CONVERGENCE
Real growth strategy from a startup CMO: The frameworks, interviews, & honest insights that 100k+ founders and operators actually use. The weekly newsletter by Lillian Pierson that cuts through the noise and gets straight to what works.
The AI GTM strategy gap most B2B founders haven't seen yet
Reader, a founder sent me his cold outreach numbers last month with a note that said "Finally making progress." His reply rate was 1.2%. He had spent three months building the infrastructure. The sequences were running. The enrichment pipeline was connected. The system looked right. The problem was not the system. The problem was what the system was built to do. Most AI GTM systems are built to produce more output. More emails, more posts, more touchpoints. And in a market where B2B tech...
Your CAC isn't a budget problem (2026 benchmarks inside)
I was scrolling LinkedIn last week when something stopped me cold. Not a single post. The scrolling itself. Post after post of polished, AI-assisted content about data strategy, digital transformation, and growth frameworks. All saying something. None saying anything distinct. I read the first sentences of six posts in a row and couldn't have told you who wrote them. And then it clicked - this is a huge reason why CAC is climbing. Customer acquisition costs in B2B tech have jumped 40-60%...
How Marcos Rivera built a 25-person pricing firm on word of mouth
Get this, Reader... 6 months before Marcos Rivera left Vista Equity Partners, he started sending messages to people he used to work with. Not pitches. Not teasers about his upcoming practice. Just, "hey, what's going on? Changed jobs? How are things?" The thing is, cold network outreach asks people to do you a favor before you've re-established any relationship capital. It works occasionally, but it feels bad to everyone involved. Marcos inverted the dynamic entirely. He spent that pre-launch...
The AI readiness gap your ERP vendor isn't talking about
Reader, The other day Andy Park told me about a friend who runs a mid-market manufacturing company. The guy has Epicor running from a server closet at his plant. Products ship on time. His team knows the system. Everything works. Then the vendor starts pushing him to migrate to the cloud version. Three times his current annual spend. No direct migration path. A full reimplementation. His question is completely reasonable: Why would I spend half a million dollars and risk my entire operation...
Your pricing model is your org chart
Hi Reader, Fact is, most founders optimize the wrong variable when they're trying to scale. They focus on shipping faster, hiring more engineers, closing more deals. But the pattern I see in fast exits? It's not about velocity. It's about pricing structure + hiring discipline. I've helped consultancies go from zero to $750K enterprise contracts in 4 months. The companies that scale fastest don't charge by the hour. They charge by the outcome. Case in point: Algoage (built and sold in under 2...
Old colleagues closed more deals than 1000 OSS members" (B2B reality)
You're building in public, Reader Your GitHub stars are climbing. Contributors are active. The community Slack has real conversations happening daily. So you assume this will convert into customers. It doesn't. Mrinal Wadhwa built Ockam with hundreds of contributors and customers like AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake. Then in 2024, he pivoted to build Autonomy, a platform for long-horizon AI agents. I wanted to understand what he learned about the gap between community building and customer...
New course: Automate 10hrs/week with Custom GPTs (no code)
Hi Reader, Every technical founder on the face of the planet knows about ChatGPT. They've tried it. They probably even use it daily. But when I ask "What have you automated with it?" The answer is usually: "Uh... some drafts?" Here's the pattern I see after training 2M+ people: The gap isn't knowledge. It's knowing which tasks are worth automating, and how to build something reliable without becoming a prompt engineer. That's why I built Automating Your Work with Custom GPTs (No Code...
AI is killing the hourly-billing revenue model (here's the fix)
Reader, When Gwen Griggs finished law school, she was ready to solve problems. She knew how to think critically and get to answers fast. Then her law firm gave her the real goal: 2,200 billable hours per year. "The skills that I had learned to solve problems quickly weren't the same skills that made you successful in a law firm," she told me. She wasn't describing a personal failure. She was describing a structural problem baked into the business model itself. The firm wanted maximum hours....
When your customers keep asking for the wrong product
She was 3 years into building a language learning platform, Reader 3 long years... Customers kept asking for document translation. Daphne Tay kept saying no. After all, she'd already spent 3 years researching domain-specific vocabulary. Legal terminology in French. Financial jargon in Mandarin. Compliance language across a dozen European dialects. Thousands of hours building databases of technical terms that didn't exist in standard translation tools. Then customers started asking for...
Your GTM infrastructure is leaking leads (here's how to fix it)
I watched a validation project burn ~$40K in two months because of broken web and form infrastructure (this happens to 7-figure companies) Get this, Reader - I opened Teams to find the message every fractional CMO dreads: “The sign-ups aren’t showing up in the product.” We were two months into active PMF validation. Landing page built. Ads running. Traffic coming in. Retention rates looked good, but conversions were far too low. The problem? Website architecture was leaking conversion events...
Real growth strategy from a startup CMO: The frameworks, interviews, & honest insights that 100k+ founders and operators actually use. The weekly newsletter by Lillian Pierson that cuts through the noise and gets straight to what works.