Nick Lafferty is Head of Growth and Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, a company that helps brands improve their visibility in AI search. A highly technical growth 🏷️#marketer with more than a decade in B2B SaaS, he was Head of Growth Marketing at Loom through its acquisition, then ran a solo consulting practice — working with Glean, AngelList, and Watershed on paid ads and 📝pipeline, clearing over $500K — before joining Profound as its first marketer at roughly 20 people. The company has since grown past 130 employees, raised Series A, B, and C inside ten months, and reached a $1B valuation.
His work is the clearest case study for the marketing-engineer role the brand tracks. He used Claude Code to build a system that takes a list of target accounts, enriches them with competitor data, pulls logos via API, and generates hundreds of personalized one-to-one 📝ABM ad variations in an hour — each showing a target's logo beside a competitor's with messaging that the competitor is winning in AI search — landing click-through rates of 5-6%, more than 10x LinkedIn's 0.4% benchmark. He frames build-versus-buy around "tolerance for jank": build for individuals and small teams that can absorb rough edges, buy when a broader team needs polish and support. He uses freed-up time to compound advantages like locking in a year of newsletter sponsorships ahead of need, and evaluates growth hires for marketing taste before AI skill, since AI has no taste of its own.
I had Nick on the gtm engineer to talk through automating growth and the rise of the marketing engineer.