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Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
Guy Yalif (00:00.078)
Ahem.
Tye DeGrange (00:01.658)
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to your new favorite podcast about SaaS growth. SaaS class. This is the first episode. We've got Guy and Nancy. Guy, Nancy, how are you?
Guy Yalif (00:14.894)
Doing great, let's go!
Tye DeGrange (00:16.954)
This is something we're really excited about, a new concept, monthly operator grade, talking about SaaS growth, we're talking about partner growth, partner strategy, and AI native execution. And I think we have the best people in the world to talk about those things, right?
Nancy Harnett (00:17.33)
doing great.
Nancy Harnett (00:38.908)
sure.
Guy Yalif (00:40.054)
and the three of us.
Tye DeGrange (00:41.231)
Hahaha
Nancy Harnett (00:41.435)
I'm
Tye DeGrange (00:44.568)
Yes. I think people are going to appreciate it and we're going to see how goes and let's have some fun. Today we're talking AEO is the new SEO, right? I think that's something that we're all seeing a lot of and Nancy was so gracious as to suggest. We've been discussing how AI, SaaS,
Nancy Harnett (01:00.604)
Yes.
Tye DeGrange (01:11.546)
All of these changes are happening rather quickly, in particular with all the exciting things going on with HubSpot and with Webflow, with what we're seeing. So I think there's going to be a lot to talk about. How can SAS teams win in the AI-first discovery world? Where do you guys want to jump in there? There's a lot going on.
Guy Yalif (01:33.004)
I couldn't agree more with Nancy that, AEO is close to a good SEO should have been, that genuinely valuable to original content that helps your prospects through the funnel. Fundamentally that gets rewarded. and that, you know, I've heard some people say, Hey, SEO is dead. SEO has been called dead prematurely so many times. It's totally not dead. And your SEO team and agency are your AEO team and agency because.
LLMs are running searches almost every query and they are correlated. 52 % of Google's AI overviews are in their top 10 search results. So Nancy, I couldn't agree with you more.
Nancy Harnett (02:15.024)
Yeah, I think this is the hot topic right now. Everyone is trying to get in on this game. At HubSpot, we started about 12 to 18 months ago. We saw the shift coming and we started to pivot and we started to make some moves and it really paid off for us. You know, the affiliate program was a huge lever in that success and...
Yeah, I think any insights that we can provide in this format, I think will be very, very valuable. And I know, Ty, you're working on some AEO initiatives via RBL as well for some clients. So it would be great to get your insights on that as well.
Tye DeGrange (02:51.01)
Yeah, I appreciate it. I would say that just similar kind of echoing what you're all saying. We've been of course, pleasantly surprised by, okay, how do we map this AI citation world, this AI shift, the user behavior, right? And the obvious question is, if you look at the partnerships world and the affiliate world, which of those are kind of showing up and impacting? There's some correlation there obviously around.
you know, the AI LM citation measurement. So just being able to map it, you know, and have the visibility for the first time is, is shockingly, uh, we're shockingly new in that world as you referenced, right? And so it, I've been pleasantly surprised to see not always the case in various samples and different prompts and different brands. You're to see different things of course, but to see almost 50 % of the time an affiliate.
content site that we have access to literally show up and have an impact in AILM's is something that's really powerful. it's exciting convergence of like the SEO world you guys and you both referenced, right? The technical world that you all have lived through and seen firsthand, the partnerships world. So I think it's really exciting. it's, know, Nancy, you mentioned early to get a headstart 12, 18 months ago.
The gains you're seeing now are kind of got to be absolute mad, like wild compared to if someone were to start two months ago, right?
Nancy Harnett (04:27.218)
Yeah, for sure. I suppose someone said to me in Vegas not too long ago when we were at ASW, that you're probably about two years ahead of everyone else now. And in essence, we probably are. I mean, in six months of 2025, from July to December, we launched over a thousand pieces of content across various different affiliate sites and publishers and blogs and listicles.
And that resulted in like over 200,000 citations in just that six month period alone. And out of those thousand pieces, 76 % of those were cited in LLMs. And that in itself was significant because it was a much higher baseline than what we were seeing from the rest of the data. And so we had the secret sauce. We were just applying it. And essentially now we're trying to apply that to our customers by giving that out in
the new product that was just launched, also in Playbooks. And, you know, that's why we're here today sharing our insights in from, what you're doing with your clients type, but also guide what you're learning from, from Webflow and what you're pushing out into the world. It's crazy. It's crazy that the impact that, you know, such a program that was always fully tied to revenue and affiliate program is now having top of funnel and middle of funnel impact. And even further.
in the AI world, which is crazy.
Guy Yalif (05:53.59)
And I think it's, resonates so strongly and across the millions of sites we host, see similar patterns, where the LLMs ultimately are looking for consensus and affiliates create more opportunities for you to create plain text, hopefully positive mentions in many different places. It's like, it's like each one of those is another repetition of teaching someone something, you know, that the LLMs then get to see.
over and over again. And it's interesting because you can have an impact tomorrow, literally tomorrow, not metaphorically tomorrow, because they're running searches all the time, which is like this huge upside to having impact. It's also early innings in a new medium where I think there are huge bargains to be had right now. And I don't mean in terms of ads, that'll happen too when those markets, marketplaces fire up at scale.
But rather in terms of the energy you put in and the benefit you get out, it's out of balance in your favor if you're working on AEO. But the one thing I'll share in addition is that like some people are then saying, I'm all in on AEO. And in my humble opinion, that is not right because for most of the CMOs I've talked to, AEO, like LLM referred human traffic is low to mid single digit percentages.
great. But if you focused all on that, you'd be ignoring the other what 95 % plus of organic traffic. And so it's better, in my humble opinion, to say, I'm going to treat it bigger than it is. I don't know if it's 5%, maybe I'm going treat it like 15, 20, 25 % of my traffic, I'm going to give it that level of energy. I made up those numbers, but like that concept, but not 100 zero because it's not there yet. It's rapidly growing exponentially, but it's not there yet.
Tye DeGrange (07:48.58)
But that growth rate is sort of like, I would imagine what you're alluding to of like why you're over indexing on it, right?
Guy Yalif (07:55.768)
Yes, 100%. That's why it warrants more energy than the current percentage of traffic suggests.
Tye DeGrange (08:02.818)
And just to give the audience more context on what the heck's going on here. always be testing weekly show. Guy and Nancy are absolute amazing in their worlds on a number of levels, from SaaS, AI, partnerships. It goes without saying. So SaaS class, what we're trying to do here is do a monthly and really solve one hard problem per month. So.
Hopefully we get there and we can land the plane and we can talk a little bit about it. I think getting suggestions from the audience, getting learnings and feedback from the audience would be fantastic, as well as maybe eventually having folks come on to kind of work through some of these real live problems with us as opposed to being too high level. I think that's one of the goals we're trying to achieve. So for those of you listening, that's what we're doing. Hope to do.
Today, so we talked a little bit about this at a time and Nancy and Guy had some great ideas around it. So that first stop in the buyer journey, know, chat GPT, perplexity, not as much Google. Like Guy said, the percentages are maybe low for now, but they're growing very quickly and user behavior is growing really quickly. So where do we stand now in top of funnel? What does that look like and who owns it? I think that was a really great framing.
How do we think about that and how do we want to try to frame up that piece and that challenge? Who owns the new type of funnel, if you will?
Nancy Harnett (09:36.7)
Yeah, I suppose that's the problem that we started to solve for 12 to 18 months ago at HubSpot. we went into it with a hypothesis of if we under pay on influence today and under invest on that influence, are we going to pay more for demand tomorrow? And going in with that kind of, hey, we'll give this a go and see if it works mindset really did help us in getting to the next stage and actually ramping up the work that we were doing there.
I think for the top of funnel, it's no longer transparent. AI search is now taking over. There is a black box there where essentially we can't see into who is searching what, what are the search volumes. No prompt is the same. And ultimately, that's the challenge that you're having to work with as a brand. So you're having to kind of...
almost put together an environment, a production environment that isn't yet live to your customers. And you're just trying to essentially simulate what they're going to be doing. And that's what prompts are. That's what we're trying to track. We're trying to track those prompts and ultimately see and predict what our customers are going to be asking at the top of the funnel. But I think ultimately, who owns it is still a question that no one can really answer.
I think there's a lot of teams and a lot of different activities that are going to go into actually ensuring that you're going to be successful there. And I'm sure Guy, you've got some insights there from Webflow as well. But for us, my team's goal was, how can we help customers who are looking for any sort of a solution that HubSpot might be able to help with discover us when they're searching on AI search?
