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Welcome to Pay Attention, where Attention's CEO and Founder, Anis Bennaceur, interviews some of the smartest minds in sales, growth, and product leadership.
Anis Bennaceur (00:02.881)
Hey, Austin. Very excited to have you. How's it going?
Austin Hughes (00:04.974)
And it's...
Excited to be here. Appreciate you having me on.
Anis Bennaceur (00:10.881)
So, ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening or watching this, let me introduce Austin to you. Austin is the founder and CEO of Unify, unifygtm .com. Before that, Austin was heading growth over at Ramp, helping them scale extremely quickly from
$1 million in revenue to $100 million in AR. Austin, thank you for being here.
Austin Hughes (00:45.678)
Excited to be here. Excited to jam on all things, growth, founders, all that stuff.
Anis Bennaceur (00:50.881)
Awesome. If you want to introduce yourself, what, you know, if I does do a shameless plug, go for it.
Austin Hughes (00:58.286)
Appreciate that. I'm Austin, as Anice mentioned, quick background context is that prior to starting Unify, I spent two and a half years at this company called Ramp. We were doing corporate cards and spend management. I was leading the growth product team over there. So I reported to a product leader as well as to a growth leader and got to work at the intersection of engineering and making a company grow faster, which was a ton of fun. A lot of what we're building today at Unify, a lot of the frameworks and things like that are somewhat similar.
But we're building is what we call a warm outbound platform. And so we think that the way that the world is going in terms of go to market is that the teams that are converting prospects the most, the teams that are growing their businesses in the healthiest ways are actually engaging with prospects in the moments when they actually want to buy. And we're building the platform that helps support that. So really tactically, an example of something we'll do is we'll help teams turn anonymous website visitors into warm outbound. So emails landing in people's inboxes, converting into qualified opportunities, all that good stuff.
So that's my shameless plug -on, I'm Unify.
Anis Bennaceur (02:00.097)
That's awesome and everyone's talking about this today. So, hey, this is great. So, first of all, I would love to know about the three pivotal moments in your career that made you where and who you are today.
Austin Hughes (02:14.414)
Yeah, it's a good question. So I think there's like, when I reflect back on time, there's like three key moments that come to mind. One is investment making experience. I can talk about that in a second. At least now you have a similar background there. Two is I built a side project called Fish Eye Surf, which I'll touch on more. And then last was R .A .P. And so really tactically, investment banking is like, it's got a lot of stigmas around it. But I think one thing that people undeniably walk out with is the ability to work in an extremely
harsh, intense environment. And I think that kind of conditions you for the rest of your career to be able to do that and have a lot of stamina. And so, you know, it wasn't super uncommon to have a hundred hour plus week and what that actually looks like in practice is pretty grueling. And so having that sort of work ethic instilled from day one, I think was super, um, super transformative and super foundational in how I approach work today. Um, two was building Fish Eye Surf, which is a side project that I worked on.
Um, I actually built it on bubble .io. It was something that I worked on early on as a COVID project. And it was a marketplace for surfers to find photographers in San Francisco. Um, that was a weird one because it wasn't necessarily a job that I had, but it was a side project that I worked on. And, um, it was the first time that I ever built a web app end to end. And so front end, back end, all that sort of stuff had to think through designing, um, how the product would work. Um, get it to a place where people could actually use it. We can accept payments through it via Stripe, all sorts of things like that.
And ultimately had to actually go out and market it. Right. So I was actually out at ocean beach in San Francisco, handing out flyers. I was posting on Instagram, doing all that sort of fun stuff. And, uh, even though we only had six sessions booked, I think it was a pretty transformative experience to actually build something by myself and to end and see all the nuances there. So I think that was a piece. Um, and the last one was ramp. Um, I joined ramp as employee 40. Uh, and so the company was, um, you know, at the time, keep in mind the landscape was. Brex ramp, Divi were really the large folks in the category.
