something in the background right now and saying yes every couple of minutes when it prompts me. In the early days, it was Cursor — as the first marketer, if I wanted to change something to our website, I just did it myself and then created a pull request and sent it to our head of engineering and he approved it. So I think any AI coding tools you can use and learn will give you superpowers as a solo marketer, if you're empowered to make those kind of changes.

Morgan Friberg: Yeah, and to add on to that, not only just Claude, but Claude and connections to all the tools that you use for your workflow, whatever it is. So for example, our product is in a web platform called WeWeb and Claude doesn't really connect to it very well, so we're transitioning over to Vercel. Just making sure that Notion, HubSpot, whatever the stack is, it connects really easily to Claude — but yeah, same for me as well. Claude Code. My stack is Notion, HubSpot, we're moving the product website to Vercel, and Fireflies. This is the first company I've been at where all of the customer calls and internal meetings are documented and easily accessible through Claude Code. So that was a huge unlock, and it goes back to some of the earlier conversations we had — I don't have to bug salespeople anymore. I can just look up what I'm looking for on my own.

Julia Szatar: I'll just say Whisper Flow, in order to get Claude working really fast. Not having to type and using Whisper Flow — so if people aren't familiar, you just press a function key, talk, it's very good, it understands my accent, it understands weird spellings — you just press function, let go of function, and it transcribes everything. So when you're vibe-coding, it just is much faster.

Sofya Leonova: I'll add one more. I also use Whisper Flow — and Claude is also my currently go-to AI powerhouse tool for doing a lot of things. The one tool that I'll add, which is an equivalent to or similar to Fireflies that Morgan mentioned, is Granola. We use Granola to transcribe all our meetings. It's not a meeting recorder, it doesn't pop up into your meetings, but it transcribes the text, and then plugging that into Claude has been awesome to data mine all of the meetings. You don't realize how much insight is in the internal meetings in addition to the external meetings and client meetings. And to pick up on trends and questions that customers are asking — I think that also goes back as a great connection to messaging at the very least, like mining your existing meetings for what are customers saying, how are they talking about your product, what are they asking. So that's been really awesome. And then producing content on that and updating your website — it's all this beautiful ecosystem of tooling. Though I am feeling that tool bloat very much these days as well.

What did you over-invest in as the first marketer that didn't pay off, and what do you wish you'd invested more in?

Morgan Friberg: I don't think I ever over-invested in anything. I'm a very frugal person and marketer. Under-investing, I think for me, again, as a content person — just the SEO, AEO, what is the right mix there? That's something I would definitely pay more to get this in my current situation, anyways.

Nick Lafferty: I under-invested in paid early on, and some of our competitors were first and were able to capture a lot of customers very quickly because they burned more of their investor money on paid than we did, and so we had to kind of play catch-up for a bit. It was right around Series B for us where our investors were looking at overall web traffic of us versus other competitors in our space and noticed that one of our competitors was rapidly catching up to us, and a lot of that was coming from paid, interestingly. So I under-invested there.

And I over-invested in newsletters and newsletter placements for us with industry thought leaders. We tried the really big AI newsletters, really small niche SEO newsletters — there really nothing worked there for us from an acquisition standpoint. There's probably some brand effects there, but yeah, newsletters really never worked for us.

Julia Szatar: For us, I would say two things. Maybe over-invested in just trying to get the message right — so just a time sink. And then probably under-invested in content broadly speaking — video too. Like, I think Nick mentioned video and just more content. We did go deep on SEO, but I think we could have gone more on organic content, basically. And probably — I want to say events, but it's hard when you have a small team.