And that's why we started to look at where the citations were coming from with our top prompts. What would our ideal customer be asking AI? And we started to create content around that to try and get AI responses to essentially suggest hotspot. And we could have started around position three. We started moving up to two, and then now we're at number one. And we are the number one most visible CRM.
Nancy Harnett (11:49.01)
across AI search and that is no small feat, but it has taken a long, time to get there. So yeah, like, you know, it's still an unanswered question in my book, but Guy, do you have any insights?
Guy Yalif (12:03.342)
very aligned with everything you're saying. You know, who owns that first step? Forrester surveyed a bunch of B2B marketers. 95 % of them said, yeah, LLM is going to be part of my buyer journey this year. And so it is an important influencer. We observe in the data that Tofu citations tend to be more off site. know, both who tends to be more on site.
I've heard some say, great, I don't need to create tofu content on my site anymore. In my humble opinion, that's totally wrong. You still need to create the tofu content because other sites and the LLMs will still go crawl your site and need to see how your story is told your way upper funnel. Okay. We too have been investing a ton in it. Like you have Nancy, we are fortunate to be able to say the same thing. We are visible in 67 % of the answers.
that we care about, which makes us the most visible CMS across AI search, despite one other having much higher market share WordPress. And we've done that by focusing on four different categories, which I invite our audience to think about their SEO to AEO work in those four categories as well, content, technical authority and measurement. in content, you're basically going from
the topics we care about being clusters of keywords to the topics we care about being represented as the questions our buyers are asking through the funnel and then answering those throughout the funnel in depth. In technical, the LLMs incrementally value more than Google does, basically serving it up on a silver platter. Same content written for humans, but easily consumed by the LLM. So you've got this like engaging, emotionally evocative experience for the humans. And then this really concise,
text-based because that's easier to parse for the LLMs, description of the structure and meaning of the content for them. In authority, it's what we were talking about. Widespread positive mentions, links optional. And in measurement, were, you mentioned it some, Nancy, and both of our companies have just launched things in this space for different use cases to see how often am I showing up in the answers to the questions I care about? What's my share of voice?
Guy Yalif (14:25.994)
And ultimately, what was the sentiment? What was the message pulled through? What was the accuracy? Concepts that just didn't exist with Google search because they were using our words. Ty, what do you see?
Tye DeGrange (14:38.244)
I love the concept of the depth and I have questions about that I want to dive more into, but in terms of what we're seeing, think it feels exciting to be early in just being able to, not to set the bar too low, but in our world, just to map the ecosystem. And I know I mentioned that a little bit, but just having the visibility, affiliate, partner, influencer, it's been running for years. There's value there, if it's run well, it's often not. So if it's run well,
But people don't know where it's impacting AI LLMs. That's a problem. And so just to be able to say, here's the roadmap, here's the visibility, here's what you're missing out on, did you not know that 25 % of your partners are having a positive impact in AI citations? That's a big change in how people think about affiliate and partner than what they did three years ago. And so the other exciting thing is there's specific partners that are helping tackle GEO and AEO, because
That's one of the beauties of affiliate partner marketing. These are entrepreneurs that can get in and do new things and test the emerging channels you want to be on those new waves. And so that's really exciting to have a roadmap of high level visibility for partner and affiliate marketing that says this is impacting AI citations. Then you have these specific partners that are leading the charge and being really innovative, which is historically what they do well if they're given the right parameters.
And then on top of that, from our perspective, it's been really exciting to also work with really insane expertise where they have a really crazy head start, multi-year head start just like you two have, where it's like you're literally ahead of the game. We got a $6 billion SaaS brand from 10 to top three in 45 days, multiple LLMs. And that's exciting, right? That's what you guys are seeing as well.
It's still a learning, there's still a long way to go, but that's some of the stuff I'm seeing.
Nancy Harnett (16:36.754)
and sing.
Guy Yalif (16:36.974)
Both of you made me think that in some sense, those mentions from affiliates, it's like the new backlinks. And to your point, it's now upper funnel, not just lower funnel performance. And I think the universe has expanded where the data we saw said that LLMs are sending traffic to 2.5x the number of domains. So 1.5x more than search did.
lots of opportunity to go reach out at scale to domains that we're not used to people reaching out to them. Firms like Noble and others are helping do that at scale so that you can get mentioned more often in more of like backlinks used to be rather than a full on affiliate relationship. And hopefully you are doing it with all of your affiliates as well.
Tye DeGrange (17:29.882)
The thing that I would love to touch on is the depth and like authority question that we were kind of going off of and that seems to be coming up a lot. And then I also want to dig into, you guys have some cool news dropping to kind of tease that out for the audience because I think that's really powerful. But I'd love to maybe explore the depth piece because that's fascinating to me. That seems to be a reoccurring theme of like, there's authority, there's the structure.
There's those, those kinds of key, key factors that you referenced guy in terms of AI visibility and citations. And I'd love to hear maybe us explore that, that depth piece. Like, is it, is it vastly different from, from SEO? How much more different is it from like a depth perspective? I think that's a really interesting one about, is it really thorough? Is it really authoritative? You know, that, that, what are your thoughts on that?
Nancy Harnett (18:28.015)
you want to take it.
Guy Yalif (18:29.614)
Sure, happy to. I think it begins with choosing where you want to go deep. And it's a little bit different, not a ton different than SEO. think, okay, you know the questions your prospects are asking, but if you want some additional data to support it, run an LLM over your GONG calls. Run an LLM over your sales and support emails. That is literally ground truth. Those are literally the questions being asked. And so,
you can go build content for those. And then to your point about depth, the tail is longer. And so in some sense, writing deeper. So first, write throughout the funnel, like, you know, what's the CMS, let's compare these CMSs, how long will it take to implement a CMS? Okay, but then write deeper, all with the goal, not because longer is better on its own, but because you want to have more opportunity to have similarity to the questions being asked.
And like in SEO land, I'll make up a silly example. Would I write content for what's it like to personalize in Austin on a mobile device on a weekday for somebody who saw this campaign? Like no way in a EO time, maybe now that particular example is silly, but the notion that you would go right that deep for that far down the tail because the LLMs may find some similarity or question somebody's asking.
In my mind, that's different. Nancy, how do you feel about it?
Nancy Harnett (20:01.124)
Yeah, I think local search is very, very easy to gain right now because you're able to go in and you're able to create that real, real specific content touching on, hey, I'm a small business owner in London based with 10 employees, et cetera. And like you can write pieces of content to speak directly to those. But on the broader sense, you need to look at, like you said there, Guy.
run the LLM over your Gantt calls. Look at what your actual prospects are asking and start writing the content for them. You can write different variations of it. Different publishers are going to perform better because that's what their audience is looking at. So for us, when we're thinking about authority and depth and everything in between, we're also looking at the actual performance of their blog. What part of the growth Gabby for us here at HubSpot, that's our ICP.
what part of the GropGabi funnel do they appear in? Are they more top of funnel? Are they more medium or middle of funnel? Are they more bottom of funnel? And then we change up the actual content for that. And I think we've seen some great learnings from it. We've had some flops, absolutely. And we've been able then to go in and say, listen, this isn't working, but let's tweak it a small bit and see what does work. But the other thing that we found really interesting was how
different it is across different geos. So you've got English content. Obviously, everyone right now is fighting for English content. But we also rolled this out in French and in German. And the learnings from those regions were completely different from those in English. domain authority did not matter in those regions. It was just about touching on relevant topics. It was having really, really well structured content.
touching on the actual answers that people were looking for and then actually getting that content out onto authoritative sources or with good followings, if you wanted to put it that way. They didn't have to be high traffic sources. They didn't have to be high domain authority. It just needed to answer the question. And now we're applying that to Spain as well. And obviously, Spanish is a much larger region. It's similar to English, but it's going to be similar learnings. What does work in those regions?
Nancy Harnett (22:23.778)
And so we're excited to see this. But the learnings, I think I've spoken to a couple of different brands. Every brand is seeing a different variation of what we've seen. And it's never going to be one size fits all. It needs to be adapted to whatever your world is. And I think if you're going in hoping that there's like a playbook that you can just plug and play, that's not what's going to happen. You just got to go with the punches right now.
Guy Yalif (22:50.027)
Go ahead, Ty.
Tye DeGrange (22:51.672)
was gonna take us into the measurement and tracking of that lens and its impacts, but if you have something to follow on their guide, go for it.