And ramp was the newest to the category. And so getting to watch just an incredibly talented team and be a part of that experience of thinking from first principles, applying rules, applying frameworks to ultimately build a generational company and see that from the stage when it was not an obvious winner, I think was super transformative in how I think about go to market startups, all that stuff today. So I think those three are like the most pivotal moments that come to mind.
Anis Bennaceur (04:33.569)
There is so much to impact there. So one of the things that you talk about today is kind of like your ability to go from zero to one, right? Either when it was at the project that you guys started, Fish High, but also kind of even being employee number 40 at Ramp and being extremely early on growth, right? So...
What are some of the things that you believe that a lot of people get wrong when it's around going from zero to one? Or what is the biggest advice that you'll give anyone who tries to go from zero to one, whether it's getting their first customer or whether it's even getting some free users, anything that goes through that process for you?
Austin Hughes (05:17.486)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think from going from zero to one, the most important thing to understand is that you actually don't know what the answers are yet, right? And your job is to actually go out and figure out what the answers are as quickly as possible. And, and you know, I talked about this a bunch, but.
One of the ways to do that is you just need a lot of shots on goal, right? And I think a lot of people sometimes get lost in that. They'll have a handful of opportunities, a handful of ideas. And if those don't work, then they're kind of at a loss or they think it's just a broken idea. Oftentimes you just haven't found the right answer yet. And so the ideas that I've always anchored to is as a growth person, I used to experiment only succeeding 20 or 30 % of the time. Like that's kind of the status quo that doesn't usually tend to be the.
the experience of like a product person, but as a growth person it is. So with that framework in mind, right, I just know that I have to take a lot of shots on goal and they have to be good shots and they have to be happening quickly to be able to actually learn fast enough to get to a place where we're building something meaningful. And so I think in going from zero to one, just moving as quickly as you can and making sure that you're taking several shots on goal is something that like that framework can get you a long ways. If you just keep applying it over time.
Anis Bennaceur (06:34.721)
That makes sense. So how does that relate to the resilience that you need to have as a founder to actually get to product market fit?
Austin Hughes (06:44.398)
Oh yeah, you got to get ready. You got to be ready to get rejected over and over again. Um, you know, it's like, uh, even, even in a stellar sales motion, you're converting opportunities at a 30 % clip, right? 30 % is like a failure in any like school class that you take. Right. And so let alone like an early stage company that maybe has a product that somewhat works or is like early in developing, the conversion rates are much lower than 30 % even. Right. And so, um, definitely have to come in with thick skin, but like, there's also a way of approaching it where.
Anis Bennaceur (06:49.089)
Thank you.
Austin Hughes (07:14.158)
you know, a no is not like a no forever. A no is like a not now, right? And I think having that framework of saying like, Hey, like we'll approach this situation again, once we have new learnings or we have a new angle on it, ends up being like a healthy way to learn from those rejections. But yeah, it definitely helps to be a, to have thick skin.
Anis Bennaceur (07:31.073)
So one of the things that you and I both have in common here is that we started out with investment banking backgrounds that, at the end of the day, aren't that creative unless you're extremely lucky to be working with the right team or the right managing director who gives you a lot of flexibility into things, which is extremely rare. But either way, we both went from investment banking into growth. When you're trying to hire a
a growth person or a growth profile, how do you go about filtering out the right versus the wrong investment bankers that could be a good fit for that role?
Austin Hughes (08:03.918)
It's a really good question. I think ultimately one of the things that is really important in growth, as you kind of alluded to, is creativity, right? And the interest and the desire to be kind of thinking about what's next or how can we apply this learning to find the next idea. And
someone who's the way we coin this internally is like, we're looking for someone who's fairly generative in what they do, right? Rather than being someone who's more reactive to consuming information. And so typically what we're looking for is somebody who can not only show up and execute on something, but can also be a source of their own ideas. And the way that we typically suss that out is somebody who's like worked on things that aren't just their job, right? You have somebody who's done just their job. They haven't necessarily shown you that they care enough about that creative aspect.
to pick up a side project, to run a cool hobby, to do whatever it might be. And so we look for signs that somebody is doing an exercise in that creative muscle outside of work as a way of like understanding how they would actually work in a growth capacity coming from investment banking.
