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Austin Hughes is the founder and CEO of Unify, a platform helping high-growth teams turn buying signals into pipeline. Previously, Austin led the growth team at Ramp, where he scaled the org from 1 to 25+ and pioneered a product-led, experiment-driven GTM approach. With a background in investment banking and venture capital, Austin brings a uniquely analytical and first-principles mindset to modern B2B growth.
Timely enough, Unify is also launching something big today — Unify for Sales Reps, their new AI-native system-of-action built to help sales teams work smarter and move faster. With powerful features like an AI research assistant, manual sequence steps, a browser extension for prospecting, and an all-in-one tasks dashboard, it’s designed to handle the busywork so sellers can focus on what really matters.
Learn more about Unify for Sales Reps: unifygtm.com/blog/introducing-unify-for-sales-reps
Discussed in this Episode:
- Why you should run marketing like product
- Distribution is a startup’s best friend
- How Austin’s content strategy turned LinkedIn into a hyper-efficient channel
- Why the best growth hires today are ex-engineers or investors
- How AI is redefining go-to-market motions
Highlights:
04:00 Ramp’s growth org: running 100+ experiments per quarter
08:45 Why LinkedIn became Unify’s silver bullet
11:30 Austin’s content creation workflow (and why he doesn’t use AI to write)
13:00 Technical vs. traditional growth marketers—how to hire for impact
17:00 Using Unify to merge 1st & 3rd-party data into a signal pipeline
20:30 How automation + human-in-loop GTM creates leverage
24:00 Austin’s Carta example: what perfect relevance looks like
27:00 What broke in outbound and why signal-based selling is the fix
32:00 When startups should start ingesting signals
36:30 Culture of experimentation: “failure is just a data point”
39:00 How Unify is using AI internally for GTM and support ops
43:00 What’s coming next: AI-relevant messaging, BDR collaboration tools
47:00 The end of traditional marketing roles—and what comes next
Guest Speaker Links (Austin Hughes):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-t-hughes/
- Unify: https://www.unifygtm.com/
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Newsletter: https://substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: /@gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Thanks to our Sponsors:
TriNet
Founding a company is hard enough. Navigating payroll, benefits, and compliance shouldn’t slow you down. That’s where TriNet comes in. They work with startups and scaling businesses to help take HR off your plate, so you can stay focused on building product, growing revenue, and hiring great people – the go-to-market engine. B2B companies like Hivebrite and Equilend trust TriNet to help handle the infrastructure of their workforce, so their teams can focus on execution.
Learn more about TriNet at: https://trinet.com/gtmnow
GTM 153 Episode Transcript
Austin Hughes:The way that we thought about growth as a function was much more akin to how you run product team.
at an earlier stage, you just have to take big swings.
we announced our seed fundraise in, early 2024 on LinkedIn, and immediately had, I think 420 demo requests come in over the course of the next 48 hours.
We also took a very first principles lens of the thing that we cared about was maximizing the dollars of pipeline that we could drive per hour of work.
we saw everything we were doing as taking bets,
distribution is the advantage that we’re looking for at a startup, we could build the best product in the world, but if nobody hears about it then it doesn’t really matter.
The thing that matters most is the impact rather than the actual solution that you’re building.
Buyers just wanna solve problems, and if you can prove that you’re the best person to solve that problem for them like they’ll take you up on that.
Sophie Buonassisi: Before we dive in today, a quick important message from our sponsor. Partner TriNet, a trusted HR provider to startups and scaling companies. Every early stage founder is told to focus on product and growth, but behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team, and building that team is one of the hardest and most important parts of the journey.
Build the team that builds the company that is part of your Go-To-Market strategy, responsible for growth, hiring the right people, keeping them supported, and creating the infrastructure to help them thrive is critical. Trying to exist to make that easier. TriNet’s Full suite of HR Solutions is designed to support companies at critical inflection points from early traction to scale.
Learn more@trinet.com slash GTMnow to see what’s possible for your business. That’s TriNet, T-R-I-N-E t.com/gtm NOW. Now onto the episode.
This episode explores how to apply product thinking to Go-To-Market. Austin, founder of Unify and former founding growth leader at Ramp shares a behind the scenes look at how he helped scale Ramp’s Go-To-Market Engine building the outbound automation program from scratch, and growing the growth team from one to over 25.
Now as a founder, he’s reapplying that playbook and reshaping it to help companies like Justworks Open phone and cursor turn signal data into pipeline. We get into the tactics, how to validate and scale Go-To-Market programs, how to operationalize product data, what technical growth really means in 2025 plus why AI doesn’t eliminate the need for growth.
Teams just changes how they’re built. Enjoy the episode.
Welcome back to the GTM podcast, is your host Sophie Boni, and today I’m joined by Austin Hughes. Welcome, Austin.
Austin Hughes: Thanks for having me, Sophie. I’m excited to be here.
Sophie Buonassisi: Super [00:03:00] excited to have you been actually looking forward to this conversation for a while. I know we’ve been jamming on ideas for. For quite some time. So excited to jam a little bit more publicly now.
Austin Hughes: Yes, a hundred percent. Uh, it’s been a long time in the making.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And I would love to start off with your background because you actually have a bit of an investor background too, before we get to more of State of the Union around what you’re working on now.
Austin Hughes: so, you know, today I’m a founder and CEO, which is a ton of fun, but I actually got started originally in finance. And so before I moved over to the operating side, I spent a few years in investment banking and then in investing after that, looking at companies and sort of understanding how investors look at in diligence businesses, which was I think a pretty.
Informative experience for me. A lot of the frameworks that I actually used a ton as an investor, thinking about unit economics, thinking about how you benchmark these companies and some of the underlying operating metrics that really matter are things that I think carried really naturally to being an operator.
And so definitely grateful for those experiences. But yeah, was an investor for a couple years, [00:04:00] moved over to ramp and then, uh, started unify more recently.
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. And when you were at ramp, you actually built out the growth function there and. started it from scratch and really grew it from one to over 25 employees. I’m curious, when you started that function from scratch, what was the first kind of system or motion that you built and why?
