Austin Hughes
@austinh___
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Co-founder & CEO @unifygtm . prev growth product @tryramp
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2012
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Pinned Tweet
Exactly a year ago I left Ramp after 2.5 years as a leader on the growth product team
Today
@HeggieConnor
and I are excited to launch
@unifygtm
and share that we’ve raised $6.6M from OpenAI, Thrive and Emergence. Our mission is to power warm outbound for the world’s most
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361
Over the last 15 months I've watched
@tryramp
scale from 45 → 225 employees while sustaining hypergrowth
Here are a few things I've learned about maintaining velocity at a startup 👇
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at a startup people flock to the “sexy” and easy to solve problems. one of the simplest ways to differentiate yourself is to work on the hardest, hairiest problems you can find. when you succeed you put yourself in a different league.
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Some bittersweet news - last week I wrapped up 2.5 years at
@tryramp
where I led growth product focused on new customer acquisition
Today is day 1 - I’m founding a startup building at the intersection of go-to-market and AI/ML
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High Output Management is one of the best biz books i’ve read, shoutout to
@rabois
for the rec
sharing my spark notes if helpful:
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Watching
@tryramp
double topline q/q and grow the team from 40 --> 150 over the last year has been the ride of the lifetime. Today we announced our $300M Series C at a $3.9B valuation. I can't wait for the next chapter.
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i'm beyond excited to share that rhea joined our growth team yesterday 📈
i was introduced to rhea through her brother, aman sanger. she was graduating from u chicago in a few months, and was looking to join an early stage startup. she wanted to become a growth expert in
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Today we announced a big milestone at
@tryramp
- we raised a new round of funding at a $8.1 billion valuation.
While exciting, a startup is merely a collection of people who've come together to build together.
Here's a story about the people at Ramp 👇
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on sunday i'm moving back to san francisco full-time to build
@unifygtm
.
in the past 8 years, i've bounced between nyc and sf.
i started my career in finance, working at centerview in nyc.
then, i moved to sf to work for softbank.
i started at ramp in sf and then moved to nyc.
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1. Dashboarding and data analysis needs to be a core competency of leaders.
The playing field evolves so rapidly that it is impossible to steer the ship without a working compass. Qualitative hunches are often wrong.
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some personal news ~ i’m joining the product team
@tryramp
focused on growth/new customer acquisition!
not too much in my day to day is changing, but stoked to learn from some incredible product thinkers here at Ramp :)
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2. Narrow focus.
Instead of working on 10 projects simultaneously over 2 months, teams should work on 1 or 2 projects per week and be held accountable to shipping on that timeline. Focus on the highest impact projects first.
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10. Hire people who want to be founders.
Founders are judged solely on output, and nothing else. They want to work hard and challenge the status quo. These are often 10x output people who amp up velocity.
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9. Unblockable = high velocity.
Hire as many people who have an "I don't know how, but I can figure it out" mindset as possible. These people will run through brick walls to get shit done, even it it means they need to pick up new skills like SQL or basic python on the job.
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5. Err on the side of hiring builders over delegators.
Builders are getting in the weeds to solve problems. Ideally you hire leaders who are also builders. The output from a team of 5 builders can be 5x that of a team of 1 builder and 4 delegators.
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eric glyman and
@rabois
recently did a 20vc episode with
@HarryStebbings
. it’s a masterclass in how one of the world’s best-run companies operates.
here are my 10 key takeaways:
from
@eglyman
(ceo at
@tryramp
):
1) focus breeds speed. some things matter a lot more than others,
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65% of our new arr last month came inbound.
our secret? we do one thing every early-stage startup should (but lots don't):
consistently publish social content.
in march, we decided that we were going to go all-in on posting on linkedin + x/twitter daily.
a lot of founders
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Picking the the next breakout startup can accelerate your career and produce big financial outcomes.
If you're thinking about joining a startup, these are some leading indicators that can help you identify the next big thing 👇
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3. Keep the quality bar high.
Since teams are focused on 1-2 projects at a time, executing them with rigor and attention to detail is doable. Solutions should work for 3-6 months minimum. Coming back to service bad solutions hurts velocity.
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i love hiring people who are young and hungry and watching them accomplish 10x more than they knew they could
talent in startups is a game of finding extremely high slope people and betting on them
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6. Employees and teams should be judged on output, not hours worked.
Every project shipped creates learnings, and compounding learnings drive high output. Fast and good decision making maximizes output.
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4. A cost/benefit framework should be the basis for all decision making.
A cost/benefit analysis ensure that teams use their marginal hour on the highest impact work. Often the best ideas are not 10x ideas but 25% improvements that 1-2 hours to ship.