Anis Bennaceur (09:18.081)
Don't those people end up becoming founders though?
Austin Hughes (09:21.454)
They do, but you can catch them along that journey. And that's, that's a, you know, ultimately it's a, it's a fun, I think we, you know, I don't know. I'm curious how you think about this thing, but we, we try to think about, uh, bringing on as many future founders as we can. Cause that energy, even if we get those folks for two or three years, it's worth it. That DNA gets infused in our company, which is, which is powerful.
Anis Bennaceur (09:40.705)
Yeah, 100%, I totally agree with you. It's all about having that self -starting ability and the ability to just push things further, right? Be a driver instead of a bus passenger, as Frank Slootman says in his book, Amp It Up. So yeah.
Austin Hughes (09:58.99)
Bye bye.
Anis Bennaceur (10:03.329)
You've mentioned that you're naturally a product guy and founder led sales was a transition for you, right? When you founded, you know, Fy. What's been the biggest surprise for you about sales as you've immersed yourself?
Austin Hughes (10:22.35)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think I've built a lot more empathy for sellers as it become one. Um, I think as a growth person and as a product person, like we're generally trying to apply frameworks as much as possible, right? Cause we're usually taking like a one to many approach. The thing we're building is going to apply to thousands of people, not to a small number of people. And so we try to think about things that scale across those people. Sales though, is an entirely different beast where I found is that it's very difficult to, um, apply templates and formulas to.
Um, a prospect, there are obviously rough guard rails that you want to follow. You want to have the same sales process and generally keep that consistent so you can learn across it. But every prospect has different pain points. Everyone understands the world slightly differently. And so figuring out that that is a piece of the equation, I think was a pretty big transition, right? It was a big, pretty big shift in mindset and how I think about understanding a situation. And so, um, I try to treat, you know, every sales conversation with a blank slate. I try to walk in and.
really deeply understand this person and their problems, how it's different from someone else, how I might be able to help them by mapping on to what they're thinking about. So I try to take a much more bespoke approach there.
Anis Bennaceur (11:30.113)
Yeah, definitely more of a consultative approach, right? Obviously you have the frameworks, you have all these playbooks, but at the end of the day you need to graduate out of those to be able to have your own ways of understanding people and how you can actually help them solve their challenges, right?
Austin Hughes (11:46.51)
Yeah, 100%.
Anis Bennaceur (11:48.481)
Was there something that you've learned about yourself throughout that process? Something maybe that was a bit surprising to you?
Austin Hughes (11:55.438)
That's a good question.
That's a really good question. I feel like what I've learned is that I really, my natural bent as a seller is to be more consultative. I didn't necessarily, I walked into sales for the first time and I was like, all right, I'm a seller now. I've read all the books, I've done the things, and tried that and had some success with that approach. But I think to a certain degree, everyone's got to find their own flavor of what feels authentic to them in selling.
And I guess I didn't have a perspective on this coming into sales, but now I know that like the way that I like to sell is to be very consultative. It's to be very like as much as possible, like, um, focused on the strategy, the idea to like why we're doing things rather than like the like pushing someone to make a decision. So, um, that's what I've found work personally. Um, I've also definitely like struck, stretched my extraversion scale. I would say like, uh, I like people and I like spending a lot of time with people, but.
By the end of a day of like having a bunch of sales calls, I'm definitely like, okay, I want to sit in peace and not talk to anybody for about an hour. So I learned those things. Yeah.
Anis Bennaceur (12:58.977)
That's exactly how I've been feeling. So I love that. One of the things, you know, as you and I talk a lot about these things that you've been saying to me quite a bit recently was, you know, finding a diamond in the rough when you're hiring someone, right? I think that is...
Austin Hughes (13:23.246)
. .
Anis Bennaceur (13:23.617)
something that a lot of people don't really think about that much. They try to optimize for intercepts over slope, whereas actually it should be the opposite, right? And one of the things I think that is extremely important when evaluating and assessing someone's slope is their hunger. You know, you mentioned in the recent LinkedIn post that hunger is the main thing that you look for in a new hire. First of all, how do you filter for that during an interview? And second of all, do you think that...
Austin Hughes (13:49.806)
Yeah, it's a really good question. What we typically will look for for thinking about hunger, and I totally agree that hiring for slope over intercept is absolutely the way the winning formula in a startup. What we will look for is what someone does outside of their nine to five.
Anis Bennaceur (13:54.081)
is a trait that someone can actively develop, and if so, how?
Austin Hughes (14:18.894)
right as a sign of like how hungry they are, right? Like, going back to some of the points we talked a little bit about on the banking side, seeing people do things that they're not asked to do, do things because they're curious, do things because they're like motivated to on their own time is what we've seen to be the winning formula for finding someone who's really hungry. Even if those experiences are not necessarily like impressive or like directly tied to what they do, seeing that...
self initiative and that self -starving is a really good sign that we're maybe talking to the right person. Um, so I definitely think that that's a piece of it. And then in terms of being able to develop it, I think, absolutely. I think, you know, people, you know, at a certain point, it's like a muscle, like anything else, right. It's like for us now, it's become so natural to like, just always be like thinking about different ideas and managing things. But there was a time, you know, in the past where I wasn't even necessarily that way. And the way that it got started for me was that I just had enough of an interest in like,
exploring side projects and stuff that I started actively spending, you know, 10, 20 hours a week working on these things. And that muscle was built that way. And so, um, definitely people can build it. Um, I think it's just a matter of like deciding that it's something that matters enough to you to actually sacrifice your, your free time.
Anis Bennaceur (15:29.555)
So yeah, I'm 100 % aligned with you on that, right? It's...
especially as you went through investment banking, there's so little that you can do outside of work hours. So anything additional that you're able to do is just kind of can be amplified in your analysis of things and traits. So kind of like shifting into, you know, another thing that you recently said was that, you know, you mentioned that you've been a super powered individual contributor and that you're starting to think about
responsibilities that you'll hire for in the future, right? Especially as Unify is hyper scaling with one of the fastest growth rates that I've seen in this space recently. So, you know, why are you focusing on hiring for first and how are you thinking about the order in which you hire for? And second of all, so how did your time at RAM influence this?
Austin Hughes (16:10.51)
Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question.
Austin Hughes (16:35.854)
So what we're generally looking for today is spiky people. So we're looking for folks who have a spike in an area that like aligns well with the strong need in the business. And we're generally trying to like, like we would for solving customer pain points with building product. We're trying to solve our own problems by looking acutely at like where we think the root causes are and hiring in folks who, who can really basically supplement in those places. And so.
tactically right now, like we're always building out our engineering team, but we're acutely building out our early business team where six months ago it was just me who was selling. We added our first AE back in the fall. And then now we're kind of building the foundational layer of post sales, of thinking about, you know, what is top of funnel? Do we bring on someone who's doing top of funnel generations, things like that. It's all done and prioritized based off of where we feel like the strongest needs in the business are.
Um, then the way that we get to those things are typically by looking at dashboards and looking at numbers, right? Examples, like we care a lot about pipeline charts and things like that to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success two to three months down the road. So, um, it's kind of how we think about like where we're trying to plug holes today on, on the team side. Um, and, uh, yeah, my, my time at ramp was, um, I think somewhat interesting in like, in, in this capacity where.
