Growth Unhinged

Shows the actual arithmetic of list building, cutting 66,000 companies down to 5,700 real targets, then tiering them by how much human effort each deserves. Also honest that signal-based plays alone are not enough, since most of your market shows no signal at any given moment.

An outbound playbook for 2025

From Growth Unhinged by Fivos Aresti long read

• Filtered 66,000 companies down to 5,700 accounts by applying ICP criteria (VC-funded HubSpot users).
• Tiers the outreach: a Dream 150 gets manual prospecting, Tier 1 adds cold calls, Tier 3 gets email only.
• Four pillars: cold calling, automated email, LinkedIn signal plays, manual prospecting for top accounts.
• Signals alone are not enough, only a fraction of the target market shows one at any given time.

Shows how average contract value really grows as a company scales from seed to IPO, and makes the case that most of the gain comes from usage and packaging rather than straight price rises. Changes what you go and fix first.

How to have 'the talk' with your customers

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar short read

Answers the two packaging questions that actually come up: when to bundle a new feature into a tier and when to sell it as an add-on, and how to give each tier a job. Short, and every principle is testable against your own pricing page.

Your guide to SaaS packaging 201

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 6 min read

• Two-thirds of SaaS companies land on a Good, Better, Best line-up, so treat it as the default starting point.
• A buyer should not need more than one or two add-ons in the first transaction.
• If a feature only gets adopted 6 to 12 months after purchase, price it as an add-on rather than bundling it.
• Make something an add-on only if it is polarizing, hits a different budget, or carries real variable cost.

Takes the three models most companies use (flat fee, feature tiers, per seat), names how each one fails, and gives specific repairs like price escalators, fair use policies and lite user seats. Diagnostic rather than inspirational.

Your pricing is (probably) broken: Here's how to fix it

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar short read

• A premium tier priced 50 to 100 percent higher typically gets 15 to 25 percent uptake, worth roughly 15 percent more revenue.
• One in three B2B contracts carries an automatic price escalator, usually 5 to 8 percent a year.
• Ship 1 or 2 new features a year as standalone add-ons, then bundle them into packages about every 18 months.
• A lite seat usually prices at 10 to 40 percent of a power user seat.
• Good, Better, Best leaks revenue because almost everyone defaults to the middle tier.

Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches benchmark ranges to each. It is how you find out which stage is actually broken.

Your guide to PLG benchmarks

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 10 min read

• Gartner data cited: only 5 to 6 percent of buying activity is spent meeting a vendor's reps.
• Product-led companies were 55 percent of respondents, up from 48 percent in 2020.
• Benchmarks drawn from 450+ software companies, from under $1M to $100M+ ARR.

A free, topic sorted index into two hundred plus issues of original GTM benchmark research. The metrics and benchmarks section is the fastest way to find out what good looks like this year rather than in 2019.

Best of Growth Unhinged

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar index of 200+ issues

Survey data from over eight hundred private companies, with an efficient growth matrix that plots CAC payback against NRR so you can locate yourself rather than just read averages.

What's Really Going on in Software: The 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 20 min read

• Across 800 plus participants, AI-native companies grew 110 percent at 1 to 5M ARR against 40 percent for other B2B SaaS.
• At 5 to 20M ARR the gap is 90 percent median growth for AI-native against 30 percent.
• ARR per FTE jumped 42 percent for 20 to 50M companies and 50 percent above 50M.
• Early-stage gross margin compressed nearly 10 points year on year.
• 70 percent of companies have shipped AI features, and 36 percent say AI is core to the product.

Gives you the four-part structure for positioning against an alternative (what they use now, what is wrong with it, your different approach, why that is better) and the rule to pick an enemy your buyer already resents.

How to differentiate your product

From Growth Unhinged by Anthony Pierri 12 min read

• Positioning is two choices: who is the target segment, and what is the differentiation.
• Differentiation has four parts: the competitive alternative, its problem, how you do it differently, and why that is better.
• In an immature segment your real competitor is a process or an ill-equipped tool, not another vendor.
• Slack positioned against email, not GChat; picking GChat would have made the addressable market far smaller.

Shows the specific places AI earns its keep in outbound (closed-lost re-engagement, champion job-change tracking, micro-campaigns off a signal cluster) rather than arguing about whether AI is good. The distinction between deterministic and agentic steps is the useful bit.

The best AI-native GTM plays you're not running

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar and Brendan Short 15 min read

• Closed-lost re-engagement: an agent watches for signal clusters, pulls the last call transcript, finds the objection that killed the deal, then drafts the reopen.
• Micro-campaigns: when signals stack on one account, build a 50 to 100 contact list with campaign-specific copy (example: 13 companies hiring Data Engineers who named a competitor).
• Warm-path ranking: a relationship graph scores every possible intro into a target account by likelihood of success.
• Tier 1 accounts route to a human for review; lower tiers send automatically.

Twenty five tactics from someone who did it over five years and shows his own numbers, including the deflating and useful finding that viral posts drove 14 percent of his growth while ordinary good posts drove 55 percent.

How to grow your B2B newsletter

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 18 min read

• Growth was slow and compounding: 1,000 subscribers in 2021, 4,000 after a year, 20,000 by Feb 2023, now over 80,000.
• The five most viral posts drove only 14 percent of subscribers; posts adding 50 to 150 each drove 55 percent.
• Test a topic as a LinkedIn post first, then expand what lands into the full newsletter.
• Calls a custom domain the single highest-ROI decision, and sending from a person beats sending from a publication name.

The implementation half. Poyar's framing that moving from subscriptions to usage is as big a shift as moving from on-prem to SaaS is the warning to take seriously before you tell your board you are switching next quarter.

Usage-based pricing 2.0

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 15 min read

The margin defence most companies are actually reaching for. Poyar's number is the one to remember: roughly 70 to 80 percent of token consumption comes from about 10 percent of users, which is why a flat seat price on an AI product bleeds quietly.

Why everyone's switching to AI credits

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 14 min read

• 70 to 80 percent of token consumption comes from about 10 percent of users, which is what breaks flat pricing.
• Microsoft, Salesforce, Cursor and OpenAI all moved to credit based models within months of each other.
• Model costs are not falling as promised: GPT-5 output is around 10 dollars per million tokens, close to GPT-4o in early 2024.
• Credits exist as a guardrail because AI gross margins are already thin, not because customers asked for them.

Survey data from 230 B2B software and AI companies, so you can see what your peers are actually charging rather than what conference talks claim. Notable findings: hybrid pricing is now dominant and AI products carry thinner margins than classic SaaS.

The state of B2B monetization in 2026

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar long read

• 37 percent of B2B companies now run hybrid pricing, up from 25 percent a year earlier.
• The median target margin on AI features is about 50 percent, not the 70 to 80 percent of classic SaaS.
• 29 percent use AI credits today and another 33 percent plan to add them within 6 to 12 months.
• 70 percent say AI spend comes out of the customer's existing software budget, not new money.

Seven hybrid pricing patterns with named companies (GitHub, Shopify, Intercom, Zapier), plus Poyar's point that the enemy is not subscriptions, it is inflexible upfront commitments.

The state of usage-based pricing in SaaS

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 12 min read

• Usage-based pricing adoption slipped from 46 to 41 percent year on year, with 17 percent testing it.
• Most usage-based businesses run a hybrid, not pure pay-as-you-go.
• Intercom's Fin charges $0.99 per successful resolution, pricing on the outcome.
• The real problem is not usage versus subscription, it is inflexible upfront commitments.

Poyar counted the actual job postings rather than the LinkedIn noise, which is the most useful sanity check available on whether the GTM engineer role is real yet. The free preview alone is worth reading before you open a req.

Do you need a GTM engineer?

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 12 min read

• A GTM engineer finds friction across the buying journey and runs automated one-to-many experiments to remove it.
• Real demand is thinner than the buzz: 45 postings in a month, 128 in three months, up from under 10 a month in 2024.
• The ratios: one GTM engineer opening for every 5 RevTech roles, 14 RevOps roles, and 92 SDR roles.
• About 45 percent of people with the title are agencies or consultants, and Clay alone lists 120 plus partner agencies.

Names precisely which classic metrics stop working when revenue is consumption based and inference costs eat gross margin, then proposes replacements. The free preview alone reframes the problem.

Rethinking SaaS metrics for AI

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 14 min read

• Poyar's argument: ARR is becoming untrustworthy for AI-native companies, and DAU/MAU break when the product runs as digital labour or inside another product via MCP.
• He does not trust LTV for any AI product right now, given experimentation budgets and the shipping pace of Anthropic and OpenAI.
• Mixed monetisation splits revenue into high-margin platform and low-margin tokens, so a single gross margin line hides the business.

Actual job posting data instead of opinion: GTM posts down 15 percent, SDR posts down 21 percent, support down 37 percent, while GTM engineering headcount doubled and AI native companies more than doubled their SDR teams. It is the antidote to both the everything is automated and nothing has changed camps.

Who's actually hiring in GTM right now? AI companies are doubling SDR hiring

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 10 min read

• Overall GTM job posts fell 15 percent in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, across 22,988 postings.
• SDR posts are down 21 percent overall, yet AI-native companies more than doubled SDR hiring.
• At AI-native companies support is 2.2 percent of GTM headcount, 67 percent smaller than peers.
• 3 in 5 open GTM roles are account executives or solutions engineers.

The build order, stage by stage: TAM and stakeholder mapping, account research, CRM cleanup and enrichment, then signal tracking. Note that the unglamorous data hygiene comes before any clever play, which is exactly where most teams skip ahead.

How to build a modern ABM engine

From Growth Unhinged by Dan Rosenthal 20 min read

• ABM is worth it at roughly $50k-plus ACV with an addressable market under 20,000 qualified companies.
• Your target account list should capture 90 percent or more of TAM to work properly.
• A full TAM map with account research easily costs $2,000-plus across data providers, Clay and AI credits.
• Order your AI qualification prompt exclusions first, then qualifying evidence, and expect 30-plus custom data points as CRM properties.

Worked examples rather than theory, across hundreds of tracked price changes: who repackaged well (Ahrefs, Loom, Pipedrive), who took the backlash (Docker at 67 to 80 percent), and what separated them. Read it to calibrate how big a move you can make.

The good, bad and ugly of SaaS pricing changes

From Growth Unhinged by Rob Litterst and John Kotowski 12 min read

• PricingSaaS tracked 339 changes across the top SaaS companies in one year: 126 pricing updates and 213 packaging updates.
• Pipedrive added an Enterprise plan to anchor high, making the Professional tier look like the sensible buy.
• Docker raised Pro 80 percent and Team 67 percent but left Business flat, missing its least price sensitive segment.
• Zapier's new Professional plan shipped the same functionality at a 61 percent discount, roughly 30 dollars of price left behind.

The case for the cadence itself. Poyar's point that pricing can now be stale within six months, and his recommendation to run win/loss at least quarterly, is what turns pricing from an annual argument into a standing function.

Pricing used to last 18 months. Now it's down to 6.

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 12 min read

• Pricing that used to hold for 18 months now holds for about 6.
• Salesforce shipped its fifth AI pricing model in under two years.
• Run win loss pricing analysis at least quarterly, monthly in competitive categories.
• Review a pricing change after about 1.5 to 2 turns of your median sales cycle, so 60 to 90 days if your cycle is 45 days.

The market you are pricing into, in numbers from 240 companies, so your pricing debate stops being two people's opinions about what feels right.

The state of B2B monetization in 2025

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar About 12 min read

• Across 240-plus software and AI companies, hybrid pricing jumped from 27 to 41 percent in twelve months.
• Flat-fee subscriptions fell from 29 to 22 percent and seat-based from 21 to 15 percent.
• Three in four software companies changed their pricing in the past year.
• Outcome-based pricing is only 5 percent of primary models today, but 25 percent expect it by 2028.

The 8 percent median and the full distribution across 200 B2B products, which tells you fast whether your filter is too loose or you have a different problem entirely.

A new look at free-to-paid conversion

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar About 10 min read

• Across 200 B2B products, the median free-to-paid conversion over six months is 8 percent.
• There is a 10x gap between the top 20 percent of products and the bottom 20 percent.
• Products requiring an upfront credit card convert at about 30 percent, roughly 5x those that do not.
• Free trial is the primary entry point for 57 percent of products, and 62 percent of trials run 14 days.