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Account Executive

BLACKHYVE

Advisor

Deloitte

Sr. Technology Advisor

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Account Executive - Enterprise

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Regional Sales Manager

President's Club FY21
President's Club FY20

National Account Executive

Account Executive - Mid Market

Account Executive - Small, Medium Business

Account Executive - Strategic Growth Business

Senior Account Executive - Emerging Small Business

Business Development Representative

WIND Mobile

Store Manager

TELUS

Sales Representative

Even as a serial sales rep throughout school, I never considered a career in sales as a viable option.

I had resigned myself to the reality that teaching was my calling and that sales was just a means to pay the rent until I graduated.

That all changed when I attended a dinner my brother was hosting for his closest friends.

The topic of what I planned to do came up and there was an overwhelming amount of support to seriously consider the field of sales.

That night, without a business degree, I worked up the courage to apply to some of the perceived best sales organizations we had discussed.

To my surprise, companies began to reach out and I haven't looked back since.

Now, I am here to help others, in a similar position find their calling.

Working in the trenches, leading teams, or advising companies on their growth objectives.

I'm excited to give back and help those who may look to forge a similar path.

Ian Barker 👨‍🍳

👋 Hey, I'm Nick and I lead Growth Marketing at Profound. We help you win AI search. 

I was Loom's Head of Growth Marketing before going on a 2-year consulting journey, helping brands like Glean, AngelList, Watershed, Air, Teleport, Typeface, Float Financial, and more open tens of millions of dollars of pipeline from paid ads.

I also ran a newsletter called the Early Exit Club which chronicled my journey from $0 to $30k/month in consulting revenue to over 2,000 subscribers. 

Now my only focus is growing Profound into becoming a new age marketing platform for superintelligence.

Nick Lafferty

What a joy it's been to help Profound announce our Series A, our series B, and now our Series C at $1B valuation!  

When I joined almost a year ago, I was humbly the only marketer. Our Series A launch was a scrappy combination of me, James, a PR contractor, and a hodge podge of other folks. 

For our Series B, we were a team of four! Me, Trevor, Layla, and Garrett. That week holds the record for our best week ever in 2025. 

Fast forward 10 months and we have a marketing team of 9 who did a freaking massive job pulling this thing together. I could not be more thrilled to work with this team! 

Now back to work. 

https://lnkd.in/e2tG5v2y

Growth Marketing @ Profound | Helping You Win AI Search

Presenting at SXSW last weekend was a career highlight for me. Here's a cool recap video:

We had about 100 people in the room who asked great questions about AI search. Seriously, Q&A lasted almost an hour and folks came up to me afterwards saying they took *pages* of notes. 

Before the event started, we walked the line outside (yes, there was a line!!) and asked folks to submit their brand for a live AEO audit during the event. Many people bravely volunteered, and we had them come up on stage and talk about their results.

This was seriously one of the most fun events I've spoken at lately. And of course it came after I moved from Austin to NYC so I had to take some gnarly late night flights to make it work 😂

Thanks to our friends at Avenue Z for being great partners: Rachael Zahn - RZ, Tina Fleming, and Jonathan Snow, DMD. Massive thanks to Katherine Underwood for helping coordinate everything and thanks to my friend Stephen Bristol for grabbing lunch with me and ensuring I didn't fly back to NYC without some HEB tortillas in my backpack.

As a certified LinkedIn Guy™️, it’s super validating to see how often LI posts are cited in answer engines. 

I was at a networking event this morning in the city and multiple people said that LinkedIn is the only social media they regularly consume these days (myself included).  

I’ve been posting here for years and if you scroll my post history back for years then you can get a surprisingly good understanding of me as a person and the evolution of my career. 

Thanks to Axios  for covering our new research on how often LinkedIn is cited! Great job on this Layla Baradaran and Davis McCain  Brandon P.

Excited to take the SXSW 2026 stage with Avenue Z for a live AI Search audit for brands. 

We'll showcase exactly how brands appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more in real time. Search isn't about rankings anymore. It's about recommendations.

📅 Mar 15: 10am–12pm CT
Courtyard Marriott

Sunday, March 15 
10 - 11 AM CT

Come see how your brand shows up in AI Search: https://lnkd.in/ecgjgK7b

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Aura should be a marketing KPI (hear me out on this).

I've spent most of my career in performance marketing. I am the measurement king.  But I also know that good brand marketing has an unmeasurable halo effect on everything else. 

Good brand campaigns make my paid campaigns better. 

Good brand campaigns help with recruiting and hiring (every candidate is mentioning our subway ads right now)

Good brand campaigns create an aura around the company, the culture, and the product. 

If you're in New York, stop by Union Square station and walk around to see the incredible work that Semal Khalil designed and that Garrett Gomez, Karina Popovich, and Trevor Pyle helped bring to life.

They'll only be up for a few more weeks so snap a photo while you can :)

ChatGPT Shopping is a retail story, not a services story.

A lot of people assume Shopping results show up because the user is "in buying mode." We tested that assumption against prompts where we already knew the Shopping outcomes.

That framing isn't wrong. But it misses the bigger picture.

Here's what actually predicts whether ChatGPT shows a Shopping card:
The noun matters more than the verb. "Running shoes" triggers Shopping. "I want to buy something" alone won't guarantee it.

Category matters more than intent. Physical consumer goods activate Shopping broadly. Software, services, travel, financial products? Near 0%, no matter how purchase-oriented the language is.

Informational queries trigger Shopping too. A purely how-to prompt about a shippable physical product still triggers Shopping roughly 17% of the time. Add commercial intent and that number triples.

We built a classifier to prove these rules hold up. With a simple prompt, we can predict whether a query triggers Shopping with 97% accuracy.

The important takeaway: if your product is shippable, ChatGPT will surface it across informational, comparison, and how-to queries. Not just transactional ones. 

Link to read more here: https://lnkd.in/erCf8UMS

Austin bound today to attend Spryng by Wynter! Who’s going this week?

I’m also hosting an SEO happy hour on Thursday with Alex Birkett and my friends at Omniscient Digital. There are a few spots left! 

Austin friends, hit me up and let’s hang while I’m in town!

Do you have your ticket for Zero Click San Francisco? 

It's on April 8th in SF and features the most stacked lineup we've had yet:

OpenAI
Stripe
Figma
Expedia
Reddit
Parallel
G2

I can push the magic *approve* button so let me know if you want to go and drop a comment below 😉

Request your spot now → https://lnkd.in/ef2yzNir

Working at Profound and sharing moments like these with people I consider friends has been the highlight of my career so far. 

It might be easy to look at photos like these and our $1B Series C and think "wow they're so lucky". There is always luck involved, but what never makes it on LinkedIn is all the hard fucking work that makes this happen. 

I can confidently tell you that I have never worked this hard in my life. We don't post about the many, many late nights in the office or how there is always some last-minute scramble or how we pivoted our ideas 50 times and had to completely reset. 

No one at Profound takes this opportunity for granted. We are all working extremely hard together. The culture here is world-class and I *promise* that is not some pithy LinkedIn statement. Anyone who spends time in our office feels that immediately. This place is special.

Our marketing team is now 8 people (with our 9th to start soon!). Love you guys Trevor Pyle Layla Baradaran Garrett Gomez Katherine Underwood Helen Martin Matthew Huo Karina Popovich

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I'm so grateful for it. 

Time to get back to work :)

taplio

The Battle

Ian Barker 👨‍🍳

Nick Lafferty

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreNick Lafferty's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Ian Barker 👨‍🍳

Nick Lafferty

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Nick Lafferty's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreNick Lafferty's LinkedIn Performance