Tom Hunt

$3.6m ARR. $0 raised. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Jan 2014.I'm walking home from a depressing New Year's trip to Oslo with an ex. girlfriend.It's raining in East London.I made a decision:I would replace my management consulting salary (£42,000) by the end of the year.I had no idea from where, but that was the goal...I just about hit it and left the corporate world.And I haven't been back since.Fast forward a decade and I've:- Tried and failed with 17 businesses- Invested in 11- Learnt a LOTThe one that is finally working is called Fame:- We have a weird culture (in a good way)- We start and grow podcasts for B2B businesses- We are fully remote and have 75 full-time team membersI live for our awesome team at Fame, building businesses and great marketing.And I post about them here 🤗

Founder & CEO

We start and grow the world's most profitable B2B podcasts.

Clients include:

👉 IDEO
👉 Workday
👉 HighRadius
👉 People.ai
👉 Zendesk
👉 Bevy
👉 Circle
👉 Suzy
👉 Mazars
👉 LeanData
👉 CXL
👉 Ramp
👉 Alibaba
👉 Signify
👉 eToro

$4.5m ARR. $0 raised. I have no idea what I’m doing.

“We need to let them go.”

I’m in a 1-1 and a manager thinks someone in their team isn’t performing.

I'm in shock, to me they seemed enthusiastic and a culture fit.


We dug into the details:

- What weren’t they doing?
- Why weren’t they doing it?

The manager thought they either didn't understand or couldn't do the role.

Then I ask:

“How did onboarding go?”

“What do you mean by onboarding?” they reply.


And that's when we found the issue:

We skipped the onboarding process and replaced it with "a couple of calls".


If you’re recruiting right, you owe it to yourself to onboard right.

You can’t expect someone to join and start performing, you need to set them up to succeed.

Onboard right or do it twice.

Agree?

I had a terrible boss.

And I spent more time with them than my partner.
 

They never raised their voice.

They smiled (kind of).

But they also started:

- Passing my ideas off as their own
- Expecting email responses at 10pm
- “Checking in” multiple times per day
 
Again, they weren’t ever aggressive or rude, they just slowly eroded my confidence each day.

I thought this was normal e.g. you get a job, you get a manager like this.
 

And then…

I moved roles and got a new manager, they:

- Stepped in when needed
- Never emailed after hours
- Saved most comms to our weekly 1-1
 

A great manager won’t get you promoted.

They will change the trajectory of your career.

Agree?

My 7 favourite startup lies:


1. We’re scaling
-- No, you still don't know how/if you'll be profitable

2. We’re going viral
-- No, your CEO’s LinkedIn fundraise post got a few more likes than normal

3. TechCrunch picked us up
-- No, your $10k per month PR agency got you featured

4. We’re partnering with Google
-- No, you’re paying Google Cloud for servers

5. The inbound pipeline is strong
-- No, some competitors requested a demo to see what you’re building

6. We have FANG-level talent
-- No, one of your devs interned at Netflix 6 years ago

7. The team are fully incentivised
-- No, they have paper options based on an inflated fundraise


And my absolute favourite:

8. We’re worth $30m
-- No, a hyped up VC gave you this valuation to make themselves look good (so they can raise their next fund)


Thank god we don't have to lie to ourselves.

Here’s to the bootstrappers 🥂

(Exit the hype-train and subscribe to Cash Machines)

I probably shouldn’t share this…

I like to call it the “Pay Rise Formula”.


Most people go about asking for money in the completely wrong way:

1. Pay review arrives
2. “Can I have more money?”

It’s an easy "not yet" from the boss.


But if you follow these three steps, you boost your chances of a pay rise by at least 56%:

(Not a guarantee but it works)

1. 6 months before the pay review ask your boss: “what do I need to be doing in the next 6 months to get a pay-rise?”

2. Write those things down and make a plan to hit them. Work hard.

3. A few weeks before the pay review, show the list (with things ticked off) to your boss in a 1-1 and ask them to confirm if you are actually doing those things


If done right, there is no way a boss can push back on a raise with the "not yet" excuse.

Pro-activity pays.

Agree?

"OK let me get this straight..."

"Because it kind of sounds like you built yourself a job."


It's 11:37pm in 2017 and I'm sat with a good friend enjoying a spicy margarita in a seedy city bar.

He's shouting into my ear because they closed something called a "Series A":

- How their going to change the world
- An upcoming TechCrunch article
- All the people he needs to hire
- Their "enterprise motion"


But something isn't making sense to me:

1. He has to report to the board every month
2. Any cost greater than £25k must have board sign off
3. He can't take cash out whenever he wants
4. Board needs to sign off his salary
4. If he leaves in the next 4 years he only keeps a slice of his own company
5. If they don't sell it for a massive amount he may get nothing
6. To sell it, they need investor sign off


He replies:

"Yeah I see what you're saying, but the reality is the company is now valued at £20m, my stake is £6m, so I'm basically a multi-millionaire"

😳


As you can imagine, it didn't work out well.

Glad I stuck to building Cash Machines.

$4.5 million ARR, 0 raised.

$500 invested.

It’s been a wild ride.


We have built Fame as a service business with mostly intangible assets.

We did it without selling a single piece of equity to venture capital.

But even asset-light businesses get stuck.

You often need to buy speed to hire a star developer, fund a new marketing campaign, or pay a tax bill.

In those moments, I did not want to wait weeks for a bank.

Unless I had another option.

An option like iwoca.


They fund small businesses that move quickly and have already funded 100,000 businesses in the UK. 

They lent £3.3 billion to business owners who need to move fast and build resilience.

You can apply for business finance between £1,000 and £1M in about five minutes.

They typically give you a decision within 24 hours.

Apply here to check your options: https://lnkd.in/euSG4SCm

NOTE - applying does not impact your credit score.

#Ad

Brand partnership • $4.5m ARR. $0 raised. I have no idea what I’m doing.

It felt like the responsible thing to do... 


But then it turned out to be one of the worst business decisions ever.

Depreciating assets hurt the balance sheet, locking up capital that could be used for growth. 

For example... 

We are in a hiring sprint, bringing on 2 - 3 new team members in Feb. 

Old Tom would have dropped thousands upfront for laptops that would be worth significantly less by next year.

That isn’t scaling.

It’s a cash drain.

Instead, we are using Raylo.

It took 60 seconds to set up a subscription for the latest HP laptops, and they arrived the next day.

Here is why I recommend Raylo as an affordable option for small businesses:

- Protect Your Cash: We paid £0 upfront. Every pound saved on hardware goes straight into growth.

- Upgrade Freedom: With the MacBook M5 rumors floating around, I am not worried because we can upgrade the team to the latest models for free with Raylo's monthly rolling option.

- Zero Drama: If something goes wrong with a device during the subscription, Raylo's Lifetime Warranty covers technical faults and they sort it quickly.


Or in other words:

Stop buying "stuff" that rots on your balance sheet. 

Convert your tech to OpEx and keep your capital for growth.

Check out the subscription options for your team here: mdsh.io/raylo-business 

#Ad

On my last day of work, the Sr. director of marketing told me that I "was a pain in the ass"

Why? I did things differently. I challenged the norm. I found my ways to do things.

And he really appreciated it.


I've worked with all kinds of companies and even built my own-

Early-stage bootstrapped startups, well-funded startups,  Unicorns, Enterprise companies


➖


I started my B2B SaaS inbound marketing agency in 2021.

It was... strange.

Getting clients was too easy.

At first, I was proud.

Then as I fell in love with the industry, I got concerned.

To put it lightly... we hardly have any good B2B SaaS marketers.

My team and I will change this by 2030.

You'll see B2C marketers learning from B2B SaaS much more commonly.

Watch us do it. (Or join the cause?)


➖


Spear Growth helps B2B SaaS companies with Ads & SEO.


📈For Ads,
we go deep into every aspect that can drive pipeline & SQLs.

▪️Tested 12+ paid channels
▪️Optimize the entire funnel
▪️Built the most advanced Demand Gen framework in the world
(and more)


📈For SEO,
we've built the most sustainable SEO service model in the world.

▪️Focus on SQLs, not vanity metrics
▪️No retainers - Only 3 month projects
▪️No BS audits, only actionable roadmaps.


Let's talk B2B growth 💬

https://speargrowth.com/30-min-call


➖


Here is me bragging about myself:

🎓 I've trained 2500+ marketers so I understand my stuff - but more importantly, I know how to communicate it.

🚀 I led SEO & analytics for a Unicorn startup.

📖 I've contributed to 2 internationally best-selling marketing books

💻 I've helped amazing B2B SaaS companies: Seed, Series A-E, Unicorns.

➖

My agency: speargrowth.com

My email: ishaan [@] speargrowth [dot] com

Ishaan Shakunt

Rand Fishkin published a study that makes AI search tools look useless.

He makes 3 claims:

1. The same brands don't get recommended consistently for the same searches
2. Rankings change every time you run the same prompt
3. People ask things in ways you can't predict

And I agree with all of them.

But here’s my bold claim: His points break the core promise of every AI visibility tool I know... except Chosenly.com

Read it here before i put on the top of our website:
https://lnkd.in/gMKQ2H6Y

– Ishaan “grew up learning SEO from Rand’s videos” Shakunt

AI Search Optimisation for B2B | 2x Founder @ Chosenly.com & Speargrowth.com | DM me for an SEO + GEO audit

Chosenly just hit PR #1000 🔥
1,000 pull requests.

For non-tech folks: Every time we fix a bug, ship a feature, or rewrite something behind the scenes, that's a PR. 

1,000 of those means 1,000 times the team made a call on what to build next and actually shipped it.

Some at 2am. Some that took weeks of back and forth. Some that got rejected and rewritten three times before they were good enough to ship.

Every feature I get to hype on LinkedIn? It started as a PR that someone on this team pushed through.

Shout out to Harsh, Aarav, Utkarsh, Deepanshu and Shivam.

I keep saying this: you can't vibe-code Chosenly. And 1,000 PRs is proof.

– Ishaan "PR #1001 is probably merging right now" Shakunt

There are 4 levels of how useful a GEO tool can actually be. 95% of the GEO tools in the market stop at Level 1. Here’s what i mean:

Level 1: Here's your data.
Level 2: Here's what to do with it.
Level 3: Let me help you do it.
Level 4: I'm doing it. You approve.

Most tools dump a dashboard on you and say "good luck." That's Level 1. Some give you recommendations. That's Level 2 on a good day.

The 3.0 launch took most things Chosenly does to levels 3 & 4. Our goal is to get to Level 4 for everything related to your searchable web presence.

Here's what Chosenly 3.0 looks like:
Content strategy → solid content drafts
Mentions strategy → negotiate placements on your behalf
Reddit → find threads, draft comments
Positioning → insights that tell you exactly what to change
LLMs lying about you → strategy to fix misrepresentations

Instead of just showing you data, Chosenly helps you act on it.

We announced 5 new features that made this jump possible. But those are just the ones we announced. We shipped a lot more quietly.

🎉 Giveaway 🎉 Every B2B SaaS company that engages with this post gets our Reddit automation feature for free.
Also, we'll pick 10 companies across all launch posts for a FREE 1-month Chosenly subscription.

– Ishaan "February Santa" Shakunt

Every startup has an inflection point. I'm betting ours is March. Here’s why I am confident:


Five things are happening right now that make me say this:

1️⃣ Market is finally ready

Last year, most of the people in our demos just wanted to learn more about AEO/GEO. 

This year, people have designated budgets allocated for AEO/GEO. They  come on calls to understand how we can help them act on it.

2️⃣ Chosenly is 10x better for B2B than competition.

Chosenly.com 3.0 is so much better than every other tool in the market. 

And by saying this, I just don't mean more features or more automation. It’s the ONLY product with the right data structure to track everything B2B companies actually need.

3️⃣ We stopped being scared of spending money

We’re bootstrapped so if we run out of money, the company will shut down. We can’t be unprofitable for long.

But now, we’re confident that it’s time to take a bigger bet.

Instead of earning money and then budgeting expenses from profit, we’re now ramping up expenses beyond our revenue to grow faster and letting revenue catch up.

4️⃣ There’s more clarity

We finally have GTM clarity. 

We’ve hired the best agencies we know and our internal growth team has more clarity.

5️⃣ Partnerships

We’ve closed partnerships bigger than anything I’ve closed in my career.

The kind that can change distribution in a single quarter.

Now this creates two realities for our team:
Growth and business teams: wins, momentum, long days that feel fun.

Engineering and consulting: scale pressure, stability work, polish, boring requirements, everything must “just work.”

Either way, it’s going to be even longer hours for both teams till April. But everyone is looking forward to it.

– Ishaan “Sourajit, our bet is on” Shakunt

Most teams take ~3 months to revamp a website.
We finished ours in a month (as a side project).

Here’s the exact stack we used.

1. Positioning research:
ChatGPT/Perplexity + Apify: Audience research, review analysis, pulling raw insights.
Fathom.ai: Sales + client calls
Miro: Putting all insights into one place.

2. SEO research:
GSC: BoFu keywords + content gaps

3. GEO research:
Chosenly.com (positioning tab): Direction for messaging, content strategy, and page structure

4. Wireframes:
Relume: First-pass wireframes + page layouts.
Gemini in GSheets: Programmatically created pages (A vs B vs C style templates at scale).

5. Illustrations & design:
Nanobanana: Illustrations
Freepik: Asset sourcing.
Figma: Final UI, design system, and ready-to-build layouts.

6. Web Dev:
Webflow: Website builder (with integration with Relume)
Ghost: CMS for blogs

7. CRM:
HubSpot: Forms, CRM, nurturing (we’re very used to it, but open to alternatives)

8. CRO:
Factors.ai: Deanonymisation
HubSpot forms: Sales workflows
Jotform: Partnership workflows

9. Legal & compliance
ChatGPT: Policy + compliance docs (with heavy manual oversight)

To many teams, this might not be the “best stack”.
But this exact same stack + workflow helped us move fast without getting stuck.

If I had to build a website again today, I’d use the same stack.

Just curious, would you add/remove anything here?

– Ishaan “will wear dark green glasses soon“ Shakunt

After helping 50+ B2B SaaS companies on content strategy, I’ve noticed one very consistent pattern.

The moment a topic is approved, everyone’s brain jumps to the same place:

“Cool. Let’s write a blog.”

But creating content is only one of three possible actions.
The other two are just as important: Update and Repurpose.

These are very different jobs.

Creating a page means:
▪️Choosing the right page type
▪️Aligning it with SEO + GEO / AI search requirements
▪️Adding net-new insights
▪️Publishing from scratch

Updating a page means:
▪️Finding gaps in the content
▪️Refreshing outdated insights
▪️Making sure you’re not de-optimizing what you had originally optimised it for
▪️Deciding how much to rewrite (small tweak vs full overhaul)

Repurposing means:
▪️Deciding the page is already “good enough”
▪️Finding third-party sites AI actually cites
▪️Rewriting for a new surface (not copy-pasting)
▪️Repositioning the same insight for a different context 

And the hard part isn’t doing them.
It’s knowing which one to do, when.

Now Chosenly.com will tell you when to do what, by default!

P.S.This post is part of our Chosenly 3.0 launch.
Every B2B SaaS company that engages with this post gets our Reddit automation feature for free.
10 B2B SaaS companies to engage get a 1-month Chosenly subscription.

– Ishaan "finally made content strategy less messy" Shakunt

Your competitor is getting recommended by ChatGPT right now. You're not. And you probably don't even know why.

Udayan just audited an entire SaaS industry for AI search (Session Replay Software). 

~10 companies. 

He tracked every single one of them across AI visibility, citations, Reddit mentions, positioning, and LLM recommendations.

The gap between the #1 player and everyone else is INSANE 🤯

Some companies showed up in almost every AI-generated answer. Others were practically invisible. Selling the same thing. To the same people.

The difference: Who had the right information in the right places for LLMs to find and recommend them.

And here's the thing, Udayan isn't stopping at one industry.
He's doing this for multiple industries. One by one. And will be publishing the reports publicly on his profile.

Each report breaks down:

1️⃣ Who's dominating AI visibility and why
2️⃣ Which websites LLMs are actually citing to form their answers
3️⃣ What content types get picked up (not what most people assume)
4️⃣ Where Reddit is quietly influencing recommendations
5️⃣ How the top players positioned themselves to get chosen over everyone else

If you're a B2B company and want to see how your industry looks through the lens of AI search, go check out Udayan's LinkedIn. 

Want him to audit YOUR industry next? Drop your industry in the comments. He'll prioritize based on demand.

(I told him he's giving away too much for free. He disagreed. Classic Udayan.)

– Ishaan "my co-founder's reports are making our sales calls way too easy" Shakunt

Session Replay Software AISO Report

I shared a post last week on why AI search breaks channel-based marketing. A bunch of you DM’d asking what this actually looks like in practice. So this is me detailing the org model I think actually survives AI search.

For years, most marketing teams were organized around channels. You had someone responsible for SEO, someone for PR, someone for the website, someone 

Open article: Channel-Based Marketing Worked for Years. AI Search Broke It by Ishaan Shakunt • 6 min read

Channel-Based Marketing Worked for Years. AI Search Broke It

What’s the most brutal part of AI search? The teams who didn’t learn the craft can still beat you.

Let me tell you how.

There are 5 levels of content strategy for AI search:

Level 1: Luck
Signs you’re in level 1:
- Your content strategy looks something like: Publish X pages/week.
- You decide what to write based on what you feel your audience will be interested in.

This level is the “answer everything” level.
You publish a lot. You hope something sticks.

Level 2: BoFu-only
Teams at this level realize AI recommendations often show up in BoFu prompts.
So they go all-in on: alternatives, comparisons, pricing, AvsBvsYou pages

Most teams are either Level 1 or Level 2.

Level 3: Job-to-be-done searches
You’re in level 3, if you’ve realised that sometimes prompts that don’t ask for vendors still have vendors in the AI answers.

For example:
- How to reduce AWS costs
- How to get a SOC2 certification quickly

Because for those JTBD searches, using a software to solve the problem is implied. In others, it isn’t.
Figuring out which game you’re in is the unlock.

Very few teams find such searches systematically, and then create blogs that show how to solve the problem *using the product*.

Level 4: Prioritization and difficulty
Teams at this level, create the same content as teams at level 3, but they prioritise based on where they can win.

We use a simple difficulty lens for this (the 3Re framework):

A. Recency: Which prompts have citations that are outdated?
B. Relevance: Which prompts are being answered with content that is shallow or off-target?
C. Reputation: Which prompts keep pulling from the same few sources because the web doesn’t trust anyone else?

These same 3 factors now help create a joint SEO + GEO strategy vs having 2 separate strategies.

Most teams never get here because doing this analysis manually is painful.

Level 5: Create vs update vs repurpose
This is the final jump.
These teams don’t just “create new content.”

Because they understand, sometimes the right move is:
- Updating an old page
- Repurposing something that already has distribution power

So they pick one or more among 3 actions to take. (Create, Refresh, Repurpose)

—

You can absolutely learn all of this yourself.
But someone else can just use Chosenly.com and jump straight to Level 5.

Chosenly is the only tool that helps you with the jump
And honestly? It feels a little unfair.

Someone could spend months learning all of this. Getting it wrong. Iterating. Finally getting good. While someone else just buys Chosenly and beats them from week one.

– Ishaan "just built the cheat code" Shakunt

You can’t be 100% customizable and fully agentic.
Most companies don’t realize this yet.

For the last decade, customization was the answer to everything.

Every SaaS company was basically either a:
- Workflow company
- Database company
- A mix of both.

Automation in SaaS came from workflows.

You wrote logic.
If this happens, do that. If X, then Y.
If not, go here.

That worked well, but only up to a point.

There were always tasks you couldn’t automate.

Not because teams didn’t try.

But because:
- the logic was too complex
- patterns were hard to define
- search wasn’t good enough
- you couldn’t reliably write rules for every edge case

So workflows would automate maybe 60 - 70% of the job.

And the remaining 30 - 40%?
A human handled it.

That’s the SaaS model most of us grew up with.

That’s why customization worked.

You could say:
“We’ll automate most of it.
And customize the rest however you want.”

A person was always there to handle exceptions.

Agentic software changes this. The whole point of a fully agentic system is that you don’t need a person to use it.

So here's the choice you actually have to make:

1. You can be highly customizable (which means humans stay in the loop and it's not really agentic).

2. You can be fully agentic (which means hands-off, no customization, and your company's playbook is law).

But, you CANNOT be both.

If you're building agentic software, have you made this choice?

– Ishaan "posting this from a beach" Shakunt

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The Battle

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The Battle

Tom Hunt

Ishaan Shakunt

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Engagements

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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);}Tom Hunt's LinkedIn Performance

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