Growth After Headcount

Epizódok

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  CRO 2.0: $25M To $100M From The Terminal — Omar Ismail (Ascend) #003 30.07.2026 21p

  Ascend grew from zero to $25M ARR with no growth team. No growth marketer, no ads manager, no paid engine. Word of mouth, referrals, and a small set of partnerships. Then Omar Ismail joined as COO and built the entire go-to-market stack himself, orchestrated end to end in Claude Code. The target now: $100M ARR without meaningfully scaling headcount.Omar calls the second half of his job CRO 2.0: one person owning strategy and the machine that executes it. He argues the real trust problem with AI is not hallucination but software bugs in the systems it builds, which is why his next hire is a go-to-market engineer, not a marketer. And when everyone has the same tools, differentiation moves back to taste, judgment, and the things AI can't do at scale: physical mail, conferences, human relationships.Chapters00:00 — Intro00:35 — Banking, VC, and a music-tech exit before Ascend03:08 — Zero to $25M ARR on word of mouth, now going AI native03:46 — No growth team: one COO owns the whole go-to-market07:18 — Claude Code as the orchestration layer08:48 — The trust problem is bugs, not hallucinations10:24 — The next hire: a go-to-market engineer11:22 — HubSpot backbone, natural-language dashboards on top13:15 — Where humans stay: taste, judgment, 14 usable hooks out of 2015:24 — When everyone runs AI outbound, mailers and conferences win19:08 — $25M to $100M without adding people20:44 — The KPI that never changes: retentionGuestOmar Ismail, COO at Ascend.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarismailb/Ascend: https://www.joinascend.com/https://omarismail.com/projects/growth-engineAbout the showGrowth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AIinstead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/About the hostHaris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/),a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum(https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing theway companies are built and scaled.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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  100x The Human, Skip The Headcount — Amos Bar-Joseph (Swan AI) #002 26.07.2026 26p

  Amos Bar-Joseph built and scaled two B2B startups on the old playbook. Raise big, hire to forty people before the first million in revenue, then spend years fighting the bloat you created. With Swan AI he threw it out. In 2025 Swan went from zero to over 200 customers and seven figures in ARR with three founders and no additional hires.The number he's aiming at is ten million dollars in ARR per employee.This episode is about how that actually works. Amos started where most teams start, building a specialized agent for every task, and it didn't hold. Swan now runs its entire go-to-market on a single coding agent with a file system and a knowledge base it updates itself. We get into why data is not context, why the job that's left for humans is specification and review, and why he'll never let AI write his LinkedIn posts.Chapters00:00 — Intro00:21 — Two startups on the old playbook, and why it broke01:10 — The autonomous business: scaling ARR per employee, not valuation01:39 — Zero to 200 customers with three founders02:54 — Why Swan killed its specialized agents and runs one04:54 — Data is not context: what your CRM teaches an agent06:40 — Context engineering, and why it's the core RevOps skill now10:29 — Fully automated, semi-automated, human-first12:19 — Different beats better: don't give AI your edge14:17 — Personal brand, and the rise of the analog18:14 — Scaling one seller to 100x instead of hiring ten20:41 — What this means for VC and bootstrapping23:03 — Talent, compensation, and widening inequality25:09 — A software revolution, not a labour revolutionGuestAmos Bar-Joseph, co-founder of Swan AI.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amos-bar-joseph/Swan: https://www.getswan.com/About the showGrowth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027.More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/About the hostHaris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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  Growth After Headcount — The Podcast (Trailer) 22.07.2026 1p

  The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. That playbook is dead.A new generation of companies is running on AI instead of headcount. Small teams, serious revenue, and org charts that would have looked impossible three years ago. This podcast goes inside those companies to find out how they actually work, from the founders building them.Each episode is a conversation with someone running an AI-native company: what they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers really look like. No hype, no "AI is transforming business" filler. Just how these companies are built and what it means for everyone still hiring the old way.The podcast runs alongside the book of the same name, Growth After Headcount: How to Scale a Company with AI Instead of People.New episodes coming soon. Subscribe so you don't miss the first one.🔗 Website & newsletter: https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/About the hostHaris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.Connect with Haris:LinkedIn &  X
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  Growth After Headcount — What is this about? #001 21.07.2026 5p

  The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. A new generation of companies is throwing it out.I'm Haris Odobasic, and this is Growth After Headcount — a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of headcount.I come from revenue operations, where the whole job is aligning people, process, technology, and data into one efficient revenue system. It works, but it's still people-dependent. Plug AI into that system and something changes: a handful of people can run work that used to take a hundred. That shift is creating a new kind of company, built lean from day one, and it's putting pressure on incumbents who grew the old way.Over the coming months I'll talk to the founders, investors, and operators building these companies. What they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers actually look like. We'll get into the big questions too: can there be a one-person, billion-dollar company? What does a truly autonomous business look like when marketing, sales, service, and even the product improve themselves?New episodes weekly. Occasionally it'll just be me. Everything feeds the book, out in 2027.Follow along and build alongside me.Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.Connect with Haris on LinkedIn or X