Guy Yalif (22:59.02)
I was going to bridge between the two based on what Nancy was saying in that our lens on the measurement is tied to that, that there isn't a, here's the thing to do and it will always work, rather here's some higher probability place to go run and you need to optimize for experimenting quickly. And our news this week was about launching measurement around appearing in LLMs on the philosophy of having
this rapidly iterating closed loop so you can learn quickly and experiment quickly. So you can have an agent suggest things based on looking at your site. Hey, here's some high probability place to go run, then have a non-coding marketer be able to say, yep, I like that. I'm human reviewing it. Go implement that. Sometimes those are content things. Sometimes those are
technical things that you really need an engineer and a marketer in the room at the same time to do, which like never happens. So it's very good to be able to enable the marketer to do and then go measure it and see, did it work? And then feed that back in and that closed loop. for me is very familiar from the company. had the privilege of co-founding and CEOing cause that was in conversion rate optimization where that mental model of here, high probability place to run. You want to go learn what's right in this situation, run them as quickly as possible.
Exactly to what you said, Nancy, I feel a parallel meta pattern here in AEO where that speed and our approach to it is being able to iterate on it quickly in a closed loop is part of winning strategy. How does that land for the two of you?
Tye DeGrange (24:41.114)
I love that. And I love the parallels with your CRO, amazing science experiment background, right? It's something that we can both identify with.
Nancy Harnett (24:54.874)
I'm aligned. I love what you say Guy, always.
Guy Yalif (24:59.832)
Right back at you. And you've got some news to share too from this week.
Nancy Harnett (25:04.134)
I do. Yeah, HubSpot launched a new product during the week. We launched an AEO product that allows our customers to now track their sentiment, their share of voice, their everything in between, all in HubSpot. And it's not just built into HubSpot. You can actually buy it as a standalone product as well. But the one thing that...
Tye DeGrange (25:04.388)
Drum roll please.
Nancy Harnett (25:29.65)
I've loved about this whole journey of this product is we as a business acquired XFunnel back last year and XFunnel is essentially what powers this product. The XFunnel data is what we've used over the last number of months, know, 12 to 18 months to actually power the journey that we've been on. Whether that's been on site, whether that's been off site, whether that's technical, we've been able to take all the insights and actually apply it into our strategy of label.
And now we're essentially handing that to our customers. And there's different elements of it that are going to be built out more over the next coming weeks. And I'm excited for the next part of this roadmap. But ultimately, the feedback has been great. The actual use cases have been fantastic from the beta users that we've had and what is up and coming, the new users that we've had over the last couple of days.
So yeah, really excited to see what happens. The insights are super invaluable. And yeah, anyone now can get started with a you and it's coming in at a really, really affordable price point, which is the main thing, especially when you're a small customer trying to get started, you're trying to like find your footing with this. So that was definitely one part. And the second part was obviously that Reddit for business. And I know we haven't really touched on Reddit here today.
And for Reddit plays a huge part in a yo because the whole thing with a yo is finding context and finding trustworthy voices to actually give you an answer. And Reddit has been a huge success for us. We went from like a hundred odd citations last year to now over a hundred and forty six thousand citations within seven months. Like that is a savage amount of growth. And ultimately.
We use those practitioner insights. We sat down with that product team on the social insights team and we said, here is what we're doing to win on Reddit. And I think one of the big things that we drove home with our product team was that Reddit is not a marketing channel. It's not a broadcast channel. Reddit is a community and you have to build it as such. You can't just go in and broadcast your message. You will rightly so be removed and banned and blacklisted and everything in between.
Nancy Harnett (27:45.744)
You have to grow it slowly and has to be done strategically. And so we essentially sat down, we wrote the playbook and we handed that to our product team. We built in exactly where HubSpot could help along that journey. And they built that into the product. And that is live today for like our pro and enterprise customers. you know, it's, it's insane. Everyone that has used it so far has loved it. And we're now using it as well. We've been.
in beta testing for a while and we've been really loving what's coming out there.
Tye DeGrange (28:18.636)
I love that. And that went live this week, Nancy.
Nancy Harnett (28:22.598)
Yeah, when live on Tuesday.
Tye DeGrange (28:24.6)
Wow, that's amazing. I can't wait to try it and get going on it. yeah, excited to learn more. That's big news being dropped.
Nancy Harnett (28:35.1)
Definitely.
Guy Yalif (28:35.182)
Congratulations, that is awesome. the like, hey, we were customer zero and then product use that as input resonates so very strongly. We did the same thing on AEO and measurement and on Reddit in talking with them and with a bunch of marketers. I could not agree with you more that it is it's not a traditional marketing channel and you will get destroyed if you do traditional marketing on the organic side.
In talking with them, were saying, hey, it is okay to be a marketer in the ads. You can do marketing, speak there, just don't do it in organic. And I've heard some people say, I need to now go figure out Reddit organic, which as you said, we too have experienced that we are participating in Reddit organic, but we took some time to learn the norms of the subreddits we care about. We have a whole team thinking and crafting.
how we engage so that it's not pitchy. It's just genuinely helpful. We self-declare, just as you said, if you don't self-declare, if you work for the company, you will get booted and you should be. The one humble thing I would suggest to folks is before jumping on Reddit ads is one thing. Reddit organic takes a lot of effort. before jumping on that, just go look at how often Reddit is cited in the answer to the questions you care about.
For some folks, will be really important, exactly to your point. It has risen in importance so much more than it did pre-LLMs. And for other folks, it's not there, in which case the ads, maybe through Hotspot, is probably the right way to go before devoting a ton of time to build a new muscle in this community.
Nancy Harnett (30:22.31)
Yeah, 100%. We, being completely transparent. 10 months ago, I knew nothing about Reddit. I knew nothing about Reddit. My team knew nothing about Reddit, but we took it on as kind of a challenge to see what could we do with it. We spent about three months just working with our community team, figuring out what works, what the different decorums were in the different subreddits, working with moderators, learning the different rules and the do's and don'ts. And then we started to put that into practice.
We built this with our community team. Our community team are the people in there every day talking to customers, building out the different criterias and really like answering the questions that people have burning on the back of their head. And so we're now putting that into practice. We've really done a great job of it. And ultimately, we wanted to hand that to our customers so that they can do the very same thing. You don't have to have your own subreddit. We have that because we're a very large enterprise brand, but you don't have to do that. You can just get involved in what is happening in
the right way across the entire platform. It is a very delicate ecosystem and you have to treat it as such. If you do it wrong, you're going to get banned and burned and everything in between. you know, it's it's been very, very fun getting to know that entire ecosystem over the last 10 months.
Tye DeGrange (31:39.204)
Yeah, I think that it's been so wild to see that the partnership with Google, the rise of how instrumental it's been in LLMs and in just like a trust-based, user-generated community. We're seeing it a lot in terms of our suggestions and optimizations for clients. And so I couldn't agree more. And it's wild to see some of those impacts that feel like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube are sort of...
risen the ranks pretty heavily. I'm curious to know where you think at the level there's kind of stacking up. Obviously it's going to be dependent on query and brand and situation, but those seem to be rising pretty heavily from what I can see. curious to get your perspective on those three in particular, especially as it relates to things like sentiment. What are your thoughts on those?
Nancy Harnett (32:29.98)
Yeah, think, yeah, RIDA is going to continue to be a powerhouse. I think it's only growing in influence because people want to share their actual experience with a brand or with a product. And even this morning, I was Googling EV chargers and I was getting so frustrated with the search results because even though it was localized, it wasn't telling me, you know, any pricing, wasn't telling me any experiences like who was a great installer.
And so I went on to AI, went on to like Chatty PT, I went on to Claude, I went on to Jim and I, and I was Googling the different versions. It gave me a bunch of names. I then went on to Reddit. And that was the first thing I did was looked for genuine use cases who had the best experience. And that is where people are searching nowadays. They want the real truth. They don't want the brand amplification. And that's where marketing has really shifted. When
You know, someone is looking for a solution. The brand isn't even in the room anymore when that whole intent is formed. The brand is nowhere near that. It is now a synthesized answer based on content that is out there in the world and based on actual users and actual customers of that brand telling the actual story. And sentiment is a huge thing. You know, you're going to have people complaining about certain things on different platforms and
That is completely fine and that is absolutely necessary in today's world. You need that transparency. But it's important as a brand to then be in that conversation and say, hey, listen, this is why we have the pricing that we have, or here is why the product doesn't do this functionality or we're working on it. And meet them where they're at. Explain to them why it is the way it is.