Austin Hughes: So way back when, so I joined RAMP back in 2020. company was few hundred customers and so the era was very different and I think the way that we thought about growth as a function was much more akin to how you run a product team. And so the foundations and how we thought about how we’d organize our time and the work that we would do and how we would prioritize what we worked on was much less, I think from like the traditional marketing lens and much more from the product lens of thinking about it in terms of sprints.
Running a regular cadence, writing specs, holding ourselves accountable for metrics. And so, uh. It’s interesting. It’s like, yeah, we were running a, you know, a growth team, which traditionally would fall more under the Go-To-Market team, but I actually sat under, Jeff, who’s on the product team. And so very interesting microcosm there.
And I think [00:05:00] when we thought about building up the program over time, we saw everything we were doing as taking bets, right? And so some of those were more traditional, some of those we could look at the market and understand, okay, you know, you’ve got your traditional channels like paid and whatnot that, are gonna produce for you, but.
We also took a very first principles lens of the thing that we cared about was maximizing the dollars of pipeline that we could drive per hour of work. And so that led us to explore a lot of different channels. beyond your traditional ones as well. So really at the core though, was this foundation of like, how do we operate more like a product team than most Go-To-Market teams would.
Sophie Buonassisi: And with that mindset around product, how did you end up validating high impact programs before investing real resources into it? Yeah.
Austin Hughes: A lot of the art, I feel like in growth is, thinking about how to scope, projects really well. And I think that this is often really overlooked. But something that I think we did remarkably well at RAMP was we were really diligent about how we spend our time and maximizing the amount of output per hour of time.
And so oftentimes what I found was that. There were projects that the team would wanna work on that they’d written down would take two [00:06:00] weeks. And in practice you could distill down an early learning from that project into an hour or two of work. Something like that. You could take something that somebody thought you needed to work with an engineer on and take it actually to be a CSV that you could sort of like just pull from a data set and test something.
And I think That idea that you could always sort of refine things and always descope things led us to this world where the way we operated was very much so in terms of MVPs and full builds is how we thought about it. So MVP is like an idea that you could build in a few hours. A full build is something that might take a week or two weeks.
And so the way that we really de-risked a lot of the work that we did was by running MVPs to test learn. Something had signal, and then when we would actually go out and do a lot of work, it was usually investing behind something that we had high confidence in. So that was sort of the foundation for us being able to move really quickly.
It was just using our time really effectively.
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, definitely that experimental mindset. It sounds like, I’ve read that when you stood up the program, you’re running over a hundred experiments per quarter. Which is a ton of volume, very high velocity. How did you set up those systems for [00:07:00] experimentation, measurement, and feedback?
That whole loop.
Austin Hughes: Yeah. you needed like, I think a couple different pieces to do this well, one is that. Everybody on the company side needs to just know how to dashboard and do analytics. And I think that’s pretty table stakes is that it is certain scale intuition is valuable, but it starts being overtaken by your ability to use data.
And the only way that we were able to drive so many concurrent experiments and learn from them is that we had clear reporting and metrics, and the team was just generally data fluent. So I think that’s really important. We also had a centralized CRM that we used to just like track what we were working on in a very systematized way of going about this.
So no learnings got lost. I think that was actually also really important was that when you have so many things going on, you need to make sure that everything, you know, it’s the same thing of how you would Go-To-Market and make sure that you’re using Salesforce or HubSpot. You need to make sure that you’re not crossing your wires.
And so I think we did that really well from systems perspective. I think also just The way that we organized the team was much more around the goal of, of pipeline. And, what that meant in practice was that teams that I think historically would’ve sat in silos actually were very sort of like [00:08:00] cross collaborative at ramp.
And I think that was really powerful. Over time, we were able to try things that, probably would’ve been shut down at, uh, a company that was organized in a more traditional way.
Sophie Buonassisi: I gotta ask, was there an experiment or channel that you doubled down on that changed everything? Maybe even if it didn’t look promising at first?
Austin Hughes: I could talk more about the unify side. I would say ramp. There’s no, there was no silver bullets. I think it was just a lot of hard work over many years that compounded continuously. And so I think that actually framed a lot of how I think about things at Unify. At Unify, I found that the silver bullet for us has been LinkedIn.
Honestly, I think like it’s very fascinating to watch this pan out. I think it’s the one bet that I’ve taken as a growth operator where it just made sense out the gate. It just worked immediately. And, for context, we announced our seed fundraise in, early 2024 on LinkedIn, and immediately had, I think 420 demo requests come in over the course of the next 48 hours.
Most of that we were seeing was being driven by LinkedIn. That was an incredibly powerful signal, I think, to us that this channel and this medium works [00:09:00] really well. Since then, we’ve really doubled down on the channel, which I can talk a lot more about that.
Sophie Buonassisi: You’re a pretty prolific writer on LinkedIn, Austin, was that what kicked off the writing? Was it your seed announcement?
Austin Hughes: It was, and I, I gotta say like there was just a lot of noise in our category at the time, and it was fascinating, I started, posting in call it March or April of 20, 24, 5 times a week on LinkedIn. before then, I was not a LinkedIn writer at all. I actually wrote a lot more on Twitter than I did on, on LinkedIn.
And that seed announcement was a really good indicator. But then also our category, which is very loud on LinkedIn, and it felt like we would show up to conversations and people will be talking about our competitors, not because our product wasn’t better or things like that, but they just didn’t know about us, right?
Actually, like what we found was that distribution was actually the thing that we were really struggling with and credibility and whatnot. And so I think actually heavily investing in LinkedIn boosted our credibility faster than anything else could have. Now, when I actually meet somebody in a conversation.
it comes up half the time. They’re like, I see your LinkedIn content over and over and over again. And I’m sure at a certain point [00:10:00] some of that gets repetitive, but I also try to keep it fresh and I do think that at a certain point, somebody seeing un Unified’s name over and over again, it makes a huge difference.
and eventually we’ll reach somebody at the right time when they are actually, um, ready to buy. So it’s been really powerful for us.
Sophie Buonassisi: Well, if anyone does not follow Austin on LinkedIn, highly recommend because I would say you absolutely do keep it fresh. It’s always very interesting. Very different perspectives, very informative and tactical. What does your system look like for publishing and writing?
Austin Hughes: I run a regular schedule where every Sunday is like my LinkedIn day, so I’ll sit down for four or five hours, plan out content for the week. Think about ideas that I wanna write about. usually most of my work happens on the Sunday where I sit down and actually write pieces out.
Usually though, I keep a note in my phone of just ideas that I think are interesting. And it’s funny, they come about it like very random times. I’ll be like, on a hike or walking around the city or something like that. And something will sort of come to me as an interesting tidbit and I’ll usually just take note of it.
And then when I need to actually sit down and write, I will just pop into that note, sit down, write out the idea. So that’s. Sort of, uh, [00:11:00] how I approach it. We’re also, actually gonna start introducing a lot more video content, which I’m really excited about. So we have a whole new process for that.
We have a team member actually, that joined our team specifically to work on video content named Adara. So huge a shout out to Adara. And, we’re gonna be introducing a lot of that to, to LinkedIn very soon, which I’m excited about. That’ll be something new that I think will be fresh for the audience.
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Shout out Dara. I can’t wait to see that content coming.
Austin Hughes: Yes.
Sophie Buonassisi: are you using ChatGPT or any AI to help support your writing? Whether it’s, you know, voice recording yourself while you’re hiking up the mountain and an idea or inspiration pops in?
Austin Hughes: I today don’t use it at all. I find that the style is just not how I wanna write things, and the words matter so much that it just hasn’t quite gotten there for me personally. But I do use it to record just like random ideas sometimes on my phone I do use you know, slack notes too, or voice notes as well.
So I use a variety of ways of just getting ideas on paper. But that actual writing piece I do myself
Sophie Buonassisi: Love it. I think it shows through the writing.
Austin Hughes: appreciate
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m definitely a big fan of the the chat GPT audio. That’s helpful. It just went on the move.
Austin Hughes: [00:12:00] It’s awesome.
Sophie Buonassisi: I wanna transition to a little bit more around the technical side. As you mentioned, everyone was very fluent with dashboards, had that technical ability. How do you evaluate whether to hire a growth marketer or a technical growth lead at an early stage?
Austin Hughes: We’re in a world today where. I think it depends on where your company is in lifecycle, right? Like if, if you’re looking for somebody ultimately to do a very well scoped job, and let’s say it’s like, Hey, you want somebody to go run a performance marketing program, you’ve got a budget of a hundred thousand dollars a month, whatever it might look like, I think in those worlds a I.
More traditional growth marketer can make a ton of sense and can be a good fit for that role because ultimately the role is well understood. You can find someone who has four or five years of experience in it. You don’t have a ton of volatility around that. You know what to goal someone on.
I do think though, that depending on what you’re looking for, oftentimes people will sort of. Conflate a growth marketer with a bunch of things. Sometimes it can be, oh, I want someone who can do paid, who can go do the website, who can maybe build product here and there, et cetera. And I [00:13:00] think in that case, you want someone who’s more technical.
So our, our first couple growth hires at Unify were all folks who came from very non-traditional marketing backgrounds. And so whether it’s somebody coming out of investing or it’s somebody coming out of, being an engineer, we find that those more technical backgrounds just lend themselves to solving problems from first principles.
And that’s ultimately a lot of what we do. And so, we found a ton of success with, our growth leader named Bria today. she comes from a background of having been an engineer and also having, been at Bridgewater as an engineer there as well. And that sort of like mentality of how do I solve this problem from first principles just translates really well to being able to solve channels in ways that you hadn’t really thought about.
And ultimately, like that distribution is the advantage that we’re looking for. at a startup, we could build the best product in the world, but if nobody hears about it then it doesn’t really matter. And so, that ability to think outside the box is something we really value. And that technical persona, I think has, tends to have a lot more of that.
Sophie Buonassisi: You are speaking our language. Austin distribution is definitely the moat. And I mean that, that’s your background too, right? You [00:14:00] came from the investment side, you’ve got that first principle’s problem solving perspective, so it makes sense that you also recognize that in others and you hire us.
Austin Hughes: Yeah, definitely.
Sophie Buonassisi: Are there signs. Perhaps that a team is trying to be technical, but maybe missing the mark bit.
Austin Hughes: I like this question. Yes, The goal of anything that we try to build is to keep it simple. Like even if we’re doing something that’s incredibly sophisticated and nuanced, we want that system to be really simple and scalable because. It sets us up to be able to plug more people into that.
It sets us in to be able to easily improve it. It sets us up to learn from what we’re testing and iterating on. And I think sometimes in today’s world, some folks have a tendency to try to over-engineer a solution to a problem that’s actually pretty simple. And so sometimes we may try to make things technical or we may try to write things in code when they.
Could be built in another system that makes them easier to use. And I think our bias is to keep things really simple because it means that it’s gonna be just much more scalable. Ultimately the reason why technical matters and being technical matters is that you [00:15:00] can, build the system that goes from point A to point B.
And ideally it’s as simple and as. Clean as possible to do that. If you start over-engineering things, all of a sudden you get a very complex system that’s hard to maintain, hard to manage, and it’s just gonna break more. And, um, that’s ultimately not. In service of what you’re after. The way that we actually think about this is that the way that we avoid over-engineering solutions is that the folks on our growth team just don’t pipeline goals.
And so there’s a strong accountability around, I’ve gotta drive a number. My job isn’t to build the most creative elaborate system ever. It’s actually to drive this number. And yes, you’re gonna have to write some code from that. You’re gonna have to try some things through outside the box, but the idea is, the thing that matters most is the impact rather than the actual solution that you’re building.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That makes sense. Great answer. And you mentioned data. And ingesting data for growth themes. You’re also doing that at Unify. Overall, what are systems that you’ve seen work well to perhaps operationalize product informed growth?
Austin Hughes: So product informed growth, Takes a couple [00:16:00] different, I would say, like mediums. And one of the most, you know, well understood ways has been this idea of taking product usage data, drag product usage data, and turning that into, into some sort of growth channel. So classic example is a PLG company that orchestrates and upsell let’s say you’ve got linear and linear has got 25 users.
