2 mental shifts that helped Unify grow 24x in 2024

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

In the last few newsletters, I've given you an inside look at how we've grown Unify.

I've covered how we scaled Automated Outbound from 0 to $7M in pipeline (here), how we've built our growth team (here), and how we've booked 58 meetings per month off of Google Ads (here).

This week Ramp announced that the company is now valued at $13 billion, a wild accomplishment for a startup founded <6 years ago.

I joined Ramp as employee ~40 and spent most of my time there on the growth product team.

The way I think about the world and how I operate is heavily influenced by my time at Ramp. I learned how to build companies there.

While my experience was valuable, as I've transitioned into the founder seat I've had to evolve my thinking.

Today I'm going to walk you through 2 of the most significant mental shifts I experienced over the past year. I don't think we would have been able to find product-market-fit at Unify without them.

Let's get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

2 mental shifts that helped Unify grow 24x in 2024

I spent 2.5 years at Ramp and grew from an IC on the BizOps team to a leader on the growth product team.

Ramp was a hypergrowth company with high standards and a highly entrepreneurial team. I was fortunate enough to be a founding member of the growth team where I learned how to lead and operate from A-players like Geoff, Guillaume, and Megan.

There was a lot that I took with me when I founded Unify:

1/ People are everything. Your product is marginally better than the alternatives in the early days. You need the best people to widen the gap over time.

2/ Velocity over precision. Speed of learnings are critical. You won't get everything right and so high velocity de-risks the bets you take. This is true for product, growth, sales and everything else.

3/ Brand matters. Invest in it early, your product should feel premium even from the early stages. It's a way to stand out.

But Unify isn't Ramp. We had to come into our own as a company, and I had to evolve as a founder.

In this newsletter I'll cover a few places where I had to adapt.

1. Everything is a people problem.

At Ramp, I led relatively small teams in focused parts of the business. I knew everything within my domain and surface area and had a tight pulse control over it. So I took the same approach at Unify early on.

For the first year as a founder, I controlled every lever because I was the only person on the business team. This worked fine early on because our business was simple.

In 2024, everything changed. We found PMF, and scaled revenue 24x. Somewhere around 20 employees I stopped being able to hold everything going on at Unify in my head.

I couldn't keep my facts straight, there was just too much info and too many things happening. I felt overwhelmed quickly.

We started elevating people within the company and hiring for true managers. 2 examples of people we elevated into team lead roles:

Anthony in Sales. He showed me there was so much more to closing deals than I knew.

Hyewon from Design. She brought elevated taste in design and brand.

We're now north of 30 employees and I now realize that everything is a people problem. That is, great people are the solution to all problems. The only way that I can effectively solve problems at Unify is to:

1/ Hire someone great

2/ Empower them to solve problems

3/ I edit their work

And repeat

I spend a meaningful portion of my time hunting for the best people to join the Unify team. I imagine this will stay true for the next several years.

2. Creating a category.

One of the biggest differences between selling Ramp and Unify is the category.

Early at Ramp, the category was well defined and the market was big. Everyone knew what cards and expense management were. Yes, Ramp had a better product, but the category was well understood and well defined.

This has never been the case with Unify.

We're creating an entirely new category that's still being defined. It's creative, fun, and requires strong perspectives. But it's also challenging because so much is being discovered in real-time.

I've found that we need to be excellent in product marketing to effectively communicate our vision. Admittedly, product marketing isn't the place that I spike. We're hiring for a founding product marketer (job posting here) if you know anyone who is looking 

I find that we're constantly iterating on messaging and positioning. Every month we learn more, we take that into account and we modify how we pitch the product. The market is evolving in real-time, even in the last 12 months we've seen the fad of the AI SDR come and go around us. Here's a post I wrote on that.

Defining ICP is mission critical when creating a category. By definition we're creating the category, so there's very little revenue in it today. By defining ICP well, you set a clear roadmap for the wedge we're going after and what product(s) are needed to build and expand it.

When selling a product that the market doesn't fully understand, little thinks like sales enablement materials and website copy make a world of difference. They can make a break a customer actually understanding what we do.

Final thoughts

My time at Ramp shaped how I think about building companies. So I look back on it with a lot of gratitude.

But our growth over the past year, and all the lessons that came along with it, taught me that there are some lessons that you can only learn by running your own company.

Leaning too much on established playbooks and your past experience can hold you back if you're not careful.

Your past experiences should inform your decisions, not dictate them. So take an honest look at your tendencies, analyze the broader implication to your actions, and unlearn some patterns.

Hope this was helpful.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

I’m excited to share our newest AI feature at Unify - the Infinity Signal

In thousands of sales calls, we’ve been asked “do you have [insert data source]?”

Over the last 4 months of watching our customers use our AI Agents product, we realized that out of the box, our agents do an incredible job of capturing tons of intent signals across the web.

Just a few examples of signals that were being powered by our AI Agent:

1/ Job postings

2/ News articles

3/ Website scrapes

4/ Perplexity searches

5/ Financial filings

During a brainstorm at our December offsite, our product team came up with the idea to take agents to the next level.

So we built The Infinity Signal - a single node in Unify to turn any question into an intent signal.

How it works:

1/ Give us a list of companies or people

2/ Tell us what research you want us to do

3/ Tell us how often you need the research

An example:

Given a list of 5,000 Tier 1 accounts in Salesforce, once per week see if there’s been any news around theft and robbery at their physical locations.

It’s like having a team of sellers to deploy at account research on-demand.

We dove deep into this new feature on our blog. Check it out here.

If you're interested and would like to book a demo, click here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading, as always.

I'm excited about next week's piece. I just hired an Executive Coach, and I'll be sharing why I did, how I found mine, and more.

If you have any questions about that, reply to this email and I'll try my best to answer them in the next newsletter.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.