Sam Blond (@samdblond)

New @ThePeelPod with @samdblond This is his first podcast since starting @MonacoGTM, and our 2-hour conversation walks through everything sales, marketing, and GTM in a AI-native world. Thanks to @numeral, @FlexSuperApp, @Amplitude_HQ, and @merge_api for supporting this episode! Watch here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 Scaling Brex to $12B 1:14 How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building 5:19 Using AI to get more leverage 9:15 Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund 12:56 Innovator’s dilemma in AI 15:57 AI companies should build full platforms, not wedge products 23:30 Revenue is just a math equation 27:18 Two ways AI increases conversion rates 36:56 AI will never replace spending time with customers 39:46 Don’t measure the impact of brand marketing 49:03 Your marketing must be different (and hard) 58:39 Customer discovery calls and working with design partners 1:03:03 The zero to 100 launch 1:11:00 Monaco’s launch playbook 1:19:00 Send gifts that are unique and social 1:22:17 Naming your company 1:28:04 Founders should send early outbound 1:32:38 How multi-channel augments AI outbound 1:39:42 Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions 1:43:28 Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue 1:50:22 Monaco’s Forward Deployed AE's

From an ROI standpoint (hard dollars), I believe a gifting campaign is as good as it gets. The downside is it's also the most operationally complex (lots of labor). Here's how I'd break it down: Investment: A worthwhile gift is likely a minimum of $100. Let's just use that #. And we'll target an audience of 100. So $10k spend on the gifts themselves. Add in handwritten notes ($500 at $5 each) and delivery ($1000 at $10 each) and we're at roughly 11.5k for the campaign. If the gift is good, you'll generate a bunch of meetings with the top 100 prospects in the world for your company. If the gift is great, you'll also get brand awareness through things like recipients posting on social media. There aren't (m)any marketing campaigns I can think of that drive that impact for 11 grand. Operations: to do this well, it's a fair amount of work. You have to come up with the gift, pick your audience, enrich with shipping addresses, order the gifts and handwritten notes to your office, repackage the gift and handwritten note for delivery, and ship them. You then need to follow up on delivery day to ensure receipt and eventually ask for the meeting. I love this type of marketing. There's a framework I like to use that half of marketing spend should directly benefit the target. Most marketing spend goes to 3rd party advertisers (Google, X, Meta, OOH providers, etc). It sounds obvious, but marketing spend that benefits the target (gifts, events like our Monaco Invitational, etc) is far better ROI. It's just more work to do it. So most companies index on the lazy approach and spend most of their marketing budget on paid online ads.

We just launched Monaco. Here’s the exact playbook we used. I hope it's helpful to other founders and startups: 1. The launch video: most launch videos I see orient around some stressed out person at their desk or some philosophical approach to company building. Do not do this.

1/ How to succeed with founder led sales: Last week, @garrytan was nice enough to invite me to his home to speak with the current YC batch. The most common topic was founders figuring out how to close the first set of customers in time for demo day.