They upsold their, you know, you added 26. That’s sort of a signal that you should be reaching out. That works really well. Uh, not for linear necessarily. I don’t know about their operations, but I’m just saying it for a PLG company, you got another bucket, which is sort of a marry between first and third party data.
Maybe you’ve got a little bit of first party data and so whether it’s website visitors or maybe a free user sign up and you’ve got some third party data as well, which is like, things like, Hey, what technographics is this company using based off of going to their job descriptions and seeing what tools they reference as being important, or it’s people starting in new, sort of like jobs within your ICP.
So for us, when a new VP of marketing as an example, starts, you’ve got this sort of other blend [00:17:00] of, of data that has a little bit of product usage, but a little bit of third party, that’s the world that unify plays in a ton. Ideally, what you have is a system around these data points that makes it easy to understand the full user journey.
And inherent in that is that you’ve got a bunch of different data sets that you need to join together. Selfishly, I’m gonna shell my own product here, but Unify does an incredible job at this. And that’s actually a lot of the beauty of what we do is that we take these disparate data sets, we actually take a perspective on the joining and the transformation of them.
So they fit together in a way that makes a lot of sense. And so one of the most exciting experiences about Unify is you actually can drop somebody into the product, integrate a couple different data sources, and then they can see this incredibly clean timeline of. All these activities that their customers have taken are things happening on the account?
It could be a move champion somebody coming to the technical docs to read about the product. Somebody starting in a new role. And once you’ve got sort of that core DA data foundation, I. Making taking an action off of that is actually quite simple. And so, historically the way that companies were doing this five years ago was with modern [00:18:00] Data Stack, so data warehouse, DBT and or coalesce, something like that.
And then something like a high touch or a census to pipe data into different tools. Fairly brittle system. Also incredibly difficult to stand up. You usually need data engineering resources to do that really well. In this new world, you actually can just do all that outside outta the box with Unify, which is really powerful.
Sophie Buonassisi: That is super powerful. are you seeing any kind of, broken data sets? I think that’s a common ask we get from our founders is, you know, we don’t know what kind of data we can pull in and we don’t have reliability around those data sources. Is.
Austin Hughes: Totally. Yeah, we, we actually spend a lot of time at the beginning of our customer engagements just thinking with them about the strategy and so usually. will come in with the best teams will come in with a few ideas, you know, something they thought about, something they saw on LinkedIn, et cetera, but they haven’t fully thought through the strategy and that this is even a strategy.
And so usually we sit down with folks and for the first call, like month of the engagement, help them think through the strategy. What are the signals that matter, what are the plays you [00:19:00] might wanna run on top of that? Help understand and, and organize that. And then once you’ve got that. Standing up the plays is actually relatively simple, but it is sort of that, that ideation.
And we find that the best companies today are able to craft, call it 25 to 50 different plays that they wanna be running at any given time. And each of those is delivering a handful of meetings a month. You stack that up and you’ve got this incredible growth program. So it’s cool to see that in practice.
But yes, the data foundations definitely matter a ton.
Sophie Buonassisi: So let’s say you’ve got that data foundation. ’cause that is a common ask we get from startups. Now that you’ve got it, what does that look like from an impact on outbound perspective?
Austin Hughes: So we believe really strongly that. You’ve got two different ways of going to market off this data. One is a fully automated approach and one is a human in loop approach. Both really matter and that synergistic equation between the two is really valuable. So, but you, what you want to do is drive the right message to the right time to the right person.
Like that needs to be true. That’s the real framework [00:20:00] that we operate in, where you’re gonna create the most impact because you know, ultimately. If you’re, so, if somebody, you know, as an example, shows up to your website browsing around your PI pricing page, you take two weeks to reach out to them, they’ve probably already made their decision, right?
Or they’re in a conversation with somebody else at that point. So the timeliness really matters. so we end up spending you know, a lot of time helping companies to build these systems that do want, or that, that take those two approaches. The way that we start on the automated side is typically Within Unify, we’ll help companies build plays that go from data point to actually action. All that happens within Unify, and we actually manage that full. workflow for somebody. We actually typically are used to companies using a tiering model. So on the account side, usually what happens is somebody will have tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four accounts, something along those lines.
Tier one is really what they want their sellers to focus on. Anything beyond that, they’re usually not covering super well. So what we’ll do is we’ll usually recommend an automated approach for tier two to tier four, and then for anything that’s in tier one, usually what we’ll do is tie in a human in the [00:21:00] loop and usually the best companies are actually intermixing LinkedIn messages, voice notes, dials, whatever it might be on the human side.
And we find that both of those added together just create a ton of a ton of impact. So it’s usually the approach that we are finding the best companies are taking to actually act on the data.
Sophie Buonassisi: It makes sense, and I mean, signal’s a powerful, powerful word overall. You mentioned buying intent. Is that how you describe it, really in the context of how humans buy? Because now we’re talking a lot about signal based selling, you know, signals. Overall, what does that actually mean to you? Somebody that’s deep in the space and an expert in the space?
Austin Hughes: Signal corresponds with that moment to reach out is like really what it means to me. And so, you know, it could be something that the buyer is doing. It could be something that’s third party. You know, it, there’s a lot of ways to read into it. What we’ll see is I would say one thing that is happening quite a bit today is that this idea of enrichment and signals are sort of being intermixed together and I do think that they are quite important to break out and so enrichment, what do I mean by [00:22:00] that?
Somebody, people are using clay to build these sort of like bigger audiences or bigger lists of companies, their total addressable market in a way that they can then. Go action against that. It’s super, super valuable. Right. I would say that building up that original list though, is, is, is more on the enrichment side, right?
It’s more in this world of, Hey, I’ve got a list of companies that I want to go after. Historically, companies would’ve done this in ZoomInfo or Apollo or something like that. Now it’s happening in this product, and you’re able to get just much tighter enrichment, right? You’re able to get these qualities that are coming from data sources that you historically wouldn’t have been able to, like as an example, classifying a company as PLG or not.
That wasn’t a data point that something like Apollo or ZoomInfo could offer. When I think about signals signals is then the actions and the behavioral data that’s happening on top of that list of accounts that you care about to tell you when’s the right time to reach out. So, you know, we’ve got a laundry list of them and unify everything from, you know, user signs up for your product to someone’s on the website, browsing around to, you’ve got somebody who starts in a new [00:23:00] job within one of your top.
To your accounts and those are sort of like the right moments and nuggets to be engaging with that account. And usually the strategy that we’re trying to, ideally you have a well enough understanding of signal and you’ve been able to build all the architecture to to move data off of them that you can actually be engaging with accounts call it like once a quarter off of a signal that’s best in class we see is you’ve able, been able to operationalize the strategy enough that when those data points come up, you’re able to move really quickly.
Sophie Buonassisi: what are your thoughts overall on signal accessibility? Because of course the question becomes, if everyone starts to be able to connect with the same signals, then. It doesn’t break out from the noise. It becomes noise eventually, and maybe it won’t, but what happens then? How do we make sure that not everybody’s prying on the same signal?
Austin Hughes: If the signals are good, I think it doesn’t matter as much. I guess my point being that if you get the timing right somebody who’s in market [00:24:00] is gonna, it’s in their best interest to, to take a quick look at what you’re doing. And I find that really the thing that stands out is relevant more than anything If you can, Show up to a conversation and just show you’ve done your research and show that you know the customer, you know their market, you understand their problems and their pain points. We find that that is actually a much better way to be standing out than to be reaching out and saying like, Hey, so and so, like I noticed you started a new job like in 2025.
That’s just not actually differentiating anymore, but being able to use that as the. The reason why you’re reaching out and then to be able to show sort of what you know and build really strong relevance, it goes a really long ways. And so I think in that world, like hopefully what we start pushing down is this idea of, uh, of re relevance being super important.
I’ll give you an example is like, I bought a product from Carta like a year ago off a cold outbound email from them. I had a to-do list item on my, notepad of I needed to go out and find some sort of solution to, employees understanding equity compensation, it’s a huge problem at startups.
Just generally speaking, folks ask a lot of questions and there’s a lot left to [00:25:00] be understood that it’s not well researched. Carta has a, has a product around that. They had reached out to me and it was just like the timing was perfect. The messaging was like very clear. I understood what the offering was and how it fit in and bought the product within like six hours.
And so I think in an ideal world, like that’s sort of the model we move to. Is that like. You get the timing piece right, you actually can make a ton of decisions really quickly because you’re getting relevant research there.
Sophie Buonassisi: I think that almost flips it on its head where a lot of people say, oh, we don’t like being sold to. But the reality is we like being helped. We like our lives easier. And when it does that and when the resonance is there, when the message is great, it is helpful. It’s actually saving you something on your to-do list.
Austin Hughes: Yep. Definitely.
Sophie Buonassisi: I remember back a little while I was running an outbound program and there was no difference in terms of performance between the automated version and a personalized version based on relevance. So when somebody identified it as a key relevant priority, no difference in terms of performance, which was shocking at the time.
This is going years back before a lot of the sophistication that we have now.
Austin Hughes: Buyers just wanna solve problems, and if you can prove that [00:26:00] you’re the best person to solve that problem for them like that they’ll take you up on that.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And what was broken about outbound when you decided to build unify? Was there a moment that tipped it for you?
Austin Hughes: So I, I had spent quite a few years around this world of like outbound and outbound automation and so was well aware of just like the problem space. I think the biggest thing was that I. When we started unifying early 2023, we saw just this huge crescendo of the old way of the world no longer working right?
The world was sort of recovering from this VC hangover of 2021 and 2022 where the market had gotten, had gotten really exorbitant, and things were really easy to sell. All of a sudden we’re course correcting in 2023. It was impossibly hard to sell. Growth rates across the board and public companies are slowing down.
Go-To-Market efficiency is, is, is just going through the floor. And I think the thing that really just stopped working at that time is just you couldn’t spray and pray anymore. This had sort of been building up over the last five to 10 years. You know, we saw the [00:27:00] rise of the sales engagement platforms like Outreach and SalesLoft, et cetera.
Sort of create this idea of cadences become really popular and then. They continue to proliferate. But I think what we saw is just that strategy just stopped working. And come 2023 companies were looking for a new way of going about things. They were looking for a new way outbound still mattered.
Controlling your own destiny still really mattered, but we needed a new strategy. And, um, we just believed really deeply in this idea of signal based selling and using these, these insights at the right time to actually break through the noise. And so I think it was just, what’s the saying? Like, it’s like success is like the combination of like luck and like timing and something like that. Anyways I think it was a combination of those things that we understood the space really well. You know, we had actually been practitioners in it before and I had built in the space and my co-founder Connor, Had well understood the technology that would actually power all of it. And that plus like this compelling event of the world falling apart and outbound no longer working in 2023 sort of was the catalyst to, to really leaning into the company.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That makes sense. [00:28:00] And, success equals hard work, luck and timing, I think is at least one variation. I think there’s a bunch of variations.
Austin Hughes: That’s it, that’s what I was looking for.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what about today? So if you are building or you’re advising another founder who’s building outbound from scratch today, where do you start?
You know, tech message people, what does that foundational step look like?
Austin Hughes: Yeah, so. I guess I can offer two pieces on this. So one is that I think for most companies, like the best way to get started with outbound unless you have this sort of DNA on your team already, is to find a great agency partner to work with and to lean into that in the early days. So test messaging, test tactics, et cetera.
- You know, if, if it’s helpful for folks, I’m happy to, happy to recommend. But I, I’ve got a ton of folks in our, in our network that have just been proven to get companies to success on outbound. And I think the reason why I suggest that approach is that there’s so many pieces that go into getting it right, which is why it’s so hard, right?
You’ve gotta get the technical things right. You’ve gotta get email deliverability, right? [00:29:00] You’ve gotta get the systems talking together. You’ve gotta get the messaging. You’ve gotta get the signals, you’ve gotta get the CRM pieces and you’ve gotta get the copy as well. And all those things take a lot of nuance.
