GTM before
GTM.
A small team in a London room. £5K/month against competitors with deeper pockets, longer histories, and established agency relationships. We engineered the signal layer five years before Clay existed, and helped take Peakon from founder-led hustle to a $700M Workday exit.
A London room. £5K/month. $700M out.
We mapped their Google Ads structure from public landing page URLs, went head-to-head on the keywords that drove their pipeline, and brought in marketers who could code: because Clay didn't exist yet and someone had to wire Clearbit Reveal into SalesLoft and Salesforce by hand.
Then came the first enterprise deal. Then channel by channel. Then hypergrowth. Then Workday, at $700M.
2016. Outgunned.
Peakon was an employee engagement platform, early, ambitious, and outgunned. Culture Amp, Officevibe, Glint, TINYpulse: all established, all outspending them. A handful of clients, most from the founders' and investors' network. Paid was 10% of pipeline. Everything else was relationships and hustle. Founder-led growth, in the most literal sense.
Dan Rogers, co-founder and CMO, had worked with us before. He gave us a simple brief: make paid work against the bigger players.
£5K/month was the starting line.Five things, in order.
Each layer earned the next. We didn't build a stack on day one; we built the channel that paid for the layer underneath it, and so on, until what started as a PPC test became revenue infrastructure.
Mapped competitors' paid playbooks from their public URLs.
The biggest competitors had years of Google Ads data behind them. We had weeks. But the trail was visible if you knew where to look: every paid ad they ran landed on a URL with UTM parameters attached. Campaign names. Ad group structures. Keyword tiers — all out in the open.
So we did the unglamorous work. SpyFu, landing page URL inspection, and a lot of spreadsheet work. Names like Search_UK_T1_V3_Converting and Search_USA_T1_V3_Converting told us which keywords they'd graded as Tier 1 — the ones they'd spent years to validate. We got that intelligence in weeks.
Not rocket science. A creative way of approaching a GTM challenge, paired with daily, consistent account optimisation. We went head-to-head on the keywords that actually mattered while their agencies ran on autopilot.
Winning the category gave us the runway to build the layer underneath.A click-to-call ad. Capgemini on the line. The whole team watching.
It came through one of our earliest tests of Google's click-to-call ads. A Capgemini inbound call, off an "Employee Engagement" ad, picked up by the AE in the office with the whole team watching. When he hung up, we all celebrated.
That call was the pivotal moment in Peakon's up-market GTM journey: the first jump out of a founder-led growth motion, and proof that paid could pull enterprise pipeline, not just SMB signups.
Clay didn't exist yet, so we wired it by hand.
The unlock wasn't the trial signup; it was the anonymous pricing page visitor. The highest-intent person on the entire site, and on every site in the category, invisible. So we deanonymized them. Clearbit Reveal turned an IP into a company in under two seconds; size, industry, and location attached before the visitor's tab even settled.
From there, size-based routing took over: low-touch for SMB, round-robin SDR for mid-market, named AE for enterprise. Automated SDR outreach, years before automated SDR outreach was a category.
Dynamic personalisation: SDR/AE names and visitors' search terms injected into email subjects and body. Salesforce sync: owner changes, activity intelligence, bounce tracking, all automated.
Clay didn't exist yet. So we brought in marketers who could code, and wired the system by hand.Test. Prove. Scale. Repeat.
Paid social was the second channel we cracked after Search: dozens of audience tests until Meta clicked, then Capterra, then conferences. Each one got the same treatment: test, prove, scale.
Paid social alone pulled 406 leads and hundreds of thousands into pipeline. No channel was sacred. Every channel had to earn its line item.
From PPC test to growth team.
Peakon was a Danish company. We built the expansion blueprints out of London: UK first, then DACH, then the US. Data-driven PR. International rollouts. RevOps. Landing pages. Automations. We ended up embedded in the growth team, part of the leadership through the hypergrowth years.
Media spend scaled from £5K to £40K/month, not because the budget grew, but because the numbers justified every step.
The numbers held up.
Every step justified by the next. The hockey stick that never flattened. The system that kept compounding long after we left.
“The best in the business: the mastermind supporting our amazing growth.”
Not a vendor. A system.
This wasn't campaign management. It was revenue infrastructure, and it kept compounding long after we left. The in-house team didn't inherit a dependency.
Competitor intelligence
Mapped from public landing page URLs and keyword tier naming conventions. Years of validation, extracted in weeks.
Visitor identification
Clearbit Reveal: IP-to-company in seconds. Every anonymous trial enriched before the SDR even saw the lead.
Size-based routing
Marketo → Clearbit → Salesforce, automated by company size. Three cohorts. Three motions. Zero manual triage.
Personalised outbound
Dynamic SDR/AE names and visitor search terms injected at send time. Personalisation as a runtime variable, not a quarterly project.
Channel playbook
Search · Meta · Capterra · conferences. Each cracked the same way: test, prove, scale. Each one earned the next.
Expansion blueprints
UK, DACH and the US, productised out of London for a Danish-origin company. Localised paid, content, and routing.
Attribution
Ad spend → pipeline → revenue. Every step traceable. Every euro justified its successor.
Handover
Tech stack advisory, SEO strategy, hiring support. We helped build the in-house team and handed over the system that ran underneath them.
A room in London. £5K/month.
Built for the next $700M.
Bring us the brief that nobody else has cracked. We work with senior operators who need pipeline that holds up under scale, not theatre.