The ideal growth tech stack.

Hey there, Austin here 👋

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

Last 2 weeks I've been discussing how to build a growth team. Specifically, I covered how I think about building a world-class team and the key operating frameworks that our team uses.

We have one more secret to share - our tech stack, and how we thought about these decisions. That's what I'm covering today.

These 3 core pieces dive into how we scaled Unify's ARR 24x Y/Y in 2024

Let's get into the tech stack.

📒 GTM Playbook

The ideal growth tech stack.

Every tool we use at Unify as of February 2025

I've spent the last 4.5 years thinking about growth every day. First at Ramp where I was a growth leader for 2.5 years, and now at Unify.

A caution - tech stack and tools are not a silver bullet. Your team is ultimately going to be the reason why you win. But your tech stack can help your team be an order of magnitude more productive if chosen well.

The right tools have accelerated our experimentation process and let us run a meaningful portion of pipeline production on autopilot.

How we evaluate growth tools.

Here are a few big questions you should be asking:

1/ Build vs. buy?

2/ What is the total cost of ownership?

Which is better: building in-house, or buying software?

For 95% of teams I recommend buying software that your growth team can maintain in-house.

World class growth teams can leverage go-to-market engineering talent towards distribution problems to create big outcomes.

But this requires an extremely rare combination of growth, product and engineering skill. 95% of growth teams will never get there. And that's totally fine. It's best to make sure your stack is maintainable for the team that you have on-hand.

The name of the game is speed and people tend to underestimate how hard building tools in-house actually is.

When you're making the 'buy vs. build' decision, you still needs to fit your financial model. Every tool purchase should align with your unit economics and expected ROI. At Unify, we know that we want to have a <12 month CAC payback period over the next couple years. So we make decisions with that north star in mind.

Every buy decision should be supported by a ROI or unit economics calculation, even if its a quick and dirty one.

Total cost of ownership is easily overlooked when onboarding a new tool. Who is going to own the product? How much ongoing effort will it take to be successful? How about very successful?

Here's an example. We use Webflow for our marketing site. We pay something like $300/month for it, which isn't expensive. But we also work with a Webflow developer who we pay 10x that to be building out new assets and pages each month.

Our total cost of ownership includes both the software and the labor around it. This investment is still well worth it, but as you can see the software costs nothing relative to the total cost of ownership.

Maintainability and scalability are critically important. You want tools that can be set up once and run in the background. Ideally you don't need an ever-growing list of people to manage your growing list of tools.

Unify's tech stack.

We buy so many tools because we're optimizing for speed to learnings at all times. Each of these has clear ROI to us.

Here's our stack:

• Webflow – hosts our marketing site, important for our SEO strategy

• Airtable – our growth project tracker to keep track of ideas and experiments

• Dreamdata – understand attribution and ROI on different channels, paid in particular

• Salesforce – CRM and our source of truth, also where we build most of our revenue dashboards

• Unify – powers end-to-end automated outbound, everything from intent signals to contact data waterfalls and managed email deliverability

• Zapier – build misc automations in minutes

• Amplitude / Segment – product analytics and website traffic

• Captain Data + Phantom Buster – LinkedIn engagement scraper (this will be a native feature in Unify soon, but today we use these tools)

• Clay – one-off enrichment tasks. Helpful if the sales team needs specific data points for a list of companies (like 300, for example) as a one-off task.

• Default – inbound routing off our website and meeting scheduling

• HubSpot – marketing automation platform for drip emails

• La Growth Machine – LinkedIn automation

• Clearbit – CRM enrichment

We'll absolutely add more to this stack in 2025. So long as each tool has a clear, incremental return associated with it, we're happy to purchase more.

My hot take is that consolidation is dumb so long as you've justified the incremental value for each purchase.

Final thoughts

Over these last 3 editions, we've covered why you need a growth team, how to operate one effectively, and now the tools that will help you scale.

But while tools and tactics will evolve, the fundamentals remain the same: Give your team the autonomy to experiment, hold them accountable to launching 1-2 experiments per week, and focus on quick wins that can scale.

Remember, the ultimate goal of your growth team is to build a predictable, repeatable revenue machine that can consistently generate and convert pipeline.

Hope this 3-part guide to building a world-class growth team was helpful.

If you have any questions, just reply to this email. Happy to help.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

We talk a lot about pipeline at Unify. But closed won revenue is really what matters.

22% of our closed won revenue has been powered by our own product since June 2024.

This gives us a ton of confidence when we're selling Unify in a competitive market. Because we know this isn't true for our competitors. And we love to tell the Unify on Unify story because it builds trust.

Pipeline is great, but revenue is what helps you raise your next round on better terms, recruit the best talent, and ultimately win in your category.

For teams looking to learn more about automated outbound, here's a deep dive into how we use Unify internally.

For teams looking to stand up automated outbound as a new growth channel, book a demo here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading, as always.

Now that we’ve wrapped the growth team series, I have a ton of newsletter topics for the next coming weeks. But I want to get your input.

Let me know what topic below you'd wanna read about next.

• Another AI SDR hot take I've been holding in

• How we evolved Unify's core values

• A deep dive into a Unify play that's booking us 10+ meetings per month

Or feel free to respond to this email with a topic I might have missed.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

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