Episode #235: Nick Lafferty on Marketing Engineering, Category Creation, and Closing His Own Deals

He was the first marketing hire at Profound, and within weeks he was shipping production code and taking sales demos himself.

For founders making their first marketing hire and for marketers deciding what to learn next.

Nick Lafferty is the Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, where he joined as the first marketer on a 20-person team that has since grown to 200 and raised Series A, B, and C in 10 months. He walks through what a marketing engineer actually does, what broke as the company scaled, and why he put himself in the lead round robin and gave close to a hundred demos when there weren't enough AEs to cover pipeline. He also breaks down the system he built to connect HubSpot deal data to LinkedIn impressions, the interview question he opens with, and why he is openly against token maxing. Before Profound, Nick ran growth at Loom through its acquisition by Atlassian.

What you'll hear

• Why the first marketing hire should be a marketing engineer, with a product marketer as the fast follow
• How Nick shipped a social proof quote to the live contact sales page in 15 minutes using Cursor, and the required "how did you hear about us" field that powers his attribution system
• What broke first at speed: lead routing running through a Google Sheet, deliverability issues, and then more meetings than sales reps to take them
• How Profound builds a category by publishing research to customers in Slack first, then LinkedIn, then email and webinars

Chapters

• 00:00 - Cold open: "I have contracts with real ARR tied back to my name"
• 00:45 - Frank Growth intro: three things going wrong with marketing teams
• 02:11 - Nick's background, from Loom to Profound
• 03:02 - What a marketing engineer actually does
• 03:50 - The first thing he ever shipped, and it's still live
• 04:45 - Building the LinkedIn to HubSpot attribution system
• 05:47 - The result: 20% of inbound lead forms from LinkedIn
• 06:37 - What broke first at scale
• 08:18 - Hiring the first four marketers
• 09:14 - The interview question: show me your GitHub repo
• 10:21 - What Loom taught him about horizontal products
• 12:00 - Marketing a category that didn't exist 18 months ago
• 13:23 - The research drumbeat, and giving customers early access in Slack
• 15:04 - Why Profound turns away the self-service market
• 15:45 - Profound University and the marketing engineer job board
• 16:34 - From analytics product to AI agent workbench
• 17:37 - What to look for in a first marketing hire today
• 18:50 - Anti-token maxing, and where marketing engineers come from
• 20:04 - Lightning round
• 21:30 - Jason's top three takeaways and one thing to do this week

Links & resources

Guest

Nick Lafferty, Founding Marketing Engineer, Profound
LinkedIn
X/Twitter
Profound
Profound on LinkedIn
Profound Index

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow: real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

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Episode #234: Dave Steer on repositioning a brand around AI in three months

Webflow's CMO had 90 days to relaunch the website, reposition the brand, and ship an ad campaign.
For marketing leaders whose board just told them to become AI native, and who don't have a playbook for it.

Dave Steer is CMO at Webflow, leading brand, demand, and product marketing after two decades at GitLab, Cloudflare, Twitter, Facebook, and Mozilla. His mandate came from the board and leadership team, timed to Webflow Conf three months from his start date. We cover how he reorganized a 50-to-60-person marketing team around AI tools, why he ran positioning as an executive exercise with April Dunford rather than a marketing one, and where he draws the line between what a human writes and what an agent touches. He also walks through Webflow's AEO Maturity Index, a study of 2,000 US websites where the average site scored about two or three, and where the problem was site structure rather than content volume.

What you'll hear

• Why positioning is a corporate strategy activity, not a marketing activity, and who has to be in the room
• How the team moved from a relay race of specialists to treating everyone as an orchestrator and connector
• The two instincts that go wrong first: buying a pile of ChatGPT licenses, and optimizing for day one instead of day two
• Where the human/agent line sits: the human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation

Chapters

• 00:00 - The human owns the argument, the agent owns the permutation
• 00:33 - Three ways marketing leaders are handling the AI mandate badly
• 02:24 - The three things every CMO has to be expert in now
• 03:11 - Where the three-month mandate came from
• 05:00 - What "agentic" means when the web has two audiences
• 06:14 - April Dunford and why positioning is an executive staff exercise
• 07:13 - The AEO Maturity Index: 2,000 sites, average score of two or three
• 08:40 - Rebuilt, not retooled: ending the relay race
• 12:26 - Four human roles: strategist, orchestrator, creator, connector
• 17:13 - The single biggest mistake CMOs are making right now
• 18:55 - Lightning round
• 20:49 - Top three takeaways and one thing to do this week

Links & resources

Guest

Dave Steer, Chief Marketing Officer, Webflow
Website
Webflow Conf
LinkedIn

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow. Real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

Promotional links

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

Sanity stopped producing SEO content and started building pages only machines will read. Roughly 60% of last month's signups came from LLMs.

For B2B growth leaders watching organic traffic fall and trying to work out what replaces it.

Jesus Requena is CMO at Sanity, and previously led growth marketing at Figma, demand gen at Unity and Algolia, and growth at Hex. After watching client SEO traffic fall to a tenth of what it had been, he stopped SEO content production entirely and rebuilt Sanity's content for LLMs to parse rather than humans to read. He walks through the three-layer playbook: fixing contradictions across 100 to 200 pages on their own site, converting roughly 1,000 FAQ pages from user-centric to LLM-centric, building five single-topic microsites excluded from Google, then correcting third-party citations that conflicted with their own story. Sanity moved from ranking 15th or 20th in LLM visibility to top five.

• Why visibility comes from reasoning: if an LLM can reason your concepts clearly, it recommends you, which makes first-party consistency the starting point
• How they executed it — crawling their own site to find unclear terms, writing content no human is expected to read, and partnering with AirOps to fix obsolete third-party citations
• Why attribution breaks when signups arrive through a CLI or MCP without ever touching the website, and the self-reported "where did you find us" question they fell back on
• Where to start from zero, in order: audit your own site, then third-party mentions, then microsites — plus the caveat that Reddit's influence is fading and LLMs are pulling more from video

• 00:00 — Cold open: "We literally just stopped any SEO content"
• 00:38 — The AEO shift: what's going wrong and what works
• 02:12 — Meet Jesus Requena: Figma, Unity, Algolia, Hex, Sanity
• 02:45 — The common thread in marketing to technical audiences
• 04:30 — SEO traffic drops to a tenth, and the bet that followed
• 06:15 — The three layers of AEO content
• 08:22 — Citations, visibility, and going from 15th to top five
• 10:37 — Authority, and becoming the thought leader for the LLM
• 12:07 — 1,000 FAQ pages and five microsites excluded from Google
• 14:23 — Why brand investment went physical: events, swag, billboards
• 17:30 — Measuring attribution when nobody clicks
• 19:17 — Is the growth repeatable or is it timing?
• 20:41 — Where to start from zero
• 22:38 — Scaling agents, and humans handling the exception
• 23:59 — Lightning round
• 25:14 — Jason's top three takeaways

Guest
Jesus Requena — CMO, Sanity
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason