Hey hey, Austin here 👋

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

First off, wanted to say thank you for the reception to the first edition of The Pipeline last week.

I expected a few subscribers to trickle in from social and for this to be very much a slow burn. But we came out of the gate with 200+ new subscribers on Day 1. Your support means the world 🙌

This newsletter is about how to announce a fundraise.

We booked 494 meetings in October off the back of our Series A announcement on October 8th. Fundraise announcements planned well are a hack to producing insane amounts of pipeline. And I want to give you our playbook.

Let’s dig in.

📒 GTM PLAYBOOK

How we booked 494 meetings and generated $6.6M in pipeline in October

Save this playbook for the next time you announce a fundraise

Before diving into our Series A, let’s rewind a little bit.

Jan ‘24 — announcing our Seed round

In January 2024 when we announced our Seed round, we decided to go all-in on social to see what we could make happen. At that time, Unify had zero repeatable pipeline sources.

I’d seen some success on Twitter in the past and had a hunch that we’d be able to make a big splash with the fundraise.

We posted the announcement on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Both went semi-viral in our corner of the internet. And it spread awareness quickly - we received 420 inbound demo requests in the 48 hours after announcement.

We had signal that this playbook worked. So we put even more energy into making a splash with our Series A.

The Series A Announcement

We spent 3 months preparing for this announcement. This may have felt like overkill but we knew it was a special moment to get the word about Unify out there.

Here’s everything that went into it:

1) Unify 2.0 - Introducing Plays & AI Agents

Our Linear initiative for the fundraise announcement had 12 projects. Our product team spent many late nights thinking, planning and building Plays and AI Agents which are central to Unify 2.0. We released 2.0 at 12:30am and at 12:42am, one of our customers messaged us “This agents feature is 🔥”. There’s a link to our Product Hunt in the comments.

We knew these would be pivotal features to telling the Unify story. They took months to build and were the biggest time commitment leading up to the announcement.

2) A New unifygtm.com

Our website needed a facelift to communicate all the new product we’d shipped.

We re-worked our whole website, and introduced new product pages, a high-quality demo video, and a new self-service product demo. Our new website reflects feedback from customers and prospects that they wanted more visibility into our product.

3) Linkedin & X Announcements

A fundraise announcement is a unique opportunity to create an echo chamber on social. Our whole team used this as an opportunity to share personal stories about why we’re excited to be building Unify. That plus organic shares from customers, investors, and our network amplified the impact.

(More detail on how to execute this strategy down below)

4) Press Coverage from TechCrunch, Fortune and more

Our Series A announcement was picked up in 7 total outlets, including TechCrunch, Fortune, Axios and more. We’re grateful to be able to tell our story in these places.

Earned media was important for building credibility with customers, partners, investors and most importantly potential hires.

We also saw some meetings booked and plenty of traffic come directly from these sources:

5) Unify Happy Meals

On Tuesday night our SF and NYC teams spent hours packing Unify-branded happy meal boxes full of aprons and warm cookies. On Wednesday AM we shipped these out to prospects, customers and investors.

Our goal was to delight people with an outside-the-box experience. And the reaction was warm (see the photo below).

If you’d asked me 1 day after an announcement if this was a success, I would have said maybe. But what became clear in the weeks that followed was that this stunt got people talking about Unify. Prospects, customers, partners and investors would say “you knocked it out of the park with those Happy Meal boxes.” It created tons of word of mouth.

In retrospect this was a huge win.

Deep Dive: Social (Linkedin & X) Content Strategy

We created a social echo chamber on Linkedin and X around our Series A announcement. Social was the core strategy that helped us book 494 meetings in October.

The playbook we ran had 3 phases: before, during, and after the announcement.

Before announcement:

3 weeks before launch we asked our 20-person team to spend 1-2 hours thinking + writing a social post.

We encouraged personal and authentic stories that would resonate with each person’s respective audiences. We importantly did not give any canned company messaging to say. Throw that all away.

Skyler talked about his experience as our first GTM hire:

Hyewon wrote about her decision to join full time:

Solomon shared how our passion for quality and great UX motivated him to join the team:

I haven’t counted the impression numbers but these posts all did insanely well.

Coordination of your team and investors pre-announcement matters.

7 days before the announcement we emailed our investors and let them know about the social push and how they could help. We also sent calendar invites so no one would forget 😁 

Engagement on the announcement post—especially in the first 30-60min after it goes live—has a big impact on the performance of the content. So, make it as easy and low-friction as possible for people to engage. Be proactive in letting them know what and when to post.

Announcement day:

The morning of the announcement we had a team-wide calendar invite for when our posts would go live. We were on a Zoom together in case any snags came up.

Our TechCrunch exclusive dropped at 10am PST. Minutes later all of our posts went out on Linkedin and X.

Then our whole team began feverishly amplifying each other's posts.

The inbounds started to roll in.

Every few minutes our #website-demo-booked Slack channel would go off. It was exhilarating.

One tip I learned from Tommy Clark at Compound is to repost on your own LI post later the same day 6 hrs after the original post is published. You can get more juice out of one post this way. Sometimes your followers will even get an alert that you reposted. The little things add up.

48 hours after announcement:

Something we didn’t expect — there’s a halo effect post-fundraise where everyone is excited about you and your vision. We wanted to ride that wave of excitement as long as possible.

Here are the follow-on posts I made in the post-announcement:

1. A results recap 48 hours after announcement (84,000 impressions, 499 likes)

2. A highlight post on our Unify Happy Meal campaign (21,000 impressions, 152 likes)

3. 2 new product highlights for Unify Plays and AI Agents (56,000 impressions, 269 likes)

4. Our playbook for the announcement (74,000 impressions, 584 likes)

5. How we raised the round in 9 days (55,000 impressions, 487 likes)

These 6 posts have generated 290,000 organic impressions and a lot of inbound.

Don’t just make one “hey we raised” post and let the moment pass. Use ride the wave as long as you can.

👀 WHAT’S NEW FROM UNIFY

We recently shipped AI Agents that research companies and people at scale by searching the web, browsing websites, and synthesizing information.

Our favorite use case? Account qualification.

This used to take me hours when I had to do it manually.

With Agents, the process can look like this:

• Define qualification questions that determine if an account is ICP

• Test your agent on a few example companies

• Use Plays to run Agents at scale on 10,000+ companies at a time

Learn more about how we built Agents with LangSmith and LangGraph on their blog here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

If you’ve made it here, I appreciate you reading. I’ve had a lot of fun writing these first two editions.

Let me know what you want to hear from me next. I think my next piece will cover our approach to Growth pre- and post-PMF.

Let me know what else that would be interesting to cover!

Austin