Product – COMBOVAR

GTM 152: What’s Actually Working in GTM Right Now: Lessons from Centari, Atrix AI, & Gaiia

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What’s actually working in go-to-market right now? In this live panel from the GTM Fund AGM, three early-stage leaders from three exceptional companies—Centari, Atrix AI, and Gaiia—break down how they’re closing enterprise deals in some of the most challenging verticals: legal, pharma, and telecom. From viral LinkedIn content and founder-led dinners to the now-infamous “donut drop” strategy, this episode is packed with practical, first-principles GTM plays you won’t find in a sales playbook.

Kevin Walker (Centari) – Founder & CEO of Centari, a legal tech platform providing deal intelligence to large law firms and, soon, financial services. A former M&A attorney at Paul Hastings, Kevin brings deep insider knowledge to solving complex legal workflows.

Vera Kutsenko (Atrix AI) – Founder & CEO of Atrix AI, a platform helping medical affairs teams at pharma and med device companies capture and operationalize real-world insights. Vera has become a thought leader in AI for regulated industries—recently authoring a viral book on AI in medical affairs.

Steven Farnsworth (Gaiia) – VP of GTM at Gaiia and early GTM leader at Workato and Outreach. Gaiia is an end-to-end ERP, billing, and CRM platform for independent internet service providers (ISPs), tackling a niche but high-value market with massive infrastructure needs.

Discussed in this Episode:

Centari built trust with top law firms by pairing deep domain credibility with a thoughtful, relationship-driven sales approach.
Atrix AI sparked inbound demand by turning a single viral LinkedIn post into a full-length book on AI in medical affairs.
Gaiia chose not to hire SDRs, focusing instead on high-ACV deals and personalized outreach in a tightly defined TAM of telecom providers.
Gaiia’s “donut drop” strategy—personally delivering treats to rural ISP offices—created brand awareness and unlocked new pipeline.
Both Centari and Atrix AI scaled founder-led sales by hiring a Chief of Staff to operationalize and extend GTM efforts.
Atrix AI uses educational AI workshops to qualify buyers, build trust, and stand out in a noisy vendor landscape.
Centari combats pilot fatigue and skepticism in legal tech by showing deep empathy, hiring former lawyers, and proving value early.

If you missed GTM 151, check it out here: How to Scale Vertical SaaS in 2025 | Dennis Lyandres (Ex-CRO, Procore)

Highlights:

03:00 – Why Atrix AI scaled founder-led sales with viral content and thought leadership

06:00 – The accidental (and wildly successful) AI & medical affairs book launch

08:00 – Centari’s early GTM strategy: legal empathy, cookies, and product conviction

11:00 – Gaia’s high-ACV model and why SDRs don’t make sense for their TAM

20:00 – The Donut Playbook: creating pipeline by showing up IRL

23:00 – Why Chief of Staff was a critical early hire for scaling sales ops

27:00 – How Gaia is thinking about building community in a slow-moving vertical

28:00 – What’s next: repeatability, vertical expansion, and community infrastructure

Guest Speaker Links:

Vera Kutsenko LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/verakutsenko/
Stephen Farnsworth LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-farnsworth/
Kevin Walker LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpwalker1/

Host Speaker Links (Paul Irving):

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsirving/

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

Website: https://gtmnow.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
YouTube: /@gtm_now
The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/

Sponsors:

Trinet

Founding a company is hard enough. Navigating payroll, benefits, and compliance shouldn’t slow you down. That’s where TriNet comes in. They work with startups and scaling businesses to help take HR off your plate, so you can stay focused on building product, growing revenue, and hiring great people – the go-to-market engine. B2B companies like Hivebrite and Equilend trust TriNet to help handle the infrastructure of their workforce, so their teams can focus on execution.

Learn more at https://trinet.com/gtmnow

UserEvidence

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Learn more at https://userevidence.com/gtmnow

GTM 152 Episode Transcript

Steven Farnsworth: We’re just kind of wowing the market with what we’ve built.

Kevin Walker: if you’re doing a strong founder-led sales motion, the hardest thing to scale is yourself

Vera Kutsenko: I did not expect it to go viral, and it did.

Steven Farnsworth: And the number of people who come up really excited about Gaiia, but are in year three of a 15 year contract, or a 10 year contract is shocking.

Vera Kutsenko: I’m only one person. I can’t be at every single trade show all the time. So I thought to myself, how do we scale this?

Steven Farnsworth: I’m not convinced s we’ll ever hire an SDR

Kevin Walker: Where we’re right now, kind of transitioning from that C to series, A stage of Go-To-Market motion.

Steven Farnsworth: I never thought to ask the question.

Sophie Buonassisi: Before we dive in today, a quick important message from our sponsor. Partner TriNet, a trusted HR provider to startups and scaling companies. Every early stage founder is told to focus on product and growth, but behind every product launch and revenue milestone is a team, and building that team is one of the hardest and most important parts of the journey.

Build the team that builds the company that is part of your Go-To-Market strategy, responsible for growth, hiring the right people, keeping them supported, and creating the infrastructure to help them thrive is critical. Trying to exist to make that easier. TriNet’s Full suite of HR Solutions is designed to support companies at critical inflection points from early traction to scale.

Learn more@trinet.com slash GTMnow to see what’s possible for your business. That’s TriNet, T-R-I-N-E t.com/gtm NOW. [00:02:00][00:03:00]

Wow. The feedback from last week’s episode where we pulled back the curtain on a private episode from GTM Fund’s annual general meeting, a GM was incredible. So. This is another special episode from the A GM and an extra special one because instead of my voice, this is a special host episode where GTM Funds partner and COO Paul Irving interviews three of our portfolio companies.

