Adrian Alfieri is the 🏷️#founder and CEO of 📝Verbatim, a case-study agency serving venture-backed B2B SaaS companies including Granola, Profound, Slack, Perplexity, and Unify. After three years in early-stage venture capital, he left investing to work directly with founders, contracting with friends running YC-backed companies. Each kept returning to him for the same work — producing social-proof content and distributing it to drive 📝pipeline. Recognizing that no one owned case studies as a category despite founders ranking them among their highest-ROI content, he launched Verbatim over four years ago. He holds a B.A. in Social Innovation from Brown University and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design.
At Verbatim, Adrian treats case studies as one of the few content assets that work across the entire business — quotes, metrics, and stories that sales reuse on calls, marketing repurposes across landing pages and paid campaigns, and champions share internally. He argues the motion requires consistency over sprints: a steady drip of at least one case study a month signals customers continuously hitting value, while stale pages make buyers nervous. When interviewing customers, he prioritizes the live daily user and "twists the knife" on their pre-product pain to surface unfiltered, metric-rich before-and-after stories. A single strong case study with Unify yielded over a dozen unique LinkedIn posts across eighteen months. Beyond Verbatim, he has been an active angel investor and scout across dozens of startups.
I had Adrian on the show to break down his social-proof engine — the part that stuck with me was how he twists the knife in customer interviews to get the before-and-after stark enough that a buyer can feel it.