Hypergrowth Partners

SaaStr 751: How to Use AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with Guillaume Cabane of HyperGrowth Partners As a marketing leader, how do you use today's AI platforms and tools to become more efficient? Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners and ex-head of marketing at Drift, Gorgias and Segment, shares how you can win with AI in outbound, SEO, and paid. AI was good a year or two ago, but its quality was less than that of a human. There was less cost and less quality. Nowadays, we have more quality and speed, yet still at a lower cost. What does that mean for marketing? Each motion has different CACs. The sales-led approach we're used to, which is pretty efficient but relatively expensive. On the other side, you have PLG, which is fairly cheap but generally drives lower CAC and smaller customers. You have this spectrum from low contract value to high ACV, which is correlated with low CAC to high CAC. With those CACs and ACVs, you have typical segmentation of micro to Enterprise, and within that segmentation, you have the channels. On the cheap, low-CAC side, you'll have SEO and virality: the PLG playbooks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet. Join us in 2024 at: SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20 --------------

Guillaume Cabane

Growth Advisor

RampHypergrowth Partners

SaaStr 725: Mastering High-Volume, Low-CAC Marketing: Strategies from Gorgias, Vercel, and Hypergrowth Partners In today's world, there's a clear shift in what founders, boards, and investors are all after — scalable, low-CAC (customer-acquisition cost) growth strategies. In a panel, Guillaume Cabane (G) and Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto), co-founders of HyperGrowth Partners, Axelle Heems, Senior Director of Growth Operations at Gorgias, and Morgane Palomares, VP of Marketing at Vercel, share real-life examples of how demand generation, growth, and marketing strategies have been executed to scale beyond 2x ARR each year, even on a low budget. Let's deep dive into how combining innovative demand gen strategies with a modern tech stack and specific team setup can provide a winning formula for scaling B2B growth, even with low budgets of greater than a 2x burn multiple. In this episode we'll share: Automated outbound at-scale strategies. Sales-assisted, product-led growth strategies that close Enterprise leads. How to use community as a driver of product-led growth. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet. Join us in 2024 at: SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20 SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200 -------------- This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.

Guillaume Cabane

Growth Advisor

RampHypergrowth Partners

Martin Gontovnikas

Co-Founder & GP

Hypergrowth PartnersAuth0

Axelle Heems

Senior Director of Growth Operations

Gorgias

Morgane Palomares

VP of Marketing

Vercel

Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the "dark side" to focus on Marketing. With this career transition, he found a way to combine his 2 passions by applying his "engineering thinking" model to Marketing. He is now a B2B SaaS Advisor to Vercel and Airbyte among others and Co-Founder & GP of Hypergrowth Partners. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0. In Today's Episode with Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto) We Discuss: 1. From No Idea to Growth Leader: How Gonto made his way into the world of growth when it was not a thing? What does Gonto know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth? Why does Gonto believe product and marketing is more important than sales and marketing? 2. Growth: What, When and Who: What is growth? What is it not? What do people misunderstand most with growth? When is the right time to hire your first growth person? What is the right profile for the right first growth hire? Junior? Senior? 3. Mastering PLG and Enterprise: What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise? Why does Gonto believe that all PLG companies should start with 6-8 design partners? Is it possible to do enterprise and PLG at the same time? How does one provide enough value in a PLG motion to convert enterprise buyers? 4. Data vs Intuition: Art vs Science: Is growth more art or science? Why does Gonto believe qualitative data is more important than quantitative? How does Gonto think about psychology when selling and marketing? What do so few startups? understand about the psychology of their customers? How does Gonto approach messaging and what is truly great product marketing?