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in the summer of 2022, the growth product team at ramp built a tool that quickly rose to become one of
@tryramp
's top site traffic (driving 5,000+ monthly site visits). this was my lightbulb moment with ai.
we found that the keyword "mission statement" was high traffic and had a
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7. Strong cross functional relationships improve velocity.
Weak cross functional relationships lead to more time spent on selling ideas than executing them.
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just finished the 20vc episode with
@HarryStebbings
and
@sama
and
@bradlightcap
from openai. one key takeaway struck a chord with me:
openai believes that there are 2 types of companies building with llms:
1. those who benefit from improvements to foundation models
2. those who
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what does your gtm stack look like right now?
here’s the next-gen gtm tech we’ve used at unify as we’ve scaled +190% in Q1 of this year:
→
@withdefault
for inbound
→
@tryattention
for call recording
→
@unifygtm
for warm outbound and sequencing
what am i missing here? tag
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today at
@tryramp
we're excited to announce the Advisor Console - a new product built specifically for accounting firms to manage their staff and clients on Ramp
sign up to get early access here:
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i'm beyond stoked to announce that shravya rao joined our team today as a founding account executive 📈
shravya brings a deep understanding of partnering with go-to-market leaders to
@unifygtm
given her past experiences at
@Braze
and
@contentful
.
during our interview process,
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it’s been 14 months since i left my job leading growth product at ramp to launch unify.
i often get asked what was the catalyst for me to leave ramp and start unify.
the honest truth?
i got somewhat lucky in that i had a handful of friends who were vcs, notably
@averyklemmer
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Career advice on how to be successful at a Series A/B startup after reflecting on my first 500 days at
@tryramp
🧵
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massive announcement
as of last week,
@unifygtm
has officially crossed $1mm in pipeline created using our own product (automated outbound).
the stats are nothing short of crazy.
➝ last 2 weeks have been the largest ever for automated outbound
➝ created $350K in pipeline in
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we gave out $500 in gift cards to land demos that quickly led to $25k+ of arr.
why do people hate on this strategy?
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product and sales are 2 jobs that have gotten too far apart. trying to sell something and winning or failing is the best user feedback you can get
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july was the most exciting month on record at
@unifygtm
🤯🤯🤯
1) the numbers were out of control:
→ total arr +20% month-over-month
→ pipeline grew by +110% month-over-month, i’ve never seen growth like this before
→ unify powered 33% of our closed won revenue and 42% of
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i have a lot to be thankful for from my 2.5 years at
@tryramp
, including getting to call ramp's co-founders
@eglyman
,
@karimatiyeh
, and
@genejaelee
mentors.
last week, ramp announced that it had raised $150m at a $7.65b valuation. an insane accomplishment for this market.
i
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energy in the
@tryramp
office is buzzing rn. a lot of people stoked to build, so much creativity, it’s a lot of fun
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8. Hypergrowth pace is uncomfortable to most who haven't seen it before - this can't slow you down.
Many people can learn to execute in hypergrowth when given the right toolkit. Leaders must keep the intensity and pace of execution up.
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i'm stoked to share our newest case study with
@OpenPhone
!
openphone is the leading business phone system serving over 38,000 customers. they're using unify to power nearly 100% of their outbound pipeline (and save 60hrs per month of manual work doing it):
the problem: despite
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june was a mind-blowing month for us at
@unifygtm
. we accelerated arr growth to +29% from +16% in may 🚀🚀🚀
i’m insanely proud of the entire team, but have to give a special shoutout to skyler, garrett and tameem who pushed us into a new gear as we wrapped up q2.
3 big wins to
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unbelievably proud to have been part of the
@tryramp
journey. excited to watch the company go to the moon and back
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6 months ago, nobody knew what unify was.
today, we're swamped with pipeline and opportunities.
my big learning for early-stage startups: crack top of funnel awareness asap.
the trickle-down effects to sales meetings and brand recognition will change the trajectory of your
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@unifygtm
grew arr by 80% mom in january and another 47% in february.
and since announcing our raise, we’ve generated more than 500 inbound demo requests.
wanted to give a peek under the hood at how we’re evolving the company to keep up with demand:
→ transitioning away from
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last week, our growth team booked $520k of pipeline and 31 meetings with
@unifygtm
🤯
i am speechless and insanely proud of what garrett has accomplished in <4 months at unify. rhea also joined the growth team in july and has already shipped big wins in warm outbound.
skeptical
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march was another record month at
@unifygtm
🚀🚀🚀
arr will grow by +39% from the business we closed in march. we tied our new bookings record set in february.
as q1 wraps, here are some big wins we're taking into april:
➝ we're consistently closing deals with companies
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making your existing team 2x as productive is almost always better than 2xing the size of the team. hiring takes 3-6 months, and introduces new person risk.
invest in software and processes to improve output per person first.