The company was, we were always much smaller than when we were out in the market, Brex, right? Brex was always, I would say like at least three times the size of our team. And we didn't necessarily view that like we needed a giant team to go out and accomplish what we wanted to. We just needed really dense people, right? People who could take on a lot more ownership and things like that. And that wasn't necessarily like an explicitly said thing, but that was something that I feel like I observed. And so similarly, as we think about, you know, bringing folks on it at Unify.
I think some things that I took away from that experience. One is that business generalists can go a long ways and can take a lot of forms. I started actually as a business generalist at Ramp and evolved into a growth leader. Like Jacob Wallenberg, good friend, who today I think leads the People org, also started as a business generalist. And so this idea that you have these people who are, again, high slope comes into play as they basically can start in one role and evolve over time. And so, yeah, lots of learnings from the Ramp time as well.
Anis Bennaceur (18:52.289)
Um.
So related to that, let's say as you try to optimize for a slope over intercept, especially these business generalists, how long do you think it takes someone to ramp up, no pun intended, to the level of intercept that is tied to someone else with more experience? Let's say you put in someone in a growth role that never did growth, how long would it take them to be good enough to be as good as someone with years of experience?
Austin Hughes (19:07.342)
I see that.
Austin Hughes (19:23.47)
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think it really depends on who you're comparing against. But I think that there's a tipping point, right? Like what I would say is that the threshold that I see folks have to cross over time, if you're going to go from being an ICE to being a real team leader, is you need to be generative on ideas and you need to be able to organize people around those ideas. And so usually the best way to actually test those waters is just still as an individual contributor, right? Individual contributors can...
come up with ideas, they can write specs, they can contribute ideas. And so, um, I had no experience directly in growth, but within call it three to six months was effectively leading a team, uh, doing the stuff just because no one else was around to contribute the ideas, but I was being generative in that sense. I've seen that happen with a bunch of folks at ramp who have kind of gone through similar growth trajectories. Um, so yeah, I, I think that that, um, the oftentimes like,
We overvalue experience and we undervalue that learning engine. And so those folks who have that learning engine can catch up in months, not years. It's really, but at the same time, you need exposure to successes and wins to actually get those learnings. You need to be reinforced with like actual good learnings and ideas are one thing, but thinking of an idea, executing it, watching it work, and then learning how to do the next step is really that, that full feedback cycle is what builds that experience very quickly. So.
Random Saturday thoughts, but.
Anis Bennaceur (20:52.353)
I love that. I love that. And speaking of ideas and learnings, so by the way, what is the founding story of Unify, right? What did you learn over at Ramp that made you want to start Unify? And I would say also equally as important, how did you and Conor, your co -founder, meet to start Unify together?
Austin Hughes (21:12.014)
Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Um, so Unify, I came into, I came into, to RAMP thinking that at some point in the future that I wanted to start a company. And for me, it was just a question of like, what was that company going to be? And so I joined the company. I was fully enthralled in everything that we were doing. I learned so much from my time at RAMP. I think in the last year that I was there, it had become,
obvious that there were a lot of problems that I was seeing in the world that we were seeing and we were solving really well that other teams struggled with, whether it was like from a, you know, a growth execute.
Anis Bennaceur (22:04.392)
Oh, shit. Sorry, I got disconnected. I don't know what. I'll repeat that.
Austin Hughes (22:06.408)
Oh, sorry about that. All good. All good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You want to repeat that question?
Anis Bennaceur (22:17.864)
Yeah, wait, hopefully, fuck, I hope that this is still recording. Let me check something. All right, I think we should be fine. Yeah, give me one second.
Uhhhh
Hopefully it did not delete anything. I'm sure it keeps uploading into the system. All right. Let me ask you again. So yeah, talking about ideas and learnings, one of the things that I'm very curious about is what is the...
Austin Hughes (22:50.248)
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So Connor and I, funny enough, went to undergrad together, went to Rice in Houston, and had known each other for a really long time.
Anis Bennaceur (23:00.36)
origin of Unify, how did you and Connor first of all meet and then how did you come up with the idea of starting Unify together?