I think in particular we find that, nine outta 10 companies we work with are, they really struggle with copywriting. Uh, and doing so in an outbound context. It’s incredibly different to pitch someone cold over email versus to be writing copy for your website and it shows up and how people, you know, tend to.
Tend to approach outbound. So I think agency partners can be a really good way of just going from zero to one, getting some of those learnings outta the way, and then you can always in-house or double down on that with your own team. For us at Unify, what we found was that, uh, so I had quite a bit of background in outbound and then our first AE Skylar also had a ton of background in outbound business development.
So, we sat down at a coffee shop one day and just like hashed out different ideas for. The thing that really broken the through the noise for us, uh, at Unify was, this is before we had even 10 customers. we just sat down and got incredibly [00:30:00] specific about the types of people that we wanted to go after.
So we’re on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, building these lists of a hundred to 200 people that. Not only had the job titles we cared about but had like specific keywords in their profiles that signaled that they cared about the problem space that that we do. Whether it was tooling they use or their goals as an example, like we would look for marketers that would mention like that they had owned outbound, which is like sort of a weird microcosm.
And use that as the reason why we would reach out. We would send them a super personalized message, et cetera. We actually found that in doing that we were able to one, hone our product market fit because we really understood precisely who and with what message would respond to us. Well, even with very little credibility.
And, two, we just started putting meetings on the board. We would. See something like a 15 to 20% response rate to the message we were sending out. And nobody was telling us to, like, no one was like unsubscribed. It was like people were always engaging in the conversation, which I think was a good indicator to us that that was working.
So you can take it a couple ways if you want to go agency versus taking it in-house.
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m [00:31:00] sure you got faster feedback loops too, just from responses to outbound and then the calls itself that were generated.
Austin Hughes: Yeah, exactly.
Sophie Buonassisi: So what if a company wants to and believes in signal based selling? When are they mature enough? Like when you’re recommending that, at what point does it make sense for them to be ingesting all these signals?
Austin Hughes: I do think in general. Once you’ve gotten to the place of. you’ve got tens of customers, you’re probably at a place where you can start leveraging signals. The first one that I’ll usually recommend folks get started with is new hires, which is one that we offer. So, hey, new VP of marketing starts in this category.
The reason why is that that audience is just always refreshing for you, and it’s actually not dependent upon your company and your. Brand awareness. There are a lot of other signals like website intent data that are very dependent upon brand awareness, but this one’s not. So usually it’ll recommend starting there because you can start to get, that was actually the first signal that we ran at Unify as an automated approach was we would see these people would start a new jobs.
We would automate the reach out with the message around that. And that worked for us. You’d book five to 10 meetings, a month, which was a, a great [00:32:00] strategy. At a certain point, you’ll hit a tipping point probably around like series A, series B, where you actually have enough critical mass around your brand, where you’ve got caught like 5,000 to 10,000 monthly website visitors.
You’ve got tens of customers, maybe you have a PLG motion, and people are sort of signing up self-service at this point. And at that point, it’s important to start building the foundations for signal based selling because it helps you to amplify and double down on the things that you’ve already gotten to work, which is exactly what you’re just gonna find a lot of wins in there.
Sophie Buonassisi: Awesome. What parts. Of your growth experience from the past or investor experience have been most valuable in building unify?
Austin Hughes: I think it’s just a little bit of this, , I think the biggest thing is just like the humility to fail over and over again, and like the willingness to, to do that. So, and growth something that. I always tell our team is that you’re gonna fail two outta three times. And like, that’s actually good.
Like that’s a good hit rate. It’s sort of like baseball in that way. And I think there’s just an element of. You open up a risk taking mentality when you do that and you have that sort of [00:33:00] right DNA where you’re not afraid to fail because that is actually the default and what’s gonna happen more often than not.
I do think you need to have that sort of, you need to have that sort of DNA on the team, on a growth team and it, you know, it applies to a bunch of different. Places it applies to being a founder. It applies to taking big swings on ideas and building product and all these ideas. But it started for me in growth and I think that’s been really powerful.
And I think it actually, for us on the growth team today, it opens us up to find new opportunities because we’re willing to take the risk. We do so in a calculated way, but we are exploring the problem space and we will find wins because we know how to execute through it. So, I think that’s personally the thing that sort of crescendos into a bunch of other areas of the work that I do.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love the baseball analogy. One of my favorite sayings is around just how Babe Ruth led the league in home runs, but also in strikeouts. So it kind of gives that perspective
Austin Hughes: I love that.
Sophie Buonassisi: what does it feel like to really lead an organization where failure is the norm or where it’s encouraged.
Austin Hughes: For me, it feels really natural. [00:34:00] I feel like I’m generally like a more truth seeking person. I want to get to the right answer rather than it being like, you know, whose perspective wins or whatnot. I think ultimately I’m just looking for the right answer. I think culturally though, if you’re gonna do that, you have to set a few things up.
You’ve gotta just like get in the mode of like culturally celebrating losses as learnings, you know? I think that’s something that matters a lot And I think this shows up in a bunch of different ways. Like this example on the growth team, we’ll do, uh, you know, a monthly retro where we talk through ideas that didn’t work.
We also though hold ourselves accountable for tracking all of our experiments. So the ones that don’t work, we can like sometimes have a variation of that that will work, and we sort of write that out and we’re clear about it. I definitely think it’s not for everybody. You know, it’s, uh, it definitely sucks to to lose sometimes, but I think if you can build that right DNA and build that right culture and.
Build the right amount of safe space to experiment. And the, the thing I, I used to always tell the growth team at RAMP was, Hey, the only time that we are, the only time that we are losing is if we are not learning from the experiment. If it works, great, fantastic. That’s a win. [00:35:00] If it doesn’t work, but we learn something from that, that’s also a win.
What we can’t do is not hold ourselves accountable for finding the learning. And I think ultimately same thing at Unify. That matters a lot. But, uh, I like it. I, I thrive in this environment.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love that. I love that. I don’t think she actually started the saying, but she’s who I first heard it from. But Pa Akia, the founder of ClassPass in her book. Life path said, failure’s just a data point. And so like you said, if you’re not getting that data point from it, that’s actually the failure.
Otherwise, it’s just data at the end of the day.
