Nick Lafferty is the Head of Growth and Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, a company that helps brands improve their visibility in AI search. He has spent the last 12 years working as a highly technical growth marketer for B2B SaaS companies. In 2021, he joined Loom and spent nearly two years there as Head of Growth before their acquisition. After feeling burnt out at Loom, Nick went into consulting, running a solo growth marketing agency where he worked with companies like Glean, AngelList, and Watershed on paid ads and pipeline generation, taking home over $500K. After being introduced to the CEO of Profound in March of 2025, Nick joined as their first marketer when the company was around 20 people. Since then, Profound has grown to 130 employees, raised a Series A, B, and C within 10 months, and reached a $1B valuation.
In this podcast, we discuss:
How Nick used Claude Code to automate building personalized one-to-one ABM content, turning a process that used to take days into one that produces hundreds of ad variations in an hour (4-min video here)
How Nick uses the time freed up by automation to think through creative ways to build long-term advantages, like locking in a year of newsletter sponsorships in advance so they’re ready when he needs them
How Nick thinks about build versus buy decisions and what he calls tolerance for jank
How Profound uses its own product to generate content briefs, automate customer reporting slides, and layer in original research
Why the bar for growth hires keeps rising and how Nick now evaluates candidates for both technical skill and marketing taste
How Nick thinks about the importance of AI visibility and how Profound’s proprietary data that can help you determine AI search traffic
Episode highlights:
Nick used Claude Code to build a system that takes a list of target accounts, enriches them with competitor data, then pulls both target and competitor logos via an API. The system then generates hundreds of personalized ad variations in an hour that show the target company’s logo next to a competitor’s with messaging that the competitor is beating them in AI search. By running these hyper-personalized ads against target accounts, Nick is seeing click-through rates around 5-6% (>10x LinkedIn’s benchmark 0.4%).
Nick explains that deciding build versus buy comes down to who the work is servicing and tolerance for jank. Anything built internally will be rough around the edges, so if the tool is for an individual or a small team that can handle jank, building makes sense. But if it needs to support a broader team like customer success, buying often wins because of the polish, support, and someone to call when things break.
Nick walks through how Profound uses its own product to generate content briefs by analyzing which pages get cited most in AI search responses for a given topic, then mapping out what a competing piece of content needs to cover to rank. To take the briefs from good to great, Nick built a workflow in Profound’s agents tool that pulls original research from their internal white papers and inserts it directly into the brief, giving the resulting content unique data points that competitors can’t replicate (4 min walkthrough here).
Nick explains that Profound has and shares proprietary data that gives directional reads on AI search volume to help you prioritize which searches to try and rank for.
Vibe coding a basic version of a tool used to be an instant hire signal, but as AI tools have gotten more powerful and there are more examples to copy from online, that’s now not enough. Nick explains that in interviews, he digs into the decisions behind the build, asking candidates why they chose one approach over another and what they tried that didn’t work, since that’s what separates someone who can think critically from someone who just copied an idea they saw online. What’s more, he looks for candidates with strong marketing foundations before AI skills, since AI has no taste of its own, and you need to know what good marketing looks like before you can automate any of it.
Where to find Nick:
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro
(04:00) Profound’s Series C announcement
(04:40) Comparing Loom and Profound and how marketing teams have gotten leaner
(07:25) What Nick worked on at Loom
(09:30) How Nick got into consulting
(11:20) Running a solo growth agency and the economics of consulting
(13:48) How Nick ended up at Profound and what his role looks like
(19:00) Deep dive on the automated ABM ad creation workflow
(25:56) Why manual work is a death spell and what modern growth looks like
(29:01) How to evaluate whether candidates can think critically versus just copying ideas
(33:37) How Nick is thinking about what is newly possible in growth with AI
(31:43) Automating slide creation with Gamma and building a Swiss army knife of growth systems
(37:35) Planning distribution channels in advance and locking in newsletters and influencers
(39:14) How Nick thinks about build versus buy decisions
(42:04) Building a culture at Profound that celebrates shipping and agency
(43:25) How Profound uses Profound
(50:57) Whether to prioritize Google or LLM visibility depending on how AI-native your buyer is and what Profound’s proprietary data says
(59:05) The rise of the marketing engineer
(1:00:38) Favorite underrated tool and wrap up
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