Vera Senco, founder and CEO of Atrix, ai. Steven Farnsworth, VP of GTM at Gaiia, and Kevin Walker, founder and CEO at Cent. These are three vertical SaaS startups talking about what is working in Go-To-Market. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Paul Irving: It’s my honor to be up on the stage with three of three of my favorite people. We’re very lucky to work with, but also do this particular panel. We talked about it earlier, but we obviously don’t get to do panel discussions like this, but we also [00:04:00] don’t get to do the A GM celebration of the funding community like this without our GTM operators.

Um, the investors we’re lucky to work with. The same should be said, and maybe even more so of the founders that we’re very grateful to be working with as well. So we’re gonna talk about three of those teams and companies with a specific tone of what’s working in GTM for everybody right now. And then maybe even some stuff we’ll end at the end of what are the focus areas from here going forward?

Because we do have a lot of valuable people in this room, a lot of people who can make connections, introductions, hopefully unlock some of that value for you. So if we. Speak it into existence. Maybe we can get some connections made in the happy hour after this. I’m sure most people here have heard us talk ad nauseum about Atrix and Centari and Gaiia, but it is much more meaningful when we hear it directly from yourself.

So I’m gonna start with just some intros, if you don’t mind. Kevin, I’ll start with you at the end, just yourself, a little bit about Centari, what you guys are building and the stage you’re at.

Kevin Walker: Great. Well, great to see everybody. I’m Kevin Walker, founder, CEO at Centari. I started my career as a practicing attorney doing m and a at [00:05:00] Paul Hastings, and then went.

In-house for most of my legal career founded Ari primarily to tackle some of the problems I felt as a, as an attorney, and particularly around deal work. So ARI is a platform for deal intelligence, so it serves transactional practices at large law firms, and pretty soon financial services. So great to be chatting with all of you.

Paul Irving: Thanks Kevin. I’m gonna pass the same, I’m just gonna write down to Vera. Vera, if you could share a bit about Atrix yourself and what you are building.

Vera Kutsenko: Hi everyone. My name is Vera, founder and CEO at Atrix ai. So we work with the pharma and medical device industry with their medical affairs teams who are really important, critical function of a pharma company in helping capture real world insights when a drug goes out to market and we help them tap into that data so they can get insights and really measure the.

Impact of their efforts. So super excited to be here and, and share what works in, in a very regulated industry. So alongside you.

Paul Irving: Yes. No easy sales cycles, by the way, on the, on the panel, we got this on hard mode. last but not least, [00:06:00] Mr. Steven Farnsworth, a familiar face, I’m sure for some of the folks in the room.

Been in LP since day one, but also, uh, VP of GTM at Gaiia.

Steven Farnsworth: Thank you and yes, good to see so many familiar faces here. I worked for Max at Outreach a long time ago now, and thankfully he did take my money. I guess it wasn’t that hard to take when I, when I joined the GTM fund. But since then I’ve been at Workato, our motto, which is also a port.

I was there first Go-To-Market hire, and then Gaiia for about a year. Gaiia is. It is essentially for the people not involved super deep into the telecom industry. It is CRM website, ERP, and billing software for NISP. So it is like the critical backbone for how internet service providers, which is a very distributed space across the country, outside of the.

Top tier one at and t Verizons that you’re used to dealing with daily. It is a very distributed industry and we function as the backbone operating system for how they [00:07:00] operate. That’s us.

Paul Irving: Amazing. Well, we’re, we’re excited to dive in a little bit and Vera, I’m gonna go to you first. It’s a pretty open-ended prompt, but as an early stage company, I mean seed stage company, working with some of the biggest and best pharma companies in the world, what’s been working in GTM so far?

Vera Kutsenko: Yeah, great question. So as, as you guys know, probably pharma and medical device, very regulated industry, similar more to legal and, and FinTech very hard to sell into from an enterprise perspective. It’s a very, and, and for context, I’ve never, before Atrix done enterprise sales, so I’ve kind of had to, you know, to, to warrant through in this really unique industry what has been working and.

And pharma in particular, it’s very relationship driven industry, is probably, I would imagine is a across industries in, in the enterprise and what we’ve seen really be effective in building relationships outside of the in-person trade shows. Right. And all of that that you’ve probably already heard of is really starting to scale those relationships through producing things like content.

So when we initially closed our first [00:08:00] customer. I thought to myself, well, why did we close them? It was in person. I spoke on a topic of authority, which is AI in my case, and built credibility that way. I’m only one person. I can’t be at every single trade show all the time. So I thought to myself, how do we scale this?

So I started to create video content. And it’s very cringe if you go, I’m sure like way, way early on. But it, it’s been a very effective way to that. Over the last year and a half has built kind of a, a following in AI and medical affairs space that has started to not only add oil to the kind of end-to-end, top of funnel to, to contract phase, but also with customer success.

And then recently, about maybe a month or two ago, I decided to run this little experiment where I’ve done a lot of trainings in these, in these enterprises. Had all of this content. So I was like, let me create a LinkedIn post to talking about this book called AI in Medical Affairs. I did not have it written fully at the time.

I did not expect it to go viral, and it did. So [00:09:00] I think we had like over a thousand people that were very relevant, who commented, liked it, shared it. So that’s an example of just from thought leadership and kind of content perspective. One way that I’ve seen be effective in pharma. And scaling content. So it’s,

Paul Irving: the ebook story is one of my favorite founder led sales stories.