Austin Hughes: totally.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what did you really have to unlearn when you became a founder after building these teams of scale, especially at ramp?
Austin Hughes: I think the frameworks still really apply. You know, I would say like how to operate, how to grow a growth team, all that sort of stuff is very, is something that I definitely learned from. And I think, like another thing that I really learned was you gotta, it, it’s all hard work. You know, I think outside data always looks up into the right, but like under the hood it’s, it’s a lot of hard work that’s going [00:36:00] in these things.
And I think you can’t discount that. In terms of unlearning, it’s really important to I think just be o open-minded, especially like the first time for me, I, when I was stepping into starting Unify first time founder, I. Learning all these experiences for the first time, I think it’s, it’s important to be open-minded about that and to not write things off ahead of time.
I also think the biggest thing that I’ve had to do is at an earlier stage, you just have to take big swings. And, you know, I join Rampant 40 people. When you join a company that has some reasonable amount of scale, you start getting into more of a mindset of like, you’re taking less, you’re not taking quite as big of swings.
Oftentimes. Usually it’s like, Hey, how do we build the machine 25 50% better? Not, how do we think about this crazy outside the box idea that’s gonna take us to the next level? I think one of the biggest things that I’ve had to reset. That I have to think about that often. What is like the step change function that we’re missing out on?
What is the thing that could really, really work that doesn’t today? And I think that’s just something you just gotta, I, I’ve become a lot more accustomed to [00:37:00] practicing over the past two years and it’s now a ton of fun for me. But I don’t think it was as natural when I first got going in the company besides the idea of like, Hey, we’re gonna go start a new company and go raise money and all that stuff.
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. I’m really interested to hear your perspective around this, of course. Ai. What are your thoughts on AI’s impact on growth teams? Do early stage companies? Still need growth teams or is it shifting towards great ai? It.
Austin Hughes: They definitely do. I think there’s just like a lot of slop that AI can create. I ai leveraged in the right way is obviously fantastic. I use it. So many times every day to do my just general day job. But I do think that there is a ton of. Things that AI can’t do. AI cannot be a very good strategist today.
I think that will evolve over time and you’ll start to have humans assisted on the strategy side by ai, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. So I do think having a great growth team is really important. One of the things that AI has really opened up in growth teams is just like the ability to marry growth and sales teams in a way that wasn’t possible before.
I think one of the things that we’re seeing the [00:38:00] best teams doing today. Is bringing together how their growth team works with their BDR team as an example, and having that be a system that works together rather than a sort of silo, disjointed set of teams that didn’t get along super well. Like I think we started unify.
One of the things that was really common that we would hear is, I. Marketers would be like, yeah, I’ll give my list of prospects to the BDR team and they’ll just never follow up. And it’s super painful. And I think what we found is that AI has actually been a really good bridge for that. And our own product is becoming more and more that surface area.
But the answer was a lot of times like, yeah, like BDRs oftentimes have really great prospects and folks they want to go after. If you make their lives easier using ai, then sure they’re gonna lean into it more. But if you just try to give them more work, they won’t. I think in that context we’re finding that the best teams are able to use AI to sort of like grease the wheels and make sure that, hey, we’re not asking teams to do work, that they could actually be, we could be automating.
And so that’s been, I think, really exciting.
Sophie Buonassisi: If I push you a bit further on that, what does that look like tactically? You mentioned in the product, it [00:39:00] could be in your product, it could be external of your product, but what does that actual lockstep look like?
Austin Hughes: For a growth team, AI is a way to automate actions. And it’s a way to scale creativity, right? So, you know, you run a plan in unify. Historically, we’ve had to run this manual job. We can automate all the prospecting work to 10,000 accounts in a matter of minutes that, that wasn’t possible before.
But let’s say you got, you know, a thousand in there that you think are really worth doubling down on and having humans dial into them, all that stuff. What that looks like in practice, in Unify is that you actually can pass those prospects off to a BDR. You can share with them all of the research that you’ve done of why this is somebody that’s interesting to go after.
Hey, this is a tier one account. Hey, you know, I noticed they’re using X, Y, Z competitors. I know that because they mention them on these job postings that are no longer up. I saw that they hired X, Y, Z people really recently. I think it’s about just sharing that context, right? In a, in the, like the right accessible way where that person doesn’t have to go look for it.
And you do that. [00:40:00] Somebody’s gonna take the action then because they’ve got all this research, it’s all powered by AI behind the scenes. Maybe in the future you can ask questions and say like, Hey, like, okay, but I wanna know about this as well. Like, what is this data point? And we actually can pull that up.
So I think it’s just a matter of simplifying the workflow, right? Historically, what you would’ve seen is that. And we saw this when we were building the first version Unified product, we would literally see BDRs open 10 tabs and like go do this research of like going to everyone’s website over and over again.
And, we’re just distilling that into like one screen where somebody can just act very quickly and have all the data that they need.
Sophie Buonassisi: The browser tabs are being minimized. That is always a plus.
Austin Hughes: Yes.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what about AI’s impact on other areas? Are there workflows that you’ve automated at Unify that have material improved your own Go-To-Market outcomes, or that you’re seeing customers do?
Austin Hughes: Two of the areas that we’re seeing a lot of impact on today, well, three. One is using our own product. We actually power, depending on the quarter, anywhere between, call it like 15 to 30% of our new business from our own product. And [00:41:00] so
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow.
Austin Hughes: that’s obviously been a huge application and a huge growth accelerant for us. We also see that, I think two areas, customer support, uh, is a big one. And then just insights from sales calls. So customer support, we use pylon. And I think this idea of. Your support team shouldn’t need to scale linearly with your company anymore, is how we think about it historically, right? When you grew your company, you needed to hire more support reps ’cause you had more tickets.
But today one of the key North Star metrics that we track internally is what percent of support tickets are we fully automating with an AI agent? And we want that number to continuously be going up into the right. To do that, we have to be building new articles, new knowledge base pieces that. AI can learn from and answer from.
