
Co-founder @upsidegtm , co-founder @branchmetrics | investor @xfactor, Female Founder Retreat organizer, reader of lots of fantasy and sci-fi.
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2008
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My whole CMO career I felt marketing was shortchanged when it came to attribution and now I finally have the data to prove it 😆 🙃
My findings:
- On every model, enhancing the data gave marketing more credit. Last touch went from 15% to 25%. First touch from 38% to 45%. Linear multi-touch from 20% to 37%.
- CRM/marketing automation touchpoint only see 51% of what creates a deal. The other 49% lives in unstructured data
- Brand and advocacy start 28% of deals. The opportunity source field credits them with 5.6%.
- Unresponded cold outbound one-way emails fill 45% of logged touches but earn 3.7% of the credit.
- AEs only add 2.7 people to buying group, the real group is 7.9
The whole report: upside.tech/research/the-unt…
Everyone is talking about connecting your CRM systems to Claude and asking questions - but the biggest blocker I hear (this was a big topic at Drew Neisser CMO Huddles last week)- GTM data is NOT ready for AI.
I ran an analysis comparing @UpsideGTM healed data agains what's in the CRM and on buying groups alone the results are telling:
- Only 1 in 3 people of the buying group on won deals are added on opportunity
- 21% don't even exist in the CRM
Without healing your data, asking AI for insights just can't fully be trusted.
At a CMO huddle chatting about @HubSpot renaming Inbound to Unbound. What does that means for Dreamforce? 😂
Ever wondered how many people on a deal don't get added to Salesforce contact roles?
Turns out: A LOT!
100% - I added that because I think better data helps us understand what's working. The "credit" in my report is meant to help teams know where to invest, not to power goaling and incentive plans.
Replying to @mada299
My favorite line: use attribution as a diagnostic, not to set goals. The moment a number becomes a target, people start optimizing the number and that's when people start pointing fingers too !
Mada Seghete retweeted
Replying to @mada299
My favorite line: use attribution as a diagnostic, not to set goals. The moment a number becomes a target, people start optimizing the number and that's when people start pointing fingers too !
Mada Seghete retweeted
How To Gather Real AI Prompts
* There is much focus on how to optimize brands for particular prompts in AI. However, most people guess what prompts they should optimize for. This can call the entire strategy into question.
* Outside of Similarweb, in our opinion, there are no reliable data sources that show users' real prompts. Existing tools are guessing based on dubious underlying data.
* We propose a way to gather real user prompts in AI at scale for free.
* Guide: graphite.io/five-percent/res…
How Did You Hear About Us?
* Attribution in AI is also hard. One solution is to ask users to self-report the channel primarily responsible for their conversion. This is often done by asking “How Did You Hear About Us?”
* Self-reporting can also be extended to gather more information, namely, real user prompts.
What Prompt Did You Use?
We built a new conversion funnel at Graphite that asks the following questions.
1. How Did You Hear About Us? (channel)
2. What LLM Did You Use (product)
3. What prompt did you enter (prompt)
This now tells you not only whether a user entered via AI, but also which LLM they used and the prompt they entered.
Results
* We now see 30 % of inbound leads come from AI. 52% came from ChatGPT and 40% from Claude.
* We receive 10x more referral traffic from ChatGPT than Claude, while the % of leads that self-report Claude is almost as high as ChatGPT. This suggests conversions via Claude are particularly underreported using last-touch, far more than ChatGPT.
* AI leads tend to be less qualified than other channels like referrals.
* Only 21% of leads that self-report as coming from AI appear as referral traffic from AI. The rest came from search (49%) and direct (30%).
Me watching Avni and Alma fight over the @ExaAILabs goat:
“Ladies, let’s not fight over our customers! 🐐😅”
Mada Seghete retweeted
The difference between vibe coding and a software factory boils down to two things:
- automation (work keeps going without a human pressing go)
- really, really good scaled risk management (security risks, behavior defect risks, availability risks)
Mada Seghete retweeted
“Do you think that getting married young has made you less ambitious?”
Welcome to the first episode of SOTA Wives with Sarah Chieng (Head of DevX at Cerebras, @MilksandMatcha) x Vivian Midha Shen (General Partner at Y Combinator, @vivianmshen).
In episode 1: finding your person before getting rich, turning down startup funding to finish MIT, what a YC partner sees in founders, and how a birthday post became “psychological violence.”
4:08 Finding your husband before the exit
8:48 Did we marry away our ambition?
18:04 The internet called Sarah's birthday “psychological violence”
20:47 Does your YC partner secretly think you’re doomed?
23:47 Building a startup with your ex-boyfriend
28:54 SF cat parties
WTF is a SOTA Wife?
SOTA Wives is a podcast exploring the unfiltered side of Silicon Valley.
We built it as an antidote to the performative polish of tech Twitter.
Brought to you by @MilksandMatcha x @vivianmshen.
Episode 1 goes live on Monday, 12th October at 9 AM PT on everywhere you get your podcasts 💙
Replying to @BrandSanderson
@BrandSanderson finally wrote a murder mystery 🤣 Just finished Fires of December and might be my favorite book by him yet. Seriously recommend. a.co/d/06L36EvC
OMG. @alexdbauer told me I could get Claude, Cursor and Codex to talk to each other, and my mind is blown. 🤯 I’m working on a research paper on attribution, and it feels like I have three employees 🤣 The 🤯 part is the back-and-forth without a lot of involvement from me, after the initial few prompts..
🧑🔬 The data scientist: Fable in @cursor_ai aggregates and anonymizes data from multiple datasets.
🔎 The analyst: @claudeai analyzes the data and asks for new cuts when it needs to dig deeper.
🎨 The marketer/reviewer: @OpenAI Astra in Codex reviews the work, makes it more accessible to marketers, creates images and gives Claude feedback.
Mada Seghete retweeted
surround me w/ plants & I will never leave the room.
this is Dan Ahmadi of @upside & he shares what it takes for an AI investment to become more than just an expensive experiment (it’s cool)
There is so much research on psychadelics = ego death.
I think what @pmarca is saying is only true is the founder's drive comes from ego and a deep need to prove yourself. I know plenty of people who become better founders because of it - but only if their drive is not rooted in ego.
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) on founders taking psychedelics:
“I was describing this phenomenon we see in Silicon Valley where these guys get under pressure and they feel anxious and somebody tells them about psychedelics.
They try it and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And they kind of come out much more at peace, but then they also tend to like quit their companies and they move to Indonesia and become a surf instructor.
They just peace out. They're just done.
There's been a whole bunch of examples of this and I was complaining to @hubermanlab about this and in true Huberman kind of wise Yoda style, he's like, "Well, you know, how do you know they're not happier? Maybe that was the positive outcome. Maybe the thing that was driving them to be a great entrepreneur was a fundamental level of insecurity. They had this kind of unsatisfied, neurotic impulse, and now, they're just satisfied.”
And I'm like, "Yeah, but their company, it's failing."
Model and harness are merging for me in my workflows.
I only use Astra with Codex, Opus with Claude, etc. I can't imagine myself trying a new harness just because it thinks it understands my workflows better.
Clay just shipped what might be the best version anyone will ever build of the 2025 definition of 'Cursor for GTM'.
This category still won't survive, even for Clay.
What they launched today at Sculpt: an agent harness, a Knowledge Hub for context, and a pitch to work with Clay "the way software engineers work with coding agents." It's exactly what they had to build, and they're probably the only company with any hope of pulling it off.
That background wailing is fifty other 'Cursor for GTM' startups turning back into pumpkins 🎃
But GTM engineers already have coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. Clay knows it (Workflows also runs from "the coding agent of your choice via CLI"). The labs won't cede a layer this valuable, and they get to train the horse in harness because they own both.
Clay's own learning example suggests an ICP change after a campaign 'books six meetings.' That's not an eval. Meetings aren't revenue, and the truth behind deals is buried in a stack built for the age of humans.
You can't solve 'what worked' at the orchestration layer.
Bought a house in SF during Covid. I think I now have some insight into how @Emilybllunt feels after marrying @johnkrasinski in his college days 🤣