I think it's going to continue growing in influence. think it's going to continue being a great source of citations for the next year or two anyway. I think I would like to see more forums getting involved here, like Cora and you're going to have Product Hunt for the likes of B2B SaaS. All of these different ones coming into play. I know that Facebook is starting to grow in influence as well with regards to Facebook forums. So the more that we can get in Forumland, I think the better it will be because we'll have real voices there to actually...
Nancy Harnett (34:44.262)
you know, hear from and play with.
Tye DeGrange (34:47.322)
absolutely love that. I could not agree more. I think it's just, why not take the greatest hits of those that are real genuine, trusted voices and community conversations. That's brilliant. I love that.
Guy Yalif (35:04.718)
If we can step out of character, or not character, but just out of the flow for one second, I recognize we've got five minutes. We didn't actually introduce ourselves. Should we redo the very beginning and then do the very end?
Tye DeGrange (35:15.962)
Yeah. Yes. Good idea. Good idea. No. No, thank you. Cool. Why don't I, you want me to kind of reframe the premise and then introduce myself briefly and then you guys or trying to get the full...
Guy Yalif (35:20.43)
Just the thought, didn't mean to interrupt our flow, because the three of us could clearly talk for hours, very happily.
Guy Yalif (35:41.688)
And you can just slice and splice later on as you see fit.
Tye DeGrange (35:44.25)
Amazing.
Welcome to the first inaugural episode of SaaS class. This is your new favorite pod about SaaS growth. I'm so excited to be here. Tied a Granger, your host, co-founder. I haven't done that in a while. I'm your host Tied a Grange founder and CEO of Round Barn Labs. Also the host of the Always Be Testing podcast. Absolutely thrilled to have some.
Nancy Harnett (36:03.27)
First slice, your editor's gonna kill you.
Tye DeGrange (36:16.6)
of the best people in SaaS and AI and partner marketing here with me. I got Nancy and Guy.
Nancy Harnett (36:24.316)
Hey everyone, I'm Nancy. I head up affiliate and offsite AEO here at HubSpot. Very excited to be here today with two of the best in the industry talking all things SaaS class. We're taking real problems and actually bringing you solutions. So I'm excited. Guy?
Guy Yalif (36:42.59)
to be here with both of you, learned from you all the time. My name is Guy Yalif. I was in ad tech for 15 years through CMO, then 10 years ago had the privilege of co-founding and CEOing an AI website personalization company that Webflow, an enterprise agentic web marketing platform bought a couple of years ago. And now I spend all my time out in market talking to CMOs and build it.
really excited for this conversation and the beginning of folks new favorite podcast.
Tye DeGrange (37:14.938)
I love it. Brilliant. Do we do a quick? Yeah. Do want to do like a recap? I'm just going to kind of spouse and then what do you think in terms of a close like, yeah, just yeah. No, no. So, so this has been amazing, Nancy. You're just absolutely on the cutting edge of what's happening in AI and partner marketing.
Guy Yalif (37:19.074)
And then do you want to record the close?
Guy Yalif (37:28.334)
just as much as like, this was a lot of fun. Thanks. See you next time. I don't know if you had anything else in mind.
Tye DeGrange (37:43.346)
We've got a huge announcement from HubSpot from you today on this show, the first SaaS class episode. There'll be more to come. We can't wait for more. And Guy got to announce all the cool things that Webflow is doing too. So that was amazing. And I think we got some really clear takeaways on the Gong LLM transmission translation concept and the power of Reddit and sentiment and depth. So I feel like...
The class is in session. The class was able to answer some real problems as opposed to talk about AI at a high level. And we're just thrilled to continue this journey with the audience. Keep the questions and comments going for future questions that you want to solve on SAS class. If you want to be a guest, let us know. But we're really excited to come out monthly with some really depth. And thank you for joining us today.
Guy Yalif (38:35.726)
Such a pleasure to talk with both of you and I hope folks found the discussion actionable to your point. That's the discussion we're going to keep having here over and over again.
Nancy Harnett (38:45.724)
Yeah, we're gonna go to get better as well, folks. So stick with us.
Tye DeGrange (38:48.474)
The game is on and we're coming in from Ireland, Austin Bay Area. It's going to happen again. We'll see you in May and thanks everybody.