Customer-Funded AI SaaS Success: Building Hushly Without VCs | Geoff Rego

How do you compete with billion-dollar marketing tech giants when you're customer-funded? Today's guest has the answer – and it involves rethinking everything about how B2B buyers consume content.

I'm joined by Geoff Rego, CEO and Co-Founder of Hushly, an all-in-one personalization platform that's helping companies like NVIDIA transform their digital experiences. After Oracle acquired his previous marketing automation company, Geoff came back to solve a bigger problem: making B2B content experiences actually work for buyers, not just marketers.

Hushly takes a radically different approach to B2B marketing. Instead of leading with forms and gating content, they've built AI-powered experiences that let buyers self-educate at their own pace. Think Netflix for B2B content – where AI agents do the searching, finding, and personalizing so buyers can focus on learning.

In this episode, Geoff breaks down how they're using AI to create account-specific microsites at scale, why "content Sherpas" beat traditional chatbots, the power of first-party intent data, and how being customer-funded forced them to build better products than their VC-backed competitors.

Takeaways

• The Netflix Model for B2B: Why self-nurturing beats email nurturing - let buyers binge content when they want it
• AI Microsite Generation: How to automatically create personalized sites for 50 accounts using internal + public intelligence
• First-Party Intent Revolution: Stop inferring what buyers want - let them tell you through conversational AI
• The Form-Free Future: Leading with value increases content engagement by 300% and qualified leads by 51%
• Customer-Funded Advantage: How resource constraints force better product decisions than unlimited VC money
• Content Memory: Why AI that remembers past interactions creates exponentially better buyer experiences

Sound Bites

• "We're not big proponents of leading with a form, we're big proponents of leading with value, kind of like the Netflix binge experience."
• "Don't call it bootstrap. Call it customer-funded."
• "When you have too much money, common sense goes out the door."

Chapters  
01:13 - What is Hushly? 
02:08 - Customer Examples and Scale 
03:42 - Core Platform Capabilities 
06:20 - Account Intelligence and Data Sourcing 
09:31 - AI-Generated Microsites 
11:53 - Dogfooding Their Own Platform 
13:07 - AI Adoption Friction in B2B 
14:39 - Content Hub Architecture 
16:50 - First-Party Intent Through Conversational AI 
19:34 - Personalized Generative AI in Real-Time 
20:57 - Self-Nurturing Landing Pages 
25:11 - The YouTube Model for B2B 
27:50 - Future Product Direction 
30:06 - Competing with Billion-Dollar Brands 
32:20 - Advantages of Being Lean 
34:07 - Building a 20-Year Team 
35:51 - Advice for Customer-Funded Startups 

Connect with us
Where to find Geoff:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffrego/
Website: https://hushly.com/

Where to find Sani:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sani-djaya/
Get in touch: [e-mail]