But if we continue to do that well we’re seeing that that’s paying a ton of dividends in terms of us just being able to deliver a better customer experience for the users of our product. So that’s been a huge win. Another area is this idea of learning from sales calls. You know, just like we use attention for that personally for call recording, which is another great product.[00:42:00]
And you know, we are. You know, I just, last night I was poking around and I’m trying to understand like competitive analysis on us versus how are people talking about our competitors? Is it on pricing? Is it on feature functionality? What are the things they care about historically, right? You would’ve had to literally go parse through, I don’t know, hundreds of calls and just like try to like control F and look for the right.
You know, verbiage, et cetera. But I actually now can just run that analysis in a matter of minutes and understand exactly who’s saying what. I can dive into the insights and the anecdotes that people are mentioning, and I’m excited about how that’s gonna feed into our product roadmap. I’m excited about how that’s gonna feed into how we better objection handle against certain things that competitors bring up.
So, lots, lots more to come there, but I think it really is transforming, it makes us just ask, Hey, like, is there a better way of doing this? At any, at every step of the journey, which is a lot of fun,
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. And what are you most excited about looking forward if you pull out your magic ball? Around operationalizing and supporting your Go-To-Market with [00:43:00] AI that maybe we’re not at yet, but you anticipate we’re getting to.
Austin Hughes: we’re at the precipice of an unlock where. This idea of relevance, right? Is at, at the fingertips of ai. Like we historically haven’t been there because you need, you need this unique combination of data and. The workflow layer around that data to be able to create that at scale. And I think we’re just a couple quarters away from being able to do that with our own product at Unify, where we actually can just send hyper relevant messages to the right people at the right time.
You know, we have, I. We definitely have strong messaging capabilities, but there’s a level of like being able to mimic humans, understand their intonation on a personal level, being able to pull in, um, you know, just in time research on whatever data point you care about. And I think that unlock is gonna be really big because I think we’re gonna get to a point very soon where spotting AI slot today in your inbox is pretty easy, but I don’t think it’s gonna be as easy with a lot of great products in the next, like six to 12 [00:44:00] months. So that’ll be something that’ll be a, a really interesting unlock.
Sophie Buonassisi: Very, yeah, we’re definitely in the transitional phase right now where some are being done incredibly well and, and some quite the opposite, so it’ll be interesting to see that at more at mass. What is on the product roadmap? If you can share, if you’re open to sharing anything, coming up down the pipe Yeah,
Austin Hughes: yeah. We’ve been doing a ton of work for BDRs, so lots more to share there very soon. But one thing that’s been a very common thread over the past year and change is that, uh, you know, our product was originally built for growth teams, right? Which is a very unorthodox way of thinking about outbound, but we found that growth teams, the.
Experimentation. The idea of using plays, kind of like campaigns really resonated. But something that was always missing was, Hey, great, like, but I’ve got this, you know, really high value prospect. I wanna pass that off to my sales team. How do I do that? Historically, that was something that we didn’t do.
We would pass it off to, you know, we’d create a task in Salesforce or something like that. But it was [00:45:00] pretty, pretty rudimentary. Coming soon. We have a big announcement around, our work for BDRs and in particular, how they work really closely with somebody we called to be like the outbound quarterback, who’s sort of our main champion today.
And, we’re using this product internally today, and it’s been mind blowing. So excited to share with the
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow, alright, we’ll keep our eyes out. And Austin, last two questions always the same. What is one tactic or strategy that’s working for you today? And I know we’ve talked about a bunch, so maybe if there’s one you haven’t touched on yet.
Austin Hughes: One tactic that’s working for me today. We, I’ve just got it. I just, it’s, it’s too good. Just not the hammer home, the. You’ve gotta own, I think social today in this world, it’s, it’s a really important medium. And you know, I think y’all obviously do this incredibly well at at the GTM Fund, but for us at Unified, just like the level of credibility that we’ve gotten from LinkedIn in particular, and just like being prolific writers about our space I couldn’t overstate how valuable that’s been to us.
And so, even though we’ve talked about it already, I do [00:46:00] think it’s important to just like reinforce, it’s like. For us, LinkedIn is where our audience lives. It’s where we reach them. And that’s been really powerful for us. You know, I, I think most of the companies that are taking off today have some form of social that they really own, whether it’s LinkedIn or X or Discord or whatever it might be.
Just know where your audience is and start practicing reaching them. ’cause it’s just been, it’s just been so powerful for us.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a great one to hammer, hone, and a really good kind of note there, just around your audience lives in different places, so figure out where they are and then show up in those places.
What about if we flip that on its head a little bit, what’s one widely held belief that revenue hold leaders or founders have today that you think is bullshit or no longer serving us?
Austin Hughes: I just think this idea of, I think the role of the marketer and the growth person is really changing and. I think no one’s quite put their finger on this yet, but I, I do think that this era of hire a traditional marketer to go do a small segment of the [00:47:00] marketing function is, is slowly, it’s not working.
Um, we see it happen time and time again with our customers, but I, I do think you’re gonna see this rise of. Call it a growth engineer. Call it like, just like a growth operator, call it like a growth manager. This idea of somebody who owns a pipeline goal, who is more technical, who is more systems oriented, who can think from first principles and and problem solve.
I do think we’re gonna see a lot more of the rise of that person as sort of the go-to marketer going forward and the go-to person who owns pipeline goals. And people are starting to put their finger on this, but I still think it’s quite early. And just time and time again, we find that the best folks are the ones who are able to.
Take product like principles and apply them to growth. And so that’s what I’m, I’m really bullish on
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. What a fantastic way to end off. And Austin, where can people find you? I know we talked about LinkedIn, so I’m, I’m gonna throw out LinkedIn already, but where should people find you?
Austin Hughes: Find me on LinkedIn. Definitely that’s a, a great spot. And then you can also find me on X or [00:48:00] Twitter at Austin h with three underscores after that.
Sophie Buonassisi: Beautiful. We will link to those in the show notes. Austin, thank you so much for the time, for the insight. Excited for that launch in a couple weeks. We’re gonna keep our eyes out and to the audience, thank you for hanging with us.
Austin Hughes: Thanks for having me, Sophie.
Sophie Buonassisi: You bet. All right, we’ll catch everyone next week.