Austin Hughes (23:19.784)
Um, we hadn't necessarily worked on anything directly together, but I know about each other. And I think we both saw, uh, a unique opportunity that was emerging in 2022. And so Connor had been a machine learning engineer for five plus years. Um, he had been thinking deeply about the space. Basically since he had graduated college. Um, I, however, had not been, I had been thinking a lot about go to market problems, about how to grow companies and things like that. But we had a bit of a, uh, I think separately, like aha moments as Connor was watching all the foundation model stuff happen.
I started to see how some of that can be used in go -to -market. And I remember specifically building a lead gen tool for ramp in the, in the summer of 2022 and using GPT three and seeing the actual user feedback and the user love for like the outputs that it was driving. We built this thing called the mission statement generator. It was basically you plug in five things about your company and we would generate a mission statement for you and seeing the reaction to that really kind of opened my mind to like what was coming from generative AI.
And so we basically started chatting seriously about starting what would become Unify pretty soon after that. Thinking through like specifically like what was the way that we wanted to bring this company to life? What was it going to look like? And we knew that generative AI was going to be a huge piece of it. So it made so much sense for us to team up together. Connor and I had a lot of mutual trust in each other that we brought a lot of different things to the table.
I brought my growth experience, understanding how to grow a company from a couple million bucks revenue to much, much larger. Connor brought the experience of building large scale ML systems. And we saw the problems that our customers had about making use of the go -to -market data that they had to actually drive pipeline. And we knew that this was going to be the space that we wanted to build something in. So anyways, that was kind of how the lead up to starting Unify worked out.
Anis Bennaceur (25:11.624)
And how did you guys view culture in a way that allowed you to just be very much aligned in the early days all the way until now?
Austin Hughes (25:20.808)
Yeah, it's a good question. We come at this problem from the perspective of startups inherently are trying to do the impossible on an impossibly short time horizon. Right. And so, uh, if you come in with that expectation, things just like feel a little bit, I think simpler and more aligned in the sense that like the reason why we're working so hard is because if we don't, it's just not going to work out. And so why would we do it to begin with? Right. And so we both really, I think, come at the problem space with that sense of, Hey, like we need to be performing.
excellently to be able to even have a shot at building a successful company here. It's insanely competitive, um, in the world we live in today. And, um, we need exceptional people and people who believe in that sort of ethos and mentality to make that company come to life. And so as we think about building culture, um, the number one thing that attracted me to ramp when the company was 40 people was the people that I, I talked to. Um, and so, um, all of the leaders at the time, um, just had an element of, um, they were.
humble, but they were smart and they were extremely hungry. And I felt like if nothing else, I would enjoy working with those people and getting to know them. And we try to build something similar today at Unify. Got to watch Eric and Kareem set culture and set the culture bar extremely high. Like one thing that really stood out to me that Eric did was every all hands that he would have, he would always push the team to think about velocity in a sense of doing a few
things extremely well and not spreading yourself among a million things. And this was like a mantra that we would hear over and over again. And ultimately people kind of think a lot about ramp and velocity and all that good stuff. I think a lot of it actually comes from that simplicity, right? The simplicity behind moving quickly is being something that you do by moving through a series of things very quickly. So anyways, a lot of those learnings we take away come from ramp and some pull from scale as well. So yeah. Yeah.
Anis Bennaceur (27:17.416)
Yeah, I remember actually once seeing Eric speak over at Ramp in front of an audience and he was saying the very first piece of advice that he gives people who want to join is to read Amped Up by Frank Slootman, which is kind of crazy because that's the exact same thing that we do over here. And to your point, you know, I think that one of the first chapters of his book, he says, he talks about prioritizing.
the one thing that you think is the most important to you instead of doing a million things at the same time. That definitely checks out. So, you know, looking back at the past year and change since you started Unify, what's the most important or impactful thing that you've done, you know, personally, that you attribute the company's success to and, you know, vice versa? Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Austin Hughes (27:52.808)
Yep.