’cause honestly, Vera wrote this LinkedIn post about a very real book that didn’t exist about AI and medical affairs, and then had so many potential customers commenting underneath like, please send DM me, DM me, and various. Sent a screenshot over to us and said, I guess I need to write a book this weekend.

And she did. I mean, how, how many pages was it in the end?

Vera Kutsenko: I think it’s like 315. I was,

Paul Irving: I was expecting to get like a 35 page PDF and I got sent a 300 page book at the end of the weekend.

Vera Kutsenko: Yeah, it’s a, I mean, thank God for, for Chad g pt, but do not worry, it can came, he came through all my training content and I read it and I edited it.

So, you know, I can back all of the words that, that are in there, but I mean, that wouldn’t have been possible before AI, to be honest. So thank God

Paul Irving: it’s, it’s just really neat because you’re, you’re [00:10:00] experimenting a little bit before you go and do that work. ’cause you have limited resources to invest and Go-To-Market.

Of course. So where you focus your time is important. So you found the demand first and then back filled it and it’s been, I know, a pretty cool source of top of funnel for you and the team. Kevin, I’m gonna pass it over to you. ’cause in a similar state, I mean at the seed stage you were working with.

Some of the biggest and best law firms in the world. What was working in the early days of go-to-market for Centari and yourself?

Kevin Walker: Yeah, so it very, very similar. Those first deals being very relationship driven, lobbying, highly regulated, and very skeptical. Lawyers are skeptical of many things. If anyone here, are there any lawyers here?

Just outta curiosity? Just just two of us. Alright. Alright. Or there’s a few more. Okay. Good. Not to out everybody at once, but, but it was a matter of going to, it’s also a very closed network. So the large law firm space, there’s a hundred, 200 large law firms, they actually have pretty, pretty deep spend on, on software.

So much larger than people typically realize. So they go to the same conferences, they kind of go to the same dinners. So the first few deals was very just, you know, me building those relationships. I think we took. Uh, the [00:11:00] same cookies from Maman Bakery to every conference we went to. So we kinda became known as like, oh, it’s the cent entire cookies.

Uh, so that really worked and, and that got us our first Marques customers and then showed up with a product that we had conviction in that the customers believed in. It became a flywheel world, word of mouth. So that was the first cover, first few innings, and now we are in the mode of starting to scale sales and go to markets.

We just made. Uh, our first two strategic, you know, senior AE hires and building that playbook, kind of coaching them on my, you know, how did founder lead sales? I watched every GTMfund, you know, video and training and was talking to Paul, you know, every other week on how to approach this, you know, these first hires.

So I. That’s where we’re right now, kind of transitioning from that C to series, A stage of Go-To-Market motion.

Paul Irving: it’s a really interesting time I think for legal tech as well, generally, just because if you look at, from a technology perspective, it is a fairly intuitive application of some of, some of the ai, both foundational models, but some of the other I.

You know, options there are available to those individual law firms, but they’re probably having to make some difficult decisions. I’d love to get the sense of what you’re hearing of just build versus buy [00:12:00] for some of these enterprise law firms.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, so this, this has been really interesting and I’m, I’m sure this is gonna resonate with for other verticals as well, but we are seeing.

You know, those firms where there’s someone in the firm who has a pet project and really has the edge to build something, and maybe they used to be a PM somewhere and now they want to, you know, bring that skillset to their, to a large law firm that they wanna shake up. And eventually the firm realizes that they are not a software company, that they are, you know, not a product company.

They’re a services business for clients. So, and usually those projects fail from what we’ve observed, but we occasionally see. Firms try to do it, and then they come to us after it has failed and we’re, we’re kinda stepping in as the, as the buy decision. So that’s most common. There are a couple firms in our industry that are truly building like software teams from the ground up and hiring, you know, armies of data scientists and engineers.

That’s very rare. But we have seen a, a couple of examples of. Someone gets to be in their bonnet to go, you know, build a gen I tool end to end. And in our, in our case at least, usually it doesn’t work out for them. It’s,

Paul Irving: I mean, it’s something that we’re seeing I think, in a lot of different areas and verticals.

And I’m sure some of our, our, you know, [00:13:00] GTM operators that are in the crowd would say the same thing, where there’s a subset of customers that want to build it internally. They wanna try it themselves, but it’s not just the build, it’s the execution of it, the quality of it, but it’s the maintenance of it too.

And, and you need to invest, I think, far more than people think when you hack together something over the weekend to really be sustainable. Especially when you’re talking about. You know, really big customers and, and firms. Um, Steven, I’m gonna kick kick it to you here ’cause I think guys an interesting Go-To-Market approach and I, I remember talking to you a little bit about it in the early days of, you know, you’re building core infrastructure software for these telecom companies, but there’s not an infinite number of potential customers that are out there.

So how does it change the way you and the team have thought about Go-To-Market when it’s, you know, a smaller pool of water, so to speak, but still, you know, really big fish that you’re going after. Y

Steven Farnsworth: Yeah. Just for context, there are 2200 ISPs we can sell to in the us and that’s, I should say, that’s our tam in terms of who’s actually in a buying cycle and is maybe potentially in market this year, it’s probably just a couple hundred, [00:14:00] which is why traditionally this space is, it’s a very distributed space in terms of our competitors and when we go out and understand from the market how many logos they’re winning a year, it’s, it’s, they’ve got a rep or two and they’re winning.

Five to six logos a year. Like this is a very slow moving space and very few people are migrating. I talked to, we were just at this big conference in Nashville, it’s like our Super Bowl for this space. And the number of people who come up really excited about Gaiia, but are in year three of a 15 year contract, or a 10 year contract is shocking.

So like, it’s just, it’s becoming, you know, a few months ago, I never thought to ask the question. I’m still relatively new there, but now it’s like. Okay, you’re excited. Awesome. How long? How long? Because I can’t get creative on, on nine years left of your contract or whatever it is. And so we’re, we’re stuck.

So for us, we have to be really conscious of, okay, if there’s only a limited number, how do we, it is so [00:15:00] paramount for us to get in front of them and to figure out how to, how to get that consideration when we’re there. And so for us it’s the, the playbook, like outreach is where I, you know, met a lot of you from.

Where you hire a bunch of SDRs and you go to markets and I see Lars and a few other people looking like this. This is the playbook that that, that I think many people still run. I’m not convinced s we’ll ever hire an SDR like in in our world it is. I, I think I’m gonna have a few AEs and today, we’ll, we’ll have probably about one and a half to two AEs that we’ll do about 7 million a RR this year.

And so we’re doing high a CV deals. We can only do, we’ll do about a dozen a quarter, which is unheard of for the space. But it’s, it’s, so our velocity, our product velocity is really high and people are seeing that. But for us it’s, we have to be value every relationship so, so carefully. And so, you know, you mentioned the events and trade shows and get building relationships.

I don’t know yet the way that we’re gonna scale this to today, [00:16:00] because today it is just us on a plane constantly to go be at these trade shows, to go interact with these people so that they know who we are. And from there we’ve been able to somehow, we’ve been able to drive deal cycles very quickly, but I don’t know how long that’ll last today.

We’re just kind of wowing the market with what we’ve built.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, very, very similar. Just to echo that very, very similar feeling here with kind of. And maybe that’s a, I’m curious how much of that is a broader trend with sales today where that relationship does matter more and more As gen AI is, you know, more and more prevalent and firms are getting, you know, fatigued by pilots and by the deluge of, you know, AI generated email sequences, that relationship, personal touch showing up at the trade shows just feels so, you know, really feels like, you know, the way to get that, that mind share.

Steven Farnsworth: Yeah, I, I mean, I think a lot of that will be dependent on the tam itself. Like somebody, like, I don’t think Kyle Norton’s here, is he from like the, you know, we, we all see him on talking about owner online. There’s I think a quarter million restaurants or something in the us. Like they’re not gonna know all of [00:17:00] them by name.

AI and, and the way that they go scale is gonna be totally different. But in a, in a market, like, it sounds like the three of us are in, like, I can actually know the names of most of the accounts that we’re gonna go after, and I can know. By name and by face. A lot of the leaders that are gonna buy my product this year or next year.

And so it’s, it’s why bring in an SDR some other motion to try to like kinda create that middle layer today. It’s important for our whole executive team to know who these accounts are and to work with them. So it’s, it’s, it’s a big support system around the seller.

Paul Irving: I’m now just known I, I, take me out of it.

No one wants to hear from me. They’ve already heard enough from me. I, we should have named the panel Making unscalable scalable. I feel like this is the theme of what a lot we’re talking about. Vera, I’m gonna go back to you on one of the things that you’ve been doing, which has been really interesting, and it’s the same idea where, you know, a lot of these buyers at the accounts you’re going after, which accounts are, are sort of the qualified people you should be talking to, and you’ve been pulled in because there’s a lot of interest in AI and how they should be using it to do almost like workshops on AI and how it would work in their [00:18:00] organization as a way to create some top of funnel.

How have you found success, or how have you been thinking about turning that into urgency to actually buy, so like the excitement and the interest in getting in the door and building a relationship, but trying to transition that into real velocity on the buying part. It.

Vera Kutsenko: Yeah, I think that’s a great question.

I’m actually, you know, curious if anyone else has, has tried a similar emotion. So for this it is, it’s an experiment for us. So I, I don’t quite know if, if this kind of Go-To-Market model will be effective, but the reason why it came about was because we sell into medical affairs. They’re MDs Pharm, these, they’re very smart people, but they’re not tech experts.

So, you know, pharma as an industry, I would qualify them as a very sophisticated data buyer. They’re, they understand data, but they’re not sophisticated software buyers and especially medical affairs. So when we’re trying to sell a solution that is a sophisticated AI solution, the way that it has to be sold, there’s some educational components that have to be involved to [00:19:00] also create, uh, signals through noise of all the other vendors that are like, we have all these AI solutions and it’s just a GPT wrapper.

Right? But, but medical affairs isn’t. They don’t have the language or the framework to evaluate that. So anyway, so, so we started to get requests to do AI trainings for medical affairs teams within the organizations. And the hypothesis ultimately is, you know, one, would that help us get one into the account to meet everyone there and be on the ground within the organization.

You know them talking about their confidential stuff within those confines to be able to then gather intelligence to qualify or disqualify them. So I recently did a training for Alexion, which is an AstraZeneca subsidiary, and you know, what became clear for through that example is that I don’t think they’re ready for, for an AI solution.

That’s good to know. Because then maybe next year we dedicate our times because every relationship matters. And you know, if you have two people maybe building those [00:20:00] relationships, you want them to prioritize their time. So, so that’s kind of, you know, the high level there. So using it more as a qualification.

Yeah. Step

Paul Irving: and, and, and anyone too, if you have tips for VE on how to leverage some of the thought leadership work that you’ve done in your GTM works and turn it into buying urgency, I’m sure she would be all ears. We’ll see.

Vera Kutsenko: Yes.

Paul Irving: And Kevin, back to you. So I. I was interested ’cause I think when we, when we were originally talking to customers that you had been talking to was I guess a little over a year now with Centari.

I think one of the things we heard over and over again was the thoughtfulness of your approach and LA’s approach with the product and the way that you thought about the customer problems. And it felt a little bit like some of that stemmed from some of these big firms having to make a lot of technology decisions really quickly.

And wanting to feel like they’re being sort of heard or understood. I, I’m curious if you’ve heard, like what’s, what frustrations you’ve heard within, you know, the enterprise buyers and legal tech over the last little bit.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting because our, our market has, I mean, probably similar to other, other [00:21:00] verticals, your end users, associates and partners at these law firms and, and then your buyers, which are the innovation teams, knowledge management teams.

Sometimes teams have just been spun up in the last two years to kind of go. Explore gen ai. And of course there’s whole separate conversation around the risks of that and how you need to really prove value to the end user and make sure you stick the landing. ’cause the, you know, there is a cycle of innovation.

We have to think long term there. But I’d say for the, for the buyer profile, they are pilot fatigued, they’re inundated with vendors. The pain points that we’re solving there are demonstrating, you know, helping them look good to their stakeholders, which is firm management. That’s usually said, we have an innovation mandate, we’re gonna hire this innovation team.

If we can make them look good, help them demonstrate. ROI, we’ve, we’ve won that, that half of the equation. Then with the associates and partners, the practicing attorneys, and I go back to attorneys being skeptical. ’cause I, I am a very skeptical attorney myself. I was in the buyer’s seat before and was always very, you know, questioning what I was, what I was being sold.

So with that stakeholder, it’s demonstrating, look, we hear [00:22:00] you, people on our team have been in your seat. We empathize with your problem. And just really that, that personal touch of like. You know, we have formed our own organization around the identity of our, of our end users. So we’ve hired attorneys from top law firms like Kirkland and from Davis Polk and others.

And so we’re able to evangelize directly to. The pain points they care about. And that’s, that’s great. ’cause they’re getting pitched by a lot of, you know, vendors that don’t have that same, that same ethos and empathy for the problem. Uh, so it’s kind of been a two-sided equation for us in that way. Yeah,

Paul Irving: that’s really interesting.

And so a lot of it is that, yeah, the customer empathy and understanding as a way to accelerate some of the decision making that, you know, I, you can just, you can understand the position they’re in, where they feel overwhelmed, they need to make big decisions, but don’t know if they’re talking to a lot of vendors that understand truly what they’re going through, what their pain points are and what they wanna solve.

Steven, I’m gonna go to you. We, we got the Centari cookies and, and now we might get the Gaiia donuts. I think I had, I had dinner with Mark Andre, the founder of Gaiia last, last week, and he was telling me about the donut playbook. So I was [00:23:00] gonna ask what’s working for Gaiia, but I think I might need to spill the beans on the, the donut playbook as well.

Steven Farnsworth: Uh, probably not prepared to call it a playbook. Oh, hey, we just did. But what we’ve, there are again, a few number of accounts that matter to us. We just, I just tried this out. It was maybe a dumb idea, but I think it got us some really great exposure. Since we’ve hired our second rep, it’s allowed me to not have to be at every single trade show.

And so I asked, I’ve asked the reps recently, Hey, where can I be? Is there some account that you wanna break into? Or an account that if I could be on site that I could go accelerate the deal? Where should I go while you’re out at this next event? And so I’ve recently been down in a big drive through Southern Utah.

A, I showed up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then done in Oklahoma City to Dallas Drive. And in each case, what I’ve done is before having planned any sort of trip, we’ve manufactured some interest with a key counter two by saying, I’m going to be in town, [00:24:00] and I’m sure everyone’s done this lots of times.

And then of course they say, yes, I’d love to go to dinner. And then I book my flight and say, okay, I’m gonna be there. And so I go and meet a two, one or two of these accounts. But if I’m gonna be there and I’ve got a. A breakfast and a dinner. I have a whole data fill. So this AI has been actually relatively difficult for us to apply in our small TAM business.

And I’d love ideas for many of you, but one thing it has been helpful for is when I have a specific location in mind, I can say, help me understand all the different accounts in their locations, their office locations. ’cause most of them have physical locations for us that are within an hour or two of this area.

I go call the local donut shop. I buy 15 to 20, do dozen donuts. I get a rental car and I am meeting for breakfast with one of these accounts. And then I spend the next nine hours driving around in a circle around these little, you know, rural areas in dropping off donuts with. Some brochures, my business card, [00:25:00] whatever, shaking the hands of the people at the front desk, who in many cases are our customer service reps who interact with a lot of what we do.

Again, these, in many cases, we may have a high A CV, but the business might be 50 people in many cases. And so if I do this right. The CEO, the leaders, they know about us and then if I go do this at multiple locations of the same account, they’re all sending each other messages. Hey, did you guys get donuts?

You, we showed up. And so we’ve driven some real interest and awareness at these accounts that. Just never would hear about us. They may never actually go to these trade shows through us just showing up in this random city that no vendor has any business showing up to. But the fact that we just we’re doing this in a a more efficient way around these other meetings has been something that’s allowed us to, I.

To drive some real pipeline and awareness for the future. And so that’s, again, it’s not, that sounds like a playbook. I’ve gotta

Paul Irving: figure out more. We, we can, we, we pulled it

Steven Farnsworth: around.

Paul Irving: That sounds like it’s certain to, we have, we have a

Steven Farnsworth: notion doc to try to capture what we think could become a playbook, but it’s, it’s something early we’ve [00:26:00] done and it’s, it’s allowed us to start getting in front of people that we just wouldn’t otherwise be able to capture and talk to.

It builds a lot of credibility for our, at least our brand in the space.

Paul Irving: And a very important follow up question. Did you bring donuts today, Steven? I didn’t, and I

Steven Farnsworth: tried. I put them in the trunk so that I don’t eat a whole box.

Paul Irving: I’m driving around. That was like a

Steven Farnsworth: learning from the, the first one.

Paul Irving: I, I didn’t, and, and Kevin Vera, I’m sorry.

I’m gonna do this. I didn’t prep you for this question, but I think it’s a really interesting one. ’cause we talked about how difficult it is to scale some of the founder-led sales stuff that you’re doing and both of you. Identified hiring a chief of staff is actually like one of the earlier hires that you did to help scale.

And I just would love to, not even the what, but like the why of, of sort of where that became a really important first hire. And Kevin, I’ll start with you.

Kevin Walker: Yeah. We, we just, we just made our first, you know, chief of staff hire about a month ago who’s fantastic and, and works here in New York with me. And we, it, it was that, that becomes, if you’re doing a strong founder-led sales motion, that is the hardest thing to scale is yourself of course.

And so having someone who you can really rely on too. Yeah, start to scale everything [00:27:00] else that you would be doing. And this particular hire we made was, uh, one of the first, uh, employees outta FinTech a number of years back, and kinda was there, you know, soup to nuts. So really saw that, uh, we, we looked for someone who had been on the zero to one startup journey in particular.

So we weren’t trying to find someone who was gonna learn startups for the first time as someone who really knew how to, um, you know, be successful at this stage of the business and hit the ground running. Because critically for me it was, I don’t want to have to. You know, train anyone on the job. At this stage, we’d meet someone who are, do you know, doers on day one.

So that’s been really, really effective and helpful for us.

Vera Kutsenko: That’s awesome. We should exchange notes ’cause we’re, we’re still recruiting. So if you guys have any good chief of staff candidates that have early stage startup experience please and, and also enterprise or B2B would be super awesome, but very similar.

I think I’m the one Go-To-Market person at our company. We’re very engineering product heavy from like a headcount perspective. And the hardest thing to scale with founder-led sales is your time. So really [00:28:00] having someone come in who can. Put processes around some of the things we see working like a donut playbook.

I’ll say, I tried candles, I did make candles for prospects. I’ll not say that, that’s a playbook to, to follow though, but, but I think in a similar vein, the chief of staff ideally could be someone to scale the Go-To-Market operations and if they can support the relationship management piece and really have executive presence, I think that’s a, that’s a nice to have.

But then I think maybe that veers a little bit more towards like the true. Sales aside from a higher perspective, so.

Paul Irving: It’s, it’s, we were worried about Steven eating too many donuts. I’m worried about you burning your car, or something like that. Carrying around too many candles. I know we just have a couple of minutes left, so I, I wanted to end on, on just sort of where you and the team are focusing most of your efforts or sort of what are the big strategic initiatives on the revenue side of the business that you’re spending a lot of your time on right now?

And, and I’ll, I’ll start Steven with you. And the idea is, I, I would love to hear if anybody in the room, you know, in the happy hour later has some ideas for these. [00:29:00] But yeah, I wanted to end on a note of. Of what’s the big initiative for the team right now?

Steven Farnsworth: One of the things I think we’ve done, and I, I honestly think this has changed the trajectory of Gaiia, and it may seem very simple, is.

At these events that we go to, these trade shows, we’ve been holding these really non-salesy operator focused dinners and everyone’s done dinners around events, so it’s, I, I don’t think we’re reinventing the wheel, but we’ve, I think that we’re at Workato, for example, where I was before we had a. Suite at the Warrior Stadium and Stadium, and we would beg people to come.

And you guys know what it’s like to sell to leaders in San Francisco. Nobody shows up. It’s crazy. It’s the finals. You can’t come on. Seriously, this space is just a, is different. We’ve, we’ve been able to get exposed to very, very senior folks through these dinners. Again, non-salesy, getting great people in a room.

It’s ended up being a huge source of pipeline for us of brand awareness. It’s been amazing for us. What I’d be really curious and something that we’ve been noodling on, and I think it’s finally [00:30:00] time for us to jump in, is we do this at these major events, but then in the, in, in between, these people clearly crave community.

They, they want it. And these are people who again, might be in year three of a 10 year contract, they have no interest in Gaiia in the near term, but we, they, they want to be part of this. They want this community and I. Again, in a B2B Tech world, say, great, let’s start another Slack group, and it’s one of my 10 that I’m in.

And I can see that that is not the case here. It’s, it’s, they’re, they’re using different tech. We’re, we’re not quite sure the best way to, to do this. And so I’m, I’m really curious for people who have created this, almost this feedback cycle of dinners and communities and local events. We, we need to do this.

And I’m not quite sure the right way to do so yet, but that is going to be an initiative that I take very, very seriously to. Take my accounts that will, you know, that I, I hope are friends of ours and prospects of ours for, you know, in five years and wanna work with us.

Paul Irving: I’m, I’m sure, I know we have some community builders in the house here, so I’m hoping we’re gonna have some, some [00:31:00] good ideas.

And even just the technology enablement side, which you mentioned is not what you would expect when you would build a tech company, a community, so to speak, and try to support it. Vera, how about yourself?

Vera Kutsenko: Well, I was gonna say, I would love to exchange insights. ’cause one of the things I’ve been thinking about pharma’s very in person, relationship driven as well.

So outside of doing dinners at trade shows, which everyone does, how can we enable kind of repeatability and consistency? Creating those types of environments, like in New York or, or wherever, throughout the year to kind of encourage pipeline. Although I will say I, I don’t think most of the pharma contracts are like 15 years, but maybe three years.

So a little bit more achievable. So from, from our perspective, what I’ve been really thinking about is just repeatability. So how do we. You know, pharma sales cycle is also very slow, but re referenceability or word of mouth is so critical. Like I, if you have an existing customer that speaks very highly of you, it just, it’s such a switch to like convert to a contract.

So almost just thinking of, okay, we have what we have [00:32:00] today. We know bits and pieces that are working, what can we do to enable repeatability in, in this kind of complex environment? So.

Kevin Walker: Great. Yeah. I think for, for us it’s, we are starting to pursue a market expansion, play into financial services. I think I mentioned earlier, and it’s a very interesting, you know, problem to solve where you have a kinda a playbook that’s working for one vertical.

You have a product that can very well be deployed at a different vertical. But, you know, trying to attack that in a way that’s not too distracting and doesn’t cannibalize the core market that you’ve, you’ve built. Uh, so if anyone has gone through that motion of, you know, spinning up a. An adjacent vertical for a similar product and found a good way to approach that all years.

Paul Irving: Amazing. Well, I, we were, you know, very appreciative of the applause earlier, but I think the largest applause of the day should go for our founders here. So thank you very much for coming. This has been fantastic.

Alright, Sophie here again. And that wraps up the special, special edition episode. Hope you enjoyed this style of conversation. If you have any feedback, drop me a line on email [00:33:00] responding to the GTM Now podcast email. It goes to our team. I do personally read and respond to every single email also, or on LinkedIn.

Would love to hear your thoughts. If you enjoy this podcast overall too, it would mean the world if you could leave us a review on the platform that you listen on. YouTube, apple, Spotify, wherever you tune in, you know the drill. This helps us continuously grow the podcast. We can continue to bring on the guests that you wanna hear from on the topics and areas that you wanna hear most about.

Thank you. Appreciate you. Have a great day and catch you next week.

The post GTM 152: What’s Actually Working in GTM Right Now: Lessons from Centari, Atrix AI, & Gaiia appeared first on GTMnow.

How to build the right thing (before you scale the wrong one)

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Most startups die not because they move too slow. Rather, because they build the wrong thing, for the wrong customer, with the wrong team.

That’s why these frameworks from Oji Udezue, former Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform, are so valuable. He’s also held product leadership roles at Twitter, Atlassian, and Microsoft, and recently co-authored a book on scaling high-growth product teams: Building Rocket Ships.

Here are five tactical, high-leverage lessons for early-stage B2B founders and operators:

1. Where to Fish: A framework for targeting the right workflow

“You can predict the terminal value of your startup by mapping the frequency and breadth of your workflow.”

This is a simple framework to assess if you’re building in the right zone. It’s a powerful filter to assess the strategic potential of the workflow your product targets. Oji maps them by two traits:

1. Frequency: How often the workflow is performed

2. Breadth: How many people across the company perform it

This creates four categories:

Look for workflows that are used daily, across teams.
Avoid building for low-frequency, narrow personas unless your wedge is razor-sharp.

So if you’re in a LiEv or LiNi zone, chart a clear roadmap toward HiNi or HiEv territory to increase market pull and enterprise value.

2. Ditch the EPD trio and build a 6-person “shipyard” team

Engineering, product, and design is a 1999 idea.”

Today’s most effective teams include six functions from day one:

Product
Engineering
Design
Product Marketing
User Research
Data

This prevents the old waterfall trap of “build → throw over the fence → launch.” Instead, you get faster iteration, tighter GTM integration, and fewer missed signals.

How these functions are built is continuously evolving with AI.

3. You need a 3x+ value delta to overcome switching costs

“People won’t switch unless your product is 3x better – faster, cheaper, or both.”

This one’s easy to overlook. If your tool is only 20% better than the incumbent, it won’t matter. Switching is painful, even if the new thing is technically superior.

You need to be:

5x cheaper, or
3x faster, or
Undeniably simpler

For example, despite building a better internal Slack competitor at Atlassian, they couldn’t win because Teams was bundled for free and Slack was good enough.

4. AI is creating a tempo mismatch between product and GTM

“We’re building faster, but customers aren’t absorbing faster.”

AI tools have radically sped up development. But GTM motions – onboarding, enablement, comms – haven’t kept pace. This causes friction, feature fatigue, and missed adoption moments. GTM and product need to operate on the same cadence.

Teams are adjusting by:

Rethinking what “version” means (rolling vs. batch releases)
Slowing down outbound marketing to give customers time to catch up
Building internal GTM muscle as fast as they build product

5. Don’t stack risk in your infrastructure

“Take only one unproven layer at a time.”

This is a mistake even seasoned founders make: layering a new market, new tech, new GTM motion, and unproven infrastructure… all at once.

Instead:

New product → proven market
New market → proven tech
New everything → high failure rate

Recommendations

Watch the AI SDR Summit (it’s on-demand and free!)

Stream Qualified’s first annual AI SDR Summit on-demand and hear how leaders from companies like G2, 6sense, Salesforce, and so many more are leveraging the power of AI SDR agents to scale their inbound and outbound pipe gen motions.

Check out candid conversations about the state of the AI SDR agent landscape, inbound and outbound playbooks, and real results from marketers at the forefront of the agentic marketing era.

More for your eardrums

147: RevOps Is a Hidden Growth Engine with Navin Persaud, VP of RevOps at 1Password

This episode explores how AI is transforming the world of revenue operations.

Navin Persaud, VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password, unpacks the evolving intersection—how AI is impacting ops, team structures, tech stacks, and execution strategies. With over 20 years of experience leading ops, Navin has seen firsthand how operational strategy went from backend support to mission-critical.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Zoca – announced their $6M Seed round. Salons, spas, and wellness other local business entrepreneurs are expected to post daily, run ads, and learn SEO – while juggling clients, staff, and operations. Zoca solves for that. Its AI engine drives demand, boosts visibility across Google and GPT, follows up with leads, and rebooks past clients. Already, it’s powering over 1,000+ small businesses.

Owner – closed a $120M Series C and now sits at a $1B valuation. An inside look to their latest funding co-led by Alex Kurland of Meritech and Shalini Rao of Headline.

More for your eyeballs

By helping customers achieve their key outcomes, your team can establish strong relationships and trust with your customers which is crucial for growth. Kim Peretti (Chief Customer Officer – Klaviyo, Restaurant365) explains how connecting the dots between marketing promises, sales deliverables, and customer success is crucial for success.

Google is quietly baking Gemini into every corner of its ecosystem—from Workspace to Android. This is a demonstration of true distribution strategy, rather than a simple AI rollout.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

Growth Engineer at Tavus (Hybrid – San Francisco)
Strategic Customer Success Manager at Noibu (Hybrid – Ottawa, ON)
Customer Operations Lead at BlueCargo (Los Angeles/New York)
Director, Solutions Engineering – MM & Enterprise at Vanta (Remote – US)
Mid-market AE (Central) at Writer (Hybrid – New York)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
GTM 25 Roadshow Boston: June 3, 2025 (Boston, MA)
Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC, NY)
GTMfund Dinner: June 11, 2025 (London, UK)
GTM 25 Roadshow San Francisco: June 12, 2025 (San Franciso, CA)
GTM 25 Roadshow London: June 19, 2025 (London, UK)
Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post How to build the right thing (before you scale the wrong one) appeared first on GTMnow.

The AI messaging pivot happening across SaaS

In 2023, we saw a surge of SaaS brands adding anything “AI-powered” or “AI-driven” into their website headlines. A quick use of Wayback Machine for the top 100 SaaS brands will show you just how pervasive it was.

The optics were that if AI wasn’t integral to your roadmap and marketing, you were losing relevance.

Many venture capital firms shifted their investments almost entirely into AI startups.

As this flood of AI messaging hit, a lot of people quickly became numb to it.

Now in 2025, AI promises have simply become baseline expectations. Describing your product as “AI-powered” is like saying it’s internet-connected in 2005. It’s expected, not a value add.

With this expectation, we’re now seeing companies ditching AI messaging in their website headers.

Companies are testing, and the results are showing. We see brands, such as Notion, testing the impact of:

AI in the hero headline
AI in the hero headline and hero sub-header
AI just in the hero sub-header

In the test example below, AI messaging in the sub-header won out over having it in the header.

They kept the focus on the core value proposition of helping teams write, plan and collaborate to create better workspaces, while still having the AI inclusion.

This trend of AI reinforcing and amplifying the core UVP (unique value proposition) is gaining momentum.

We see this shift towards having no AI in the hero header (but including it in the sub-header) across dozens of top SaaS brands: Klaviyo, Monday, Freshworks, MongoDB, Snowflake, Braze, Cloudflare, GitLab, ActiveCampaign and countless others.

For example, here is how Freshworks positions it:

3-step AI messaging differentiation framework

In a market where almost every product claims to have AI, differentiation can’t come from the tech itself. It has to come from the outcome, the problem you solve, and the clarity of your message.

If you’re building or marketing an AI product, use this simple 3-step framework to test and refine your positioning:

1. Start with the pain (what’s broken?)
Don’t lead with tech. Lead with the real problem your buyer is facing. Make it visceral, specific, and urgent.

For example: “Sellers spend 40% of their time manually triaging email.”

2. Move to the outcome (what improves?)
Next, show what your product actually helps people achieve.

For example: “Our users reclaim 4+ hours per week and use it to close deals.”

3. Then show how AI enables the outcome
Now that the user cares, you can explain how AI helps make that happen. But avoid buzzwords, make it visual and concrete.

Bad: “We use AI to streamline sales workflows.”

Better: “Our AI automatically categorizes, prioritizes, and drafts replies – so reps can focus on revenue.”

A quick cheatsheet for better AI messaging:

Replace “AI-powered” with outcomes – what does it enable?
Use your customer’s language – not your internal jargon.
Get specific – “launch campaigns 2x faster” beats “transform workflows.”
Anchor with proof – even directional data builds credibility.
Show, don’t tell – demos and workflows > buzzwords.

Leading with “AI-powered” used to signal innovation. Now, it risks blending you into the noise. Companies are putting product value back at the center and letting AI show up only when it adds clarity to that story.