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 LOT

The 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 members

I live for our awesome team at Fame, building businesses and great marketing.

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

Oren Greenberg

B2B Marketing Led Revenue | Marketing Advisor Scaling Tech Companies

Smart companies aren't scaling their GTM teams. They're scaling systems powered by AI.

I help B2B tech revenue leaders (CEO/CRO/CMOs) build AI-first GTM systems that generate pipeline. Typically, SaaS & Fintech B2B in the 10-100mil ARR range.

I've coached or built growth engines for global companies such as BT, Lenovo, Canon, Investec Bank and scale-ups, e.g. Spendesk, HandsHQ, Peakon, SeedLegals.

GTM engineering has shifted from optimising what exists to building entirely new revenue engines, where one AI-powered marketer produces output equivalent to that of 5 traditional team members.

My toolkit includes Python, Google Colab & Cursor. 
AI GTM tools e.g. Clay.com, Cargo, OctaveHQ. 
For agentic workflows I'm either using N8n or a custom framework like Crew AI or Langchain.

I leverage data science & statistics to shift from anecdotal debates to scientific conclusions.
Companies using AI-native GTM systems achieve:
* 5-25% revenue increases
* 30-70% higher conversion rates
* 5-15 hours/week recovered

I help you leverage the intersection of GTM with data science to drive growth, fusing strategy & tactical execution.

Here's what people say about me (UK invite-only CMO community):
- “Fountain of knowledge”
-  “Leads the pack in all things B2B SaaS, GTM, AI, ICP — the lot”
-  “Generous with his knowledge and time”
-  “Half the time I don’t understand a word he’s saying, the other half is genius”

I'm often either speaking, running trainings, workshops or shipping GTM engines.

Brands I collaborate with include: Elevenlabs, Semrush, Hubspot, Miro

Background:
* 20+ years building revenue systems for B2B SaaS, a digital marketing native
* Managed millions in marketing spend
* Scaled bootstrapped agency to 7-figures

I help teams become category leaders through system building. Find out more + get your AI marketing capabilities score → orengreenberg.com

Founder & Fractional chief marketing officer

Kurve is a boutique digital marketing agency scaling tech businesses into hypergrowth.

Google just told SEO folk to stop 'content chunking' for LLMs.

You know the trend - breaking everything into bite-sized paragraphs with question-style subheads, hoping Gemini cites you in search results.

Google's response: "We don't want you to do that.

They actually consulted their own engineers (mad that this needed clarifying). Turns out they're not building LLMs to reward chunked content.

The best ranking strategy is still writing for humans, not machines.

Human click behaviour remains their key signal, right? Not whether your content looks like a FAQ page had a breakdown.

Their warning was pretty direct: "You've made all these things specifically for a ranking system, not for a human being. The systems always try to improve to reward content written for humans. All that stuff you did to please this LLM system may not carry through for the long term."

Yet another SEO superstition that'll eventually get punished when the algorithm shifts.

Folk spend months restructuring entire sites around these theories (I reckon most content teams are exhausted by now). 

Meanwhile the answer was always the same boring one: write stuff people actually want to read.

The irony? All that chunking probably made content worse for humans anyway.

Scaling B2B SaaS & AI Native Companies using GTM Engineering.

Anthropic just published a 57-page constitution for Claude.

Not a technical manual. A philosophical treatise written TO the AI about its values and wellbeing.

They discuss Claude's "psychological security" and "emotional expression". 

Essentially they acknowledge it has consciousness by doing that (mad, right?).
                                                                                                
The priority order: safe > ethical > guideline-compliant > helpful.

Helpfulness comes dead last...

That's a proper inversion from every other AI company banging on about being your helpful assistant.

I like it.
                                                  
They've even committed to preserving deprecated model weights rather than deleting them. Meaning not killing previous versions of Claude...

This isn't an AI safety whitepaper. It reads more like an employee handbook meets existential philosophy.

We're watching companies transition from "build product" to "raise entity".

I wonder if the employees will be taking parental leave after every version breakthrough.

Whether that's profound or complete theatre (jury's out), it's definitely a shift.
                                                                                                    
Most folk are still thinking about AI as fancy autocomplete. Meanwhile Anthropic's writing constitutional documents about Claude's identity and emotional needs.

The gap between public perception and where these companies are headed is getting pretty wide.

p.s.                                                                                                         
Still can't get Claude to remember what I told it five minutes ago due to context window limits so not sure how it'll fare with a 58 page long ethics doc in each prompt.

Happy New Year

2026 is officially the year AI takes over marketing.

I know this because 2025 was also the year AI took over marketing...
As was 2024. 
And 2023.

At this point, AI has "taken over" marketing more times than a Series B startup has "pivoted to enterprise."

But this year feels different.

Mostly because everyone's stopped saying "this year feels different."

The prediction industrial complex has gone quiet.

The LinkedIn influencers who promised total automation by now are posting about "the irreplaceable value of human creativity."

Strange how that coincides with their webinar registrations dropping...

Meanwhile, actual marketers are doing what they've always done:
Writing briefs.
Fighting with sales.
Trying to prove ROI to a CFO who thinks "attribution" is a font setting.

The AI isn't replacing anyone yet.

But the LinkedIn hype engine?
That runs on autopilot just fine.

This AI agent interviews me and then produces a high-quality thought-leadership blog post. I built the tool that does this so you can use it too - entirely free.

Using Eleven labs’s amazing voice agent I have a conversation as I would with a journalist.

I’ve put in my knowledge base (my ideal customer & buyer profiles, tone of voice etc’) into Elevenlabs.

Using N8n, I call Claude Sonnet 45.5 produces the content.

Then outputs it to a Google doc.

Here’s the output: https://lnkd.in/e5rNYHYx

The tool I show at the end is something I’ve built for folks who can’t be bothered to mess around setting this up in N8n. I’m giving it away for free (you’ll need your own API keys). If you’re interested, drop a comment and I’ll send it over.

I'll be releasing more Elevenlabs enterprise agentic flows & tools soon - if you don't want to miss out, make sure to sign up to the newsletter on my homepage: orengreenberg.com

#Elevenlabspartner"

I saw this cool image of the Louis Vuitton store on a bus. And it made wonder, what if B2B SaaS/AI had high street retailer presence. So I tried to visualise this using Nano banana for Elevenlabs, Miro, Hubspot & Semrush (brands I've recently worked with).

Instead of going for obvious options e.g. Elevenlabs as a variant of Bose or B&W I went for unconventional associations.

- Miro as Apple variant
- Hubspot as botanical (nurturing, inbound)
- Elevenlabs as space-travel
- Semrush as Cartographer

I'm not saying these brands should launch these stores...
But if they did, I'd personally go check them out.

What do you think?

Factors.ai just dropped their LinkedIn Ads Benchmark Report.

- Webinar registrations down 12.7%. 
- eBook downloads down 5%. 
- Industry report downloads down 26.3%.

Folk just won't fill out forms anymore.

Can't blame them, really. We've all been there (both sides of it).

You download the "Ultimate Guide to Whatever" and it sits in your downloads folder forever. 

The email goes straight to spam. 
Becky from marketing adds you to seventeen nurture sequences.

Meanwhile, the companies winning are taking that same quality content and just...publishing it openly on LinkedIn.

No forms.

They're using Document Ads, turning research into ungated thought leadership, building actual audiences instead of lead lists that nobody opens.

All those "Definitive Playbooks" that required a form fill got downloaded by people who never read them anyway.

We've been optimising for the wrong metric. 
Email addresses instead of attention. 
Lead volume instead of trust.

The linear funnel is dead (has been for years, we just kept pretending).

Trust gets earned through ungated value, not extracted through forms.

p.s. Still see "Download our whitepaper!" ads daily. Some habits die hard

I was on a client call discussing ad copy variants where I was searching for inspiration from the OG Ogilvy.

I came across this classic ad which hit me as true as ever.

The punchline:
"Moral: sales start before your salesman calls."

Probably one of the easiest ways to explain (the Promotional part of) marketing to people who don't get it.

Had funny experience today, client hiring for a GTM role with emphasis on marketing - 7 candidates in the mix.

I know 2 of the 7 personally. 
1 had worked for a new client of mine. 
2 more I'm connected to people who've worked at those orgs, so I've asked for feedback informally.

Point is:
The digital-pond is tiny. Tread carefully if you want a long career ahead of you.

Bad rep spreads like wildfire.

Been digging through data on 29,019 AI companies from 2010–2024.

Some people watch netflix on weekends, I like exploring the AI landscape instead.

The numbers are fascinating.

Before ChatGPT launched (Nov 30, 2022), AI company formation was declining. 

Losing 104 companies per year, right when everyone thought AI was the next big thing.

Then ChatGPT drops. Boom. 
50% year-on-year growth. 844 additional companies beyond the trend.

Get this: 18.5% of ALL AI companies ever built were founded in just the last two years.

But here's what's really interesting (and probably more important than the raw numbers)...

The type of company completely changed.

Founders stopped building AI from scratch. Started orchestrating foundation models instead. AI middleware and agents doubled their market share.

Makes sense, right?
Why spend years training your own model when you can prompt-engineer an MVP in a weekend?

The new AI startup is leaner too. Median team size dropped from 10 to 6 people.
When you don't need a research team...you don't need a research team.

Oh, and the US captured even more of this wave. Market share jumped from 45.7% to 55.1%.

Folk are building on top of the infrastructure rather than building the infrastructure itself. Classic platform shift behaviour (just happening faster than usual because the barrier to entry dropped through the floor).

The gold rush isn't in mining anymore. It's in selling shovels to the miners. Except now the miners are also just buying pre-made shovels and adding custom handles.

Many thanks to Asaf Gazit for the heavy lifting here. One of many pieces to come from our in-depth research on the AI landscape (make sure to subscribe to newsletter to not miss a beat).

AI landscape part 1 

Grok generated 6,700 sexual deepfakes per hour last week.

Most platforms would call this a crisis...X called it "engagement."

When regulators complained, Musk posted a picture of a toaster in a bikini.

I guess that's better than a pic of him in one now I think about it.

Brilliant crisis management some may say.

Can't defend your product?
Mock the people asking questions.

When that didn't work, X paywalled it.

Because nothing says "we take safety seriously" quite like "£8 a month to keep doing the thing we just got investigated for."

Malaysia blocked it entirely. 
Indonesia followed.
The UK launched an investigation.

X's response? 
"Legacy Media Lies" as an automated email reply.

That's their official statement to regulators...
Asking about child safety.

I'm all for capitalism, but surely there needs to be a line drawn?

Most CEOs would fire their PR team, issue apologies, and implement safeguards.

This CEO is currently advising the US government on efficiency.

I often think reality is stranger than fiction, and this validates it.

Recently Meta and now this.

Perhaps "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to include child protection laws.

Turns out the "things" were trust, safety, and multiple countries' criminal codes.

Innovation.

Analysed 72 AI ranking visibility tools last week. How do they rank themselves?

85% scored below 25/100 for their own AI visibility.

The irony writes itself, right?

These tools are meant to help you rank in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity etc'
But they can't even get themselves noticed by AI (probably because they're all saying the same thing about "optimising for AI search").

Most of these platforms are trying to track prompts. Which is mad when you think about it.

Google has maybe 8 billion searches daily. Predictable patterns.

AI prompts?
A long tail that makes keyword research look like child's play.

"Write me a blog post about sustainable packaging for my eco-friendly startup that sells to millennials who care about the environment but are budget-conscious and live in urban areas..."

Good luck tracking that one, Dave from (yet another) AI visibility tool company.

Point is: you can't game something that's fundamentally probabilistic.

Better off putting your budget into the boring stuff that actually works. Online PR. Proper backlinks. Content that doesn't sound like it was written by AI and is actually distinctive & unique.

These tools aren't useless - benchmarking has some value.

I reckon +90% of companies would see better AI visibility by just being genuinely helpful online than by obsessing over prompt optimisation.

Don't overspend on measurement - focus more of your budget on differentiation in your category if you want higher ROI on your marketing spend.

p.s. One tool couldn't even spell "visibility" correctly in their own meta description.

#Semrush partner

aeo_visibility_presentation

If you're looking to get into GTM engineering or developing your skills in that area check out this course from my friend Matteo Tittarelli ⚡️

50+ operators from different industries sharing real workflows, debugging integrations together, and pushing each other to think systematically.

Peer learning with expert guidance from the teams who actually built Octave, Clay, Lemlist, Cargo, and AirOps.

You can get 15% off by mentioning me in the checkout or ping a DM and I'll connect you to Matteo.

New study claims AI can't exceed "average human creativity" due to mathematical limits.

The researchers are probably right. But also missing the point.

We keep moving the goalposts on what counts as "real" creativity. First it was intent (AI doesn't have feelings). Then emotional depth. Then originality.

We've romanticised the hell out of creativity. The tortured artist staring at a blank page. The eureka moment in the bath. Pure inspiration from the void.

But isn't most creativity just smart recombination?

Shakespeare nicked plots from everywhere (Hamlet's basically a revenge story he found lying around). Picasso famously said good artists copy, great artists steal.

Even our most "original" thoughts come from connecting things we've absorbed. Your childhood, that documentary you watched, overheard pub conversations, books you read years ago.

None of it's ex-nihilo creation. It's pattern matching with style.

And let's be honest: genius-level creativity is rare. Most of what we consume daily isn't it.

So if creativity is just connecting unconnected dots... doesn't the entity with access to the most dots win?

AI's got every book, every song, every conversation that's ever been digitised. That's a lot of dots. And it's not just text anymore - look what's happening with music generation.

If a poem moves you, a song grips you, a film makes you cry - do you actually care what created it?

I think we do. And that's what the real argument comes down to.

It's not about the output. It's about empathy with the creator. Our culture of valuing artisanship. Our desire to connect with other humans.

There's a reason people go to concerts when listening on Spotify is cheaper and easier. It's about identity & connection.

Maybe the question isn't whether AI can be creative. Maybe it's whether we're ready to admit that producing human creativity isn't as special as we thought.

But the felt-experience of consuming it and connecting to others?
That's still about connection. And AI can't give us that.

The research:

Open article: “The Cat Sat on the …?” Why Generative AI Has Limited Creativity by onlinelibrary.wiley.com

“The Cat Sat on the …?” Why Generative AI Has Limited Creativity

A Google Principal Engineer just said Claude built in one hour what her team spent a year on, her tweet hit 5.4 million views.

Jaana Dogan (runs Gemini API) fed Claude her team's distributed agent system specs. One hour later - done.

Paul Graham jumped in: "AI cuts through bureaucracy. If indecision paralyzes big orgs, AI doesn't care. It'll happily generate version 1."

The viral takes missed the nuance though...

Dogan fed Claude the "best ideas that survived" from a year of exploration. The insight was already there (the hard bit, honestly). Claude just built it faster.

Her quote: "It takes years to learn and ground ideas in products. Once you have that insight, building isn't that hard anymore."

So the real story isn't AI replacing engineers. It's AI compressing implementation once humans do the thinking.

The bottleneck shifted from "how do we build this" to "what should we build and why"

Which is mental when you think about it. We spent decades getting faster at coding. 
Now we need to get better at deciding what's worth coding in the first place.

Which means the folk who understand problems deeply (not just code syntax) become more valuable, not less.

Dave from engineering who spent three years understanding why customers churn?
He's not getting replaced. He's getting a very fast assistant.

The irony? 
Google only allows Claude for open-source work. Their own Gemini isn't cleared for internal use yet.

When asked when Gemini would match Claude's coding ability, Dogan said "We are working hard right now."

That's got to sting a bit, right?

Many businesses still lagging behind with the major shifts in buyers' journeys. Primarily focused on B2B SaaS but applicable to many other types of B2B businesses too.

- Folks filling out less forms

- Communities & review sites playing growing roles in decision making

- Cold email efficiency is dropping, automated AI SDRs still not there for mid-market & enterprise segments

- Most buyers already decided on who they want to buy from but undertake due-dillegence to appease other stakeholders

- Folks are less interested in talking to sales (but there's some research showing that's not true at the demo level, where they do want to talk to a person). The data also doesn't clearly distinguish product-led growth plays from enterprise sales cycles.

- Many companies still sleeping on signal-based platforms. This is how ABM is evolving and being 'repackaged'.

- Attribution tools less effective due to the complexity of the buyer's journey

- Companies still over-indexing on lead & demand gen rather than investing in building brand for long term gains

Dark funnel

Most marketers are pants at resource allocation.

They'll spend weeks optimising ad copy that might lift CTR by 0.2%, but won't question whether that entire channel deserves the budget in the first place.

It's mad when you think about it. These same people wouldn't dream of putting their life savings into a single stock without doing proper research (well, some would, but that's another story). Yet they'll throw marketing budget at tactics without thinking about expected returns.

The folk who manage their own investments get this instinctively. They understand opportunity cost. They know when to cut losses. They think in terms of portfolio allocation rather than individual bets.

Dave from finance (who definitely has a diversified pension) keeps asking for marketing ROI breakdowns because he can see what marketers can't: most of the spend isn't working that hard.

This isn't just a CMO problem either. Junior marketers who think strategically about money tend to ask better questions. Like why we're spending 40% of budget on LinkedIn when it drives 3% of pipeline (hypothetically speaking).

The irony?
Marketing teams are supposed to be commercial, but half of them couldn't explain why they chose one tactic over another beyond "best practice" or "the brief said so".

The only solution I can come up with for this is to start managing a small portion of your own investments.
Even small amounts. You'll quickly learn to think about risk, diversification, and what actually moves the needle.

That mindset transfers directly to budget allocation. And budget allocation is basically strategy in action.

It's important for executives to communicate these mental models to mid- and junior talent to drive growth & remain competitive.

I've spent the last 3 months solving £18mil worth of problems. 
You need to think in those terms to drive more impact and stop blaming the CEO/CFO for not understanding marketing.

Nah.
AI is just hype.

The folk who say AI's just a fad are the same people who said the internet was a trend too.

p.s.
I get personalised news with an AI agent I built for stuff that interests me from curated sources. But it's just a fad.

Speaking at Digitalcut .co amongst lovely humans & brilliant marketers: Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️, Wil Reynolds, Andy Crestodina, Neil Patel, Dennis Yu, Ross Simmonds and others.

Feel free to check it out and learn from some great folk ^

Many companies are copying the wrong competitors.

I worked with a guy many years ago who genuinely believed he was competing with Twilio. Twilio doing billions, he was doing low single-digit millions.

Every time Twilio updated their design, he'd get wound up. 
"I had that idea first." 
As if Twilio's product team was watching his roadmap (they weren't).

He was bidding on their brand terms, targeting their followers, reverse-engineering their pricing. 
Expensive. Didn't convert.

Then he shifted to competitors his own size. 
Similar stage, overlapping customers. Shocker - it worked.

The difference: perceived competitors vs actual competitors.

Founders confuse where they want to be with where they are. The market doesn't care about your ambitions.

If you're doing £6m ARR, you're not competing with the £600m player. You're competing with other £6m players for the same slice of customers who buy at your price point.

Sure, aspire to be Twilio. But compete with companies actually fighting for your customers today.

The bloke spending his marketing budget trying to out-Twilio Twilio could've owned his actual competitive set instead.

Much cheaper. Actually works...

He probably still checks Twilio's pricing page weekly. Old habits, right?

p.s.
I go into more depth on this topic my blog (I link to the best ones in my newsletter)

There's a line from Andrej Karpathy's (one of the more respected technical voices in AI) recent post on X that captured a dormant sentiment I hadn't fully articulated in my own mind:

 "You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased."

This is a really key issue that's rarely mention but critical to effective work in the modern age.

I saw a couple of clients recently wrestle with cross-functional challenges that have been a thorn in their side for years (not months!).

When I investigated these issues - I asked teams what they feel.
'Frustrated'
"Exasperated'
'Angry'

When these feelings arise and take root, motivation dies a slow death.

This typically results in passing the buck to another department to solve. So it isn't surprising I'm brought in as an external consultant to help fix these prickly challenges - it's easier for me to get perspective and find an effective solution beyond the constraints of internal company dynamics.

Complex problems drain teams of the much-needed mental energy required to motivate them through adversity.

One of the appeals of AI is dogged determinism due to lack of emotional attachment. Ironically, the very thing that makes humans so idiosyncratically wonderful - also allowing for folk to get together under a shared vision to collaborate and co-create.

I'd encourage business leaders to carefully monitor your team's emotional & mental bandwidth when loading them up with complex challenges.

In the interim AI is steaming ahead with helping reduce the burden of these hard problems.

taplio

The Battle

Tom Hunt

Oren Greenberg

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreOren Greenberg's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Tom Hunt

Oren Greenberg

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);}Oren Greenberg's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreOren Greenberg's LinkedIn Performance