Martin Gontovnikas

Co-Founder & GP

Hypergrowth PartnersAuth0

Guillaume Cabane is a growth advisor to high-growth SaaS Startups, including Ramp, Spot, Airbyte, G2, Gorgias, Metadata, Madkudu, and others. Guillaume held VP of Growth roles at Drift, Segment, and other successful startups, where he helped them grow from ~50 to 300. Prior, Guillaume spent 6 years at Apple. In Today's Episode with Guillaume Cabane We Discuss: 1. Entry into Growth: How did Guillaume make his way into the world of growth? What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from him time at Segment where he 4x revenue? What does Guillaume know now that he wishes he had known when he entered growth? 2. Enterprise vs SMB & CAC/LTV: Why does Guillaume think it is harder to go enterprise down than SMB up? What are the biggest mistakes companies make when scaling into enterprise? What are the biggest mistakes startups make with product-led-growth motions? Why does Guillaume believe it is impossible to analyse CAC/LTV in early companies? 3. Activation, Engagement and KPI Setting: What are the biggest mistakes companies and teams make in activation? What can growth and marketing teams do to guarantee engagement in prospects? Why are all KPIs not tied to revenue BS? 4. Hiring the Growth Team: What are the core characteristics of great growth hires? How quickly does it become apparent when you have made a bad growth hire? Why do founders make the best profiles when hiring your first growth hire? What are the biggest mistakes Guillaume has made when hiring for growth? 5. Why Growth is Like Venture: What is the secret to building a great growth portfolio? Why is it impossible to scale to $50M ARR with only one good channel? What is the right way to spread resources across channels? When is the right time to add new channels and diversify?

Guillaume Cabane

Growth Advisor

RampHypergrowth Partners

Are you trying to unlock sustainable low customer acquisition costs (CAC) growth for your SaaS company? Then you need to hear what Guillaume Cabane, Co-Founder and President of HyperGrowth Partners, has to say on the subject. In this podcast, Guillaume shares the formula he used at Ramp, Gorgias, and Drift to reach explosive saas growth - showing you the secrets of smart scaling. Don't miss out - listen now now for groundbreaking advice on generating fast CAC growth success!

Guillaume Cabane

Growth Advisor

RampHypergrowth Partners

Martin Gontovnikas started coding at 12, built his career as a software engineer, then switched to "the dark side" - marketing. At Auth0, he applied a 6-step inbound marketing SaaS framework that grew the company from $200,000 to eight figures in less than five years. In this episode, Gonto walks through each step, shares a case study where two experiments failed before the third unlocked growth, and explains why 85% of Auth0's revenue comes from inbound marketing SaaS strategy driven by developer content. The six steps are: decompose the problem, formulate a hypothesis, define a metric, run the experiment, verify the data, and iterate. Auth0's first SaaS content marketing experiment attracted existing users instead of new ones. The second got great conversion but low traffic. The third - greenfield content distributed through Hacker News and developer newsletters - finally drove organic growth SaaS founders can replicate. Martin Gontovnikas is the VP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0, a platform that makes it easier for developers to implement authentication and authorization for web and mobile products. 🔑 Key Lessons 🎯 Decompose big inbound marketing SaaS problems into testable pieces: Auth0 was flat on signups. By interviewing developers about their habits, Gonto broke the problem into specific, testable experiments rather than guessing at solutions. 🔄 Treat content marketing SaaS failures as data for the next experiment: Auth0's first two experiments failed, but each revealed critical insights. The third iteration combined both learnings into a scalable acquisition engine. 🚀 Write greenfield content that solves problems without mentioning your product: Auth0's breakthrough came from writing about authentication in Angular without leading with Auth0. A small aside converted at much higher rates than product-focused content. 📉 Inbound marketing SaaS without distribution is invisible: Auth0's second experiment had excellent conversion but almost no traffic because SEO alone was not enough. Adding distribution through Hacker News and developer newsletters multiplied page views. 🧠 Scale by spinning up dedicated teams for proven channels: When developer content worked, Auth0 hired 10 technical writers as their first marketing team. The experimentation squad moved on to test new channels. Chapters Introduction Favorite quote - be yourself, everyone else is taken What Auth0 does and its developer-focused platform Martin's role as VP of Marketing and Growth Transition from software engineer to marketer What is developer evangelism How Martin joined Auth0 through serendipity The rise of the CTMO and engineering approach to inbound marketing SaaS Step 1 - Decompose the problem into smaller pieces Step 2 - Formulate a hypothesis The first experiment that failed Steps 3-6 - Define, Run, Verify, Iterate Deep dive into qualitative and quantitative decomposition Formulating hypotheses with problem statements Setting time frames and statistical significance Verifying data - segmenting metrics to find hidden insights Getting traditional marketers to embrace experimentation Auth0's growth - from $200K to eight figures Lightning round Where to find Martin and Auth0 Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/188 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email

Martin Gontovnikas

Co-Founder & GP

Hypergrowth PartnersAuth0