Insight
E-commerce performance playbooks are the correct B2B SaaS growth strategy
“My philosophy is that the Ecom playbook
Is the right playbook for SAS?
Because if you look at e-comm, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an ad to cart.
You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of chan…”
Insight
Swulinski: Fire marketing team members who are not systems thinkers
“My hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker. Like, stop brute forcing people in. Hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed.”
Insight
Startups can scale to $10M ARR using only Meta, Google, and lifecycle
“You want those three things spun up because you can scale to your first 1,000,010 million ARR, Just off of those three things. And then obviously, you know, you're investing into the site, you're investing into founder-led content. There's like the other thing…”
Insight
Swulinski: Paid Acquisition Usually Fails Due to Bad Conversion Tracking Setup
“If you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn't know who those people are, and it just randomly targets people, and you, you'll have a super high CAC, you'll say, ah, pay doesn't work for me. I'd say most of the time, people haven't done the actual setup co…”
Insight
Swulinski: A $100K Meta Budget Requires 400-500 New Creatives Monthly
“Like if you, let's say you have a hundred K meta budget, You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau. You're going to get out-competed.”
Insight
Swulinski: Superhuman hit a growth ceiling by hyper-focusing on tech founders
“At the end of the day, it was very much a, you know, premium product, immediate paywall, and the core ICP is founders, right? And we also experienced this at Whisper, right? Like the early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Swulinski: Eight-person teams spend $15k-$20k monthly on Viktor
“We have like eight person teams that are spending 15, 20,000 dollars a month to use Victor. And it replaced all their hiring.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Swulinski predicts AI agents will execute 80% of company work in three years
“I think in three years, companies will essentially be, like, board of directors, where 20% of the work is the strategy and the thinking, And then agents just do 80% of the execution, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Swulinski: Marketing Acquisition Talent May See ML-Level Hiring Boom Within a Year
“I think we're coming to the place that like people in these marketing roles also are They're unicorns. They're rare, and you want them in your company, and I think that same like ML crazy moment is maybe going to happen over the next year in, in the marketing …”
Insight
Swulinski: Paid ads are the fastest way to validate product-led growth
“Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form, right? Like there, there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand, go organic content, build all that base. That just takes too much t…”
Opinion
Swulinski: SaaS Lacks Out-of-the-Box Multi-Touch Attribution and Conversion Tracking Platforms
“For SaaS, Completely different world because you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch, right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer. So maybe you're using click house and hex last click, you know, first click at…”
Insight
Swulinski: AI SaaS must calculate LTV to CAC on gross profit
“LTV to CAC is usually not enough. You want to probably look at like LTV gross profit, specifically if you're, you have token cost because you're, the biggest cost item is, is usage at the end of the day.”
Opinion
Swulinski: AI video tools cannot replace real people in creative ads
“In no way, shape, or form is anything in creative to the point where you can replace real people.”
Opinion
Swulinski: PostHog's unconventional website UI succeeds as audience pattern disruption
“That's like a pattern disrupt thing for them, and they know who their target audience is, and the target audience appreciates the weirdness.”
Insight
Swulinski: Growth teams should spend aggressively to find channel ceilings
“What I think everyone should do, is go as hard as you absolutely can, and then see it blow up, and then understand where and how it blew up, pull back, and use that as information of now we know what is incremental, we know where our ceilings are”
Insight
Swulinski: YouTube reviews are top citation sources for ChatGPT and AEO
“YouTube reviews, because they're long form, and they rank long tail. They'll essentially beep, they're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website, PR, external sources talking about you, and one of the biggest, …”
Insight
Swulinski: PR now primarily drives AI answer engine citations, not traffic spikes
“Really, that PR is made for citations, right, around AEO. Like, how many external credible sources are writing about you? Then you'll see your AEO traffic significantly increase, because the more of a not-owned narrative is being talked about positively about …”
Disclosure
Swulinski ran $1M/mo Google spend and 100+ newsletters solo at Wispr
“For essentially a year and a half, I was the one person at Whisper doing all execution. So imagine a million a month on Google, hundreds of thousands of keywords, ads, experiments, landing pages. I owned every KPI from eyeball to download and then product tick…”
Opinion
Swulinski: Under 1% of candidates can build deep AI systems
“Less than one percent.”
Opinion
Swulinski: X ads do not work for SaaS growth
“X ads don't work. And, like, that to me just means the platform is still... I have yet to meet a SaaS head of growth or performance marketer that says that X ads print.”
Opinion
Top PLG companies are best positioned for autonomous AI agent software selection
“So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned, in my opinion, for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks.”
Insight
Swulinski: 90% of Companies Fail to Build Proper Tracking Before Spending
“I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first cent, have everything set up.”
Insight
Swulinski: Meta and Google Ad Algorithms Dislike Usage-Based SaaS Models
“The biggest differences are first in that, like, Meta and Google are not optimized for, like, B to B SaaS usage-based products. Like, they go absolutely nuts with a, so you're telling me there's a predictive revenue of a one person could be a 50,000, you know,…”
Disclosure
Swulinski pays teenage UGC creators up to $30,000 monthly for ads
“Like, we have we have kids that are, like, 1718, 19, that are making 20, 30 K a month, just making a couple ads for us.”
