Austin Hughes is the co-founder and CEO of Unify GTM, a platform powering warm outbound for growth, marketing and sales teams. Previously, Austin was an early growth leader at Ramp, where he helped scale from a few hundred to over 12,000 customers in just two years. Unify GTM has raised over $30 million from investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Emergence Capital, as well as founders from Ramp, Flexport, Box, and others.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:30 - Why experimentation culture, not strategy, is the real growth secret at billion-dollar startups
03:32 - How running 100+ quarterly experiments creates massive competitive advantage—even with 70% failure rate
04:48 - Why your multi-week engineering sprints are killing growth—scope experiments to hours, not weeks
06:28 - Traditional growth channels beat moonshot virality—forget going viral, here's what actually works
09:00 - Why all your growth knowledge becomes useless when starting from zero revenue
12:28 - The exact customer threshold when traditional growth strategies finally start working
14:14 - Most companies kill experiments too early—why "this doesn't work" is your biggest growth obstacle
16:57 - What HubSpot's early growth tactics reveal about the counterintuitive power of partnerships
24:51 - The mathematical formula for prioritizing growth experiments nobody talks about
31:14 - Why most growth teams waste 90% of their time on the wrong activities
34:52 - How acting on website signals within 15 minutes can dramatically increase conversion rates
41:01 - Why growth hires—not engineers—will be the most crucial startup hires in coming years
42:28 - The costly mistake Austin would fix if restarting Unify: investing in growth 6 months earlier
45:16 - The surprising truth about what makes social media posts go viral for founders
48:19 - Why hiring growth talent from consulting and banking beats traditional marketing backgrounds
51:06 - The dangerous myth that you should perfect your product before selling it
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