Case Study: From Seed to Go-to-Market in Under 3 Months

How Airframe Labs Built a High Octane RevenueTech Stack for XetHub

WHO IS XETHUB

XetHub, backed by Madrona, is like GitHub but built for machine learning, and was recently acquired by Hugging Face. 

The company was co-founded by Yucheng Low, Ajit Banerjee and Rajat Arya, a team with years of experience working with large data platforms. Low previously co-founded ML startup Turi, where Arya was the first employee. Apple acquired the company in 2016 for $200M, allowing Low and Arya to get hands-on experience working with Apple’s ML platform stack. It was at Apple that the two met Banerjee, who previously worked at Inktomi, Amazon and Facebook- along with having previously founded two startups. With those years of experience between them, these three technical powerhouses came together to found XetHub.

HOW AIRFRAME LABS HELPED 

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, XetHub co-founder

1. Establishing a Sales-Led Prospecting Motion

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 seed round and flagship product a month earlier. XetHub’s founders sensed that to catch the AI wave, they’d need to accelerate their go-to-market plan. That’s where Airframe Labs 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. 

The first big decision: which CRM to choose. We recommended Hubspot over Salesforce because of its flexibility regardless of GTM motion, and because time-to-market was such an important factor.

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.