Austin Hughes (28:04.68)
you
Austin Hughes (28:10.184)
Yeah. Uh, one thing that I think helped a lot was throwing myself into sales, like headfirst. I wouldn't say it was something that I was like waking up every day, like super eager to go do. I was a product person by trade. Like that was where I felt like my 10X strength was. Um, but I knew that it was something that was important. And I think having now been selling for about six months, I think the thing that stands out to me is.
The product is never done evolving, right? And that feedback with the market that largely comes through sales is pivotal for influencing the product roadmap and finding bugs and figuring out where you should go. And so being really closely intertwined with those learnings, attention helps us do that actually, is like a very, it's a really powerful lever to improving the business, improving the product. And so I think that's definitely something that is so important.
for founders, especially while you're looking for that deep visceral product market fit, you've got to do that. Otherwise you don't get to the right answers fast enough to have the company survive. So I think that's one thing that I've learned on the, on, on something I, I'm glad I did. And then in terms of doing things differently, I think one thing that you guys probably did extremely well that I think that I wish I'd focused on a little bit earlier is just like focusing on top of funnel, right? As a way to drive faster learnings. Right. And I think that.
Um, we were very selective with conversations in the early days, which I think helped in the sense that we figured out we were able to run that more consultative process and that worked well for us. But I think that a lot of things that we've learned have come from a big burst of top of funnel and being able to pattern match across those conversations very quickly and easily. And that only can come through having a lot of conversations in a short period of time. And so that's, I think something that we, um, I wish we had done a little bit.
a little bit earlier on and focus on a little more. Today I feel great about it, but I think it would have accelerated learning even faster.
Anis Bennaceur (30:09.96)
I think we went through the exact same path, right? I think very early on we were kind of just speaking to a handful of people over and over again and very quickly we realized, and that was kind of almost by accident. As soon as we came out of stealth, we started getting a ton of inbound and that...
That amount of inbound made us diversify the quality and the conversations that we would have and try to get different sorts of feedbacks and try to see what was the common thread across everyone that would make us prioritize building the biggest painkillers.
So yeah, I think that's kind of a big trade that I see across every founder like you who has great early success.
Austin Hughes (31:02.152)
You also, it forced you to shake some biases too that everyone has, right? Where you're like, you come in with an idea of like what you're selling to and what you're selling. And then you see a bunch of people who fit a different pattern come in and you're like, oh, like we missed something here, right? And you're actually forced to take that learning, which is good.
Anis Bennaceur (31:17.416)
100%. Getting deeper into the problems that Unify solves for today. Everyone talks about intents. Everyone talks about signal -led sales. Is there any major breakthrough or discovery that you've noticed in the last months that people should be aware of when it comes to selling through signal -led sales?
Austin Hughes (31:47.688)
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think the way that I think about it is a little more from like a framework perspective. There haven't, I would say, the category is super hot and there are tons of companies launching with new signals all the time. I think the biggest thing that we think differentiates teams that do warm outbound really well versus those who struggle to get the full value out of it is the ability to run a repeatable strategy or playbooks around what they're doing.
It's not uncommon for us to talk to a team that buys intent data or buys a signal that they don't pursue to get full value. When you dig into it, it's not really clear how many contacts they're putting in a sequence, how many folks they're reaching out to, what the conversion rates are and things like that. But the way we try to think about it is that without the consistency of acting on the signals, you're kind of dead in the water. And that consistency of acting on signals has to be like the spark to the learning engine. And so...
Um, what we found is that every company's got a handful of signals that they know work. Our job is to make them make those work extremely well and make the process of acting on those effortless. And then our hope is to serve that up in terms of actionable learnings back to the company, uh, that we're talking to so that they can use that to inform the strategy, learn, inform what other new signals they might want to bring into the equation. But, um, yeah, sorry to answer orthogonally, but I feel like this idea of acting on the signals is actually the thing that.
is the biggest unlock for teams and teams that do it really well.
Anis Bennaceur (33:20.616)
No, 100%. I totally agree with you. I think the GTM fund had kind of this webinar with 12 go -to -market leaders. And I think I tagged you on that LinkedIn post where out of the 12 people, only one person was able to properly act on the e -ten signals that they were getting. It was actually someone from our team.
and shameless plug here. And then everyone else was just kind of blown away by, hey, they were spending a ton of money into kind of like buying intent data, but they were not able to do anything out of it, right? And the ability to, it's all about how you cross all the different signals together and act the right way on top of those, send the right messaging, which I think...
Austin Hughes (33:45.48)
Ha ha ha!
Anis Bennaceur (34:13.864)
I think Cuneify is uniquely positioned to help with, right? So, yeah, 100%.
Austin Hughes (34:16.584)
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. To your point, like what we, the dream state that like we want teams to get to is you've got a signal or a collection of signals that happens and you have a touch on that prospect out within 15 minutes. And the only way to do that is to think from the actual product that, or think from the actual sequencing surface area, because you need that context of why you're reaching out and why this is relevant in the actual product that's.
email to get value out of it. So you're speaking our language and you speak our language.
Anis Bennaceur (34:51.304)
I love that. So, Austin, what are your closing thoughts on this whole conversation? And also, who are three sales or growth leaders or founders that you'd like to give a shout at and see as guests on this podcast?
Austin Hughes (35:10.056)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Um, so I think it was like, you know, for folks who are thinking about becoming first time founders, I think the biggest piece of advice that I oftentimes give people take, take with a grain of salt. I'm also a first time founder and learning as I go. But, uh, with that being said, it's to pick the right area that you want to build a company in, in the right area that you have conviction that something valuable is to be built in, but you don't need to pick the exact right like shape of what it is yet. And what I mean by that is that, um,
You need the feedback and the friction with the market to hone what that idea that you're working on is. And you just need to pick a space that you are excited enough about that friction is not going to deter you from putting in a lot of work. And so, um, number one thing is like, people will oftentimes come with like, I'm going to build XYZ for XYZ. And I think that's great. But I think it's also important to take a step back and be like, is this a space that I feel like something really valuable can be built? Cause ultimately markets win over ideas oftentimes. And so, um, I think that's one general piece of.
advice. And I think also just like picking a co founder that compliments you really well. I think having a co founder is extremely helpful. Like the job of being a founder is so stressful and having a sounding board and a partner in what you're doing is extremely valuable in my experience. Three folks I'd recommend bringing on the podcast. I would say Guillaume Caban, who we both know dearly from hyper growth. Fun guy to talk to.
great mentor of mine and of your team now. I believe you guys are working together. But just like really, really thoughtful about everything, growth and frameworks and all that stuff. Love you dearly. I would say Max Freeman from Ramp. Max started as the first SDR at Ramp and today leads a sales team of I have no idea how big, but it's gotta be, I would guess, somewhere close to 100. And...
Max scaled everything from starting with the initial outbound campaign. So we were running and driving a tunnel leads there all the way up to closing very, very large deals. And, um, it was just the, the marquee definition of one of those people who, uh, is extremely high, slow thinking real quickly. And so Max super thoughtful guy would definitely recommend him. And then lastly, I would say is, uh, Doug Landis who I've gotten to know through, uh, emergence Doug is, uh,
Austin Hughes (37:30.184)
an extremely thoughtful storyteller, an extremely thoughtful communicator. And I think in the stuff that we do, that is such an important skill and it oftentimes gets lost. And so I think Doug's another guy that I'd recommend.
Anis Bennaceur (37:45.256)
Awesome. Great. I'll make sure that they get featured on the next podcast. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. This was awesome. And I'll see you on the other side.
Austin Hughes (37:58.44)
Amazing. Anise, thanks for having me.
Anis Bennaceur (38:00.552)
Bye.