Case Study: Building a High-Octane GTM Tools Stack in Under 3 Months
Instead of an in-house team slowly cobbling-together a disjointed GTM tools stack, we accelerated XetHub's GTM (they were later acquired by Hugging Face)
My first time as a Head of Revenue was 2013 at Bloc.io. Over the course of 3 years, through a lot of trial-and-error, we slowly build (and rebuilt) our GTM tools stack, eventually creating a well-oiled engine that turned leads into revenue. When Bloc got acquired by Thinkful (a larger competitor), I was told our GTM architecture was a big part of the reason. Our paid ad spend was similar to Thinkful’s, bout our CAC was far-better.
Fast forward 10 years (and 10+ startups) laster, I set out to build a similar GTM stack for XetHub. But instead of 3 years, I vowed to build it in under 3 months.
It worked. And about a year later XetHub was acquired by Hugging Face.
Do you want to hire Prasid & Airframe Labs? We’ve helped YC-backed startups like Scribd, scale-ups like Booksy, and Fortune 500 companies like SiriusXM. In every case, we’ve helped them grow revenue, fast. And we can do the same for you.
A Quick Aside: Who is Xethub?
XetHub, backed by Madrona, is like GitHub but built for machine learning, and was recently acquired by Hugging Face.
The founders had previously created a ML tools startup that they sold to Apple for $200M, and their vision for XetHub was to be a more-comprehensive GitHub-alternative for ML teams.
How We Built XetHub’s GTM Tools Stack in Under 3 Months
It was January of 2023, ChatGPT had just launched, and AI and ML were top of mind for developers everywhere. XetHub had just announced their product and their seed round led by Madrona. The founders sensed that with ChatGPT taking-off, if they wanted to catch the AI wave, they’d need to accelerate their go-to-market plan. That’s where we came in.
We worked with XetHub’s co-founders to go to market fast, developing the GTM strategy and then executing first a sales-led and then product-led go-to-market motions. The key to moving fast: right-sizing the system complexity to where the business was at.
Airframe’s first-principles approach helped us establish a flexible foundation so we could quickly transition from Sales-Led to Product-Led growth. Their focus on shipping fast, staying lean, and being embedded with our team enabled faster iteration and greater creativity. And Airframe’s integrated approach to analytics, across sales, marketing, and product, has set us up to make data-driven decisions.
—Rajat Arya, Co-Founder, XetHub
1. Establishing a Sales-Led ABM Prospecting Motion
The first big decision: which CRM to choose. We recommended Hubspot over Salesforce because of its flexibility, and because time-to-market was such an important factor. (Salesforce is a beast to set up, and requires a lot more ongoing maintenance, so we probably could have billed a lot more consulting hours if we’d recommended Salesforce, but that’s not what we care about 🤷).
We drove the procurement process, negotiated terms, and worked with XetHub’s co-founder Rajat Arya to map the sales process and define Lead Statuses and Deal Stages. Next, we worked XetHub’s Head of Product Ann Huang to write a sales prospecting outreach sequence that would resonate with prospects.
Working closely with Rajat and Ann, we defined an ideal customer profile. With this, XetHub was ready to start standing up their sales prospecting machine and training a part-time contractor to operate it. Each week we’d identify prospects within the ICP using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, enrich contacts with ContactOut, import into Hubspot, and start them on a cold outreach sequence in Hubspot. Over the course of eight weeks we ran one campaign a week to 1000 prospects per week, continuously refining our approach.
2. Adding a Product-Led Growth Motion
The Airframe Labs team knew that for a developer-first product, like XetHub, we’d need a product-led motion as well, and got to work.
We set up XetHub’s Google Analytics, Google Ads, Reddit Ads, and LinkedIn Ads accounts, and added tracking pixels using Google Tag Manager tags inserted into Webflow.
Another important step: rather than depending solely on Google and LinkedIn’s native reporting, we made sure to lay a strong foundation by implementing a secondary analytics plan. We built-out dashboards to measure paid ads campaigns via UTM tracking in PostHog (and Hubspot).
The XetHub team told us they had one overarching goal for this initial paid ads test: compare four variants of their value proposition to help inform the product strategy.
To accomplish this we created four paid landing pages in Webflow and set up a split test to measure the four value propositions against one another. The result? We were able to show, with statistical significance, which value proposition most resonated with viewers and shift all of XetHub’s messaging to this champion variant.
The Results: Cutting Go-to-Market Time in Half
“In a matter of months, Prasid and team helped us get from a standing-start to a built-out PLG tools stack with paid ads, automation, and reporting. They helped us ship rapidly while staying lean.”
—Rajat Arya, Co-Founder, XetHub
Oftentimes a startup’s tools stack is disjointed because it’s built out by individual contributors (IC) on separate teams. Oftentimes these ICs have expertise within a specific tool, but lack a strategic understanding of how to get the best performance out of the system as a whole. The result: a disjoined customer experience with poor conversion rates, high CACs, and anemic growth.
Having a single team like Airframe Labs enabled XetHub to build fast and with confidence, knowing that that the foundation was stable and ready to maximize conversion.
In just three months, Airframe Labs took XetHub from just getting started to a sales-led go-to-market motion that was firing on all cylinders. And we did it without the expense and delay of building-out an in-house marketing, sales, and rev ops team.
According to our estimates, we cut XetHub’s time-to-market by 3 months: that’s nearly half. You can review our assumptions around a typical GTM timeline here.
Additionally, by leaning on Airframe vs. building-out the team, we cut XetHub’s burn by an estimated $245,000. You can review our assumptions around hiring costs here.
Once XetHub’s go-to-market was underway, we shifted from to a lower-touch, lower-cost advisory model.
The XetHub team could still Slack us with questions around automation, ops, measurement, or even sales hiring. In fact we helped hire XetHub’s first developer evangelist and first head of sales.
Summary
We understand not only the revenue ops and automation toolset but also how these tools fit into a broader growth strategy. In the end, this saves early stage startups their most valuable resource: time.
To learn more about how we can help your business grow efficiently, get in touch.