Martin Gontovnikas, HyperGrowth | The Future of Marketing With Artificial Intelligence

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

Today we speak with Martin Gontovnikas, who started his career as a programmer and joined the Argentine unicorn Auth0 as the sixth employee. At Auth0, he came to lead the Growth team that took the company to more than 100 million dollars in annual sales, with an engineering and scientific approach to marketing.

Today Martin is cofounder and partner at HyperGrowth Partners, a firm specialized in B2B business growth that provides advice in exchange for equity, and that has worked with multi-million-dollar companