👋 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.

Big news out of Profound today: Karina Popovich joins to support growth marketing in 2026 and beyond. 

We're a tough place to interview at. The bar is extremely high and we've been trying to fill this role since last August. Karina impressed everyone here at every stage in the process. 

Our marketing team is now a group of 5, we'll be 8 by early February, and we just opened up SEVEN more roles to fill asap. Please tag a friend below who would be a good fit for any of these roles:

👉 AEO & Inbound Manager: https://lnkd.in/eFtiJqDd

👉 Content & Social Manager: https://lnkd.in/eUeTtsWh

👉 Marketing Ops & Analytics: https://lnkd.in/e4CG9Y4c

👉 Performance Marketing: https://lnkd.in/edYyTSBR

👉 Social Distribution: https://lnkd.in/efN6jiSQ

👉 Field Marketing: https://lnkd.in/eD86xbHe

👉 Customer Marketing & Community: https://lnkd.in/eEDXmgds

Nick Lafferty

Growth Marketing @ Profound | Helping You Win AI Search

I spent years dreaming about moving to NYC and 2 years ago I packed everything up and did it.  

Of course it was hard. Finding an apartment here feels impossible. It’s crazy expensive. I own a house in Texas and that made this extra complicated. 

But it was worth it. 

Now I get to spend every day building a generational business and working with the kind of people who drink homemade eggnog while walking to our team’s holiday dinner(this is a good thing in case that statement wasn’t already clear). 

I had no idea how my life would turn out after I moved here. All I knew is that I wanted this and that I’m the kind of person who sees things through. And I trusted myself that if I followed my heart things would work out. 

This was also true when I quit my job 2 years ago to start consulting. 

In both cases I bet in myself. And in both cases everything worked out. 

Yes there is some luck involved. But following through on your dreams, whatever they are, helps create your own luck. You’re giving yourself more opportunities to be lucky. 

The only thing standing between you and achieving your dreams is taking action. Do the thing. It’s always worth it.

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Happy Friday to all the performance marketers out there 😂

I'm excited to test this but I expect the rollout will be slow and them having a usable self-serve UI will be even slower.

Cursor & Claude Code can give the right marketer superpowers. Here's how I've been using them:

1) My aha moment was giving Claude Code a link to our change log and then tagging 10 different blog posts that I wanted to update with new information. Claude cranked through all of the updates in a few minutes, way faster than it would've taken me manually. Claude Opus 4.5 is insanely good right now. 

2) The social quote on our contact sales page? I added that with Cursor on my second week at Profound. It wrote the code for me, helped me test locally on my computer, and helped write the pull request that I submitted to our eng team.

3) Using the Profound API and MCP server, I've been vibe coding new beta features for Profound. I presented them at our weekly demo day last year (and also showed them off at Emily Kramer's Gen Marketer summit in December). 

This just scratches the surface of what you can do, but if your website is built on a code repository you can access (likely Github), then I would strongly encourage you to ask for access to it and play around with Cursor. It's a bit more accessible than Claude Code.  

Your eng team will have to review your code before it gets pushed live, but honestly that's a good thing. You'll get great exposure to the software development process and make some new friends along the way.

Using a CMS feels awful now in comparison.

New Profound Research: Youtube is the #1 most cited domain in Gemini (vs #90 in ChatGPT)

Gemini also cites Youtube videos with roughly half as many views compared to ChatGPT (unlocking a greater longtail opportunity for brands to capture). 

Based on 90,000+ YouTube citations across both platforms our data set from the last month, Davis McCain from our team found some interesting things.

The median view count of a video cited in Gemini is 4,394 views. 
ChatGPT: 8,991 views. 2x that of Gemini.

What does this mean? 

ChatGPT is biasing towards more popular videos, which shrinks the TAM for what videos can be cited. Gemini, which obviously has way more internal data on video performance, is citing smaller creators more often. 

Google seems to be taking a more creator-friendly approach. But either way, Youtube is fertile ground for anyone looking to get cited more in AI search.

Excited to chat with VEED.IO and Georgie Kemp in a few weeks about video discoverability in AI search!

Great videos mean nothing if no one can find them in 2026 🔍

Join us live for a practical session on Video Discoverability and learn how to make one video work everywhere your audience searches.

Georgie Kemp, VEED’s SEO Lead, and Nick Lafferty, Head of Growth Marketing at Profound, will break down a simple optimization workflow that helps your videos show up across Google, AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and social platforms like TikTok and Reddit.

Here’s what we’ll cover:
✅ Why your videos aren’t being found across search, AI tools, and social platforms
✅ The anatomy of a well-optimized video
✅ One fast optimization workflow you can apply to every video 
✅ How to track video performance holistically

If you want your videos to rank, surface, and stay visible wherever people search, this session is for you.

Save the date: Jan 28, 3pm GMT

Masterclass N3: Video discoverability in 2026. Ranking in Google, ChatGPT..

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