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hot take? engineering in GTM is underrated
but so many startups are hesitant to dedicate engineering resources to the growth team
how it usually goes:
➝ engineer is pulled from project engineering for a week at a time
➝ they wonder "why am i doing this?"
➝ little progress
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taste, beauty, and design are underrated in building product today.
when i was an early product manager at
@tryramp
, vp of product
@geoffintech
made a comment that stuck with me. he said, "users love and appreciate the small delights in a product more than you're giving credit."
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a product hill i'll die on:
if you don't dog food your product, you're missing out on tons of insights and learnings.
since onboarding our first biz ops hire, he's been focused on dogfooding our product and already has a running list of ~20 things to improve.
yes - talk to
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there’s a lot of talk about how founder-led sales is necessary for early stage startups.
i 100% agree, but i’ll be honest.
this was one of the harder parts of the transition from growth to founder. at heart, i’m a product guy.
so as a founder, it was easy to stay in my comfort
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growth product is going to blow up as a mission critical function.
getting your product in the hands of users as efficiently as possible is the
#1
priority for startups rn, and the skill set is quite distinct from core product.
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building a generational company take more product surface area.
we've been building unify for 17 months and we already have 2 distinct pillars to our product:
1) signals: the reasons why we reach out
2) engage: the workflows to engage with customers (think emails, calls,
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customer empathy is something that has to come top down - this is a huge thing that
@tryramp
got right kudos to
@eglyman
and
@karimatiyeh
when a customer has a problem there's this itch to immediately hop on it, from product to sales to support
this is in Ramp's DNA
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may was huge for
@unifygtm
—grew arr +16%.
a few key highlights:
1) skyler continued to crush quota. he closed 57% more arr in may than in april, and attained 184% of quota.
thanks for all the insanely hard work, skyler 🤝
2) noah czelusta joined our engineering team
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i'm extremely lucky to have found
@HeggieConnor
as a co-founder.
we've hit on a real formula for success as a duo — here's why:
connor and i’s journey began about a decade ago at rice university. we weren’t necessarily best friends then, but we shared a ton of mutual friends
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I'm so grateful for my time at Ramp - it's shaped the way I view the world and operate every day
Most importantly I count so many people that I crossed paths with as personal friends
Thanks so much to
@eglyman
@karimatiyeh
@genejaelee
for bringing me along for the journey 🙏
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we scaled
@unifygtm
's new revenue bookings by nearly 300% in q1.
we powered this growth by dogfooding unify. here are 3 of the ways we're using our own product to scale the business:
1) automated outbound re-targeting of paid ads.
over the last month or so, we've
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wanted to share a cool milestone for
@HeggieConnor
and i as founders.
we just wrapped our first board meeting 2 weeks ago.
i’ve been “around” board meetings in my previous roles at
@tryramp
and
@SoftBank
. but this was the first time i’ve been at the head of the table.
here are
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it’s wild how quickly life can change.
1 year of being in the right place/right time can have a greater impact than 10 years of unfocused time/effort
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pumped to show off our new self-service product tour
I'm a firm believer in helping people see, touch, feel, and experience a product before buying it. I know I like to.
so, now, you can visit a link and:
➝ get a brief overview of the product
➝ understand how we identify
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i wish that more gtm folks knew that you *can* actually do fully automated warm outbound. it looks a lot like marketing automation, but for sales.
it’s 100% possible in 2024 - the revenue teams that embrace it will win.
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transitioning from being a ‘product guy’ to running founder-led sales had quite the learning curve (maybe you can relate)
3 resources that helped me get proficient in asking for money from customers:
→ i read gap selling by keenan (twice)
→ i built a network of founders who
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there's a famous paul graham saying 'you make what you measure.'
we grew arr +190% in q1 - what made this possible was ensuring that we were measuring the right things about our gtm motion to improve it.
we started to measure 2 things to ensure we're always learning/improving:
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big win for
@unifygtm
in may
we just passed $10M of created pipeline for our customers in a single month
the momentum for warm outbound is real
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august blew all expectations out of the water. unify grew arr +48% in august, and 3x’ed our single month record for new arr 🤯
we’re feeling insanely energized and ready for fall. some highlights:
1) we had 4 aes who all have slightly different selling styles, and they’re all
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a few trends i'm noticing in b2b go-to-market:
➝ hubspot crm is everywhere
➝ warm outbound is becoming more of a focus and cold outbound isn't working
➝ there's budget to buy tools if roi is clear
what else are you seeing?
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i'm 18 months into my founder journey.
before becoming a founder, i was working in growth & product at ramp. there, my role was almost exclusively execution-related. i was focused on projects, features, planning, etc that would drive the business forward over the next 1-3
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the hard truth about B2B startups:
the teams that are allergic to sales are never going to have a great gtm motion.
this sales allergy gets embedded in the culture of the company, and can take years to shake.
you need to have a founder(s) that really believes that distribution
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at
@unifygtm
, we beat our new arr record for a single month in the first 10 days of august...and we're currently putting up our best month on record by +77% (it's only the 16th of the month).
yesterday we wrapped up a team onsite in sf, and the energy of this group all together
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its common to believe that great companies start with a single, brilliant idea.
i don't agree with this.
after 18 months of building
@unifygtm
, there are two pieces of advice I'd give to aspiring founders when figuring out what company to build:
1) pick an icp you like
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b2b companies need to stop wasting so much time fighting over attribution.
it's an exhausting dilemma that affects 90% of the revenue teams i've talked to in the last year.
here's the basics:
customers who convert have multiple touchpoints. which team or channel gets pipeline
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i’ve spoken to 20+ gtm leaders at high-growth startups over the past 2 weeks.
and I’ve been seeing one mistake non-stop.
a lack of awareness on volume.
here’s how it usually goes:
(1) a team will send 10 outbound emails per week for 1 month
(2) they’ll get ~1 reply per week
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working closely with
@guillaumecabane
and
@HypergrowthP
helped me grow from a business generalist to a growth leader in <2 years.
g was a growth advisor at
@tryramp
and previously was vp of growth at segment, drift, and gorgias where he helped them grow revenue 10x, 4x, and 6x
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unify couldn't exist as it does without my co-founder
@HeggieConnor
.
here's the story of how we became co-founders.
connor and i first crossed paths over 10 years ago at rice university. though we were never best friends, i always admired his work ethic and the energy with
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1
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i’m currently deep in
@tryramp
growth strategy planning… 2022 is shaping up to be our biggest year yet 🚀🚀
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things at
@unifygtm
are in full sprint. q1 was massive, we grew new revenue bookings +277% from q4 2023.
things are only accelerating—and learning how to navigate these early stages as a founder has been an experience.
wanted to share a few of the things i’m doing to keep my
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if you google "warm outbound,"
@unifygtm
is the
#1
search result.
the phrase came out of a brainstorming session we had at the emergence capital office. here's how it went down:
last fall, we were workshopping with
@camillericketts
,
@jakesaper
, and
@YazanElBaba
from
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It’s always day 1. One of my favorite things about
@tryramp
is that the team celebrates accomplishments and then goes heads down to get to the next one. Never settle.
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i'm insanely proud of what the
@unifygtm
team has accomplished in just 15 months since launching:
➝ we power nearly 100% of
@OpenPhone
's outbound motion
➝
@Abacum_io
saw a 5x roi from unify shortly after go-live
➝ unify saves
@MozartData
75% of the time manual prospecting
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genuinely enjoying your M-F is such a big happiness unlock. i don’t quite understand how some can work decades in a job they don’t like. i’d be a shell of a human
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a very exciting launch day here at
@tryramp
- we’re going global 🌎 with ramp you can now reimburse employees and pay vendors overseas.
0
2
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i spent 2.5 years leading
@tryramp
's growth product team before leaving to start
@unifygtm
.
i can't wait to share learnings on the journey at ny
#techweek
.
here's what's happening:
@unifygtm
and
@withdefault
are partnering to bring you a star-studded gtm panel featuring
1
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our team just wrapped up an off-site in san francisco that may prove to be a major turning point in
@unifygtm
's history.
here's why:
for the first time, we all left feeling like a real company.
as we scaled over the last 15 months, there have been moments when it just felt
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Damn even feeling like I’m a small contributor to building
@tryramp
is an incredible feeling. I’m so lucky to have the job I do l 🚀🚀
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for early-stage startups, perception is everything.
when we first started selling unify fall of 2023 we had close to zero brand awareness. every prospect conversation came from outbound or investor intros.
you're effectively asking a prospect to take a bet on you with zero
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i’ve talked a bit about my experience leading growth product at ramp and how that led to the launch of
@unifygtm
—but haven’t talked much about the winding journey i took to becoming a founder.
here’s the actual story:
when i was 22, the concept of coming up with an idea,
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not sure if other founders can relate, but I found it extremely hard to pull myself out of day-to-day execution.
I know what needs to get done, and I know I can add value in most areas of the business, but I came to learn it was a wildly inefficient use of my (and the team's)
0
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my co-founder
@HeggieConnor
and the engineering team at
@unifygtm
have been shipping nonstop lately.
in just this last month, we’ve launched 3 new features that we believe will give marketers the tools to propel their warm outbound execution, find more high-quality contacts, and
2
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49% of our closed won revenue in august has come from inbound.
growing via inbound + word-of-mouth used to feel like a black box to me. how do you drum up inbound? how do you get people to talk about you?
there are ways to "engineer" word-of-mouth, if you will. driving inbound
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what’s the worst cold email you’ve ever received? i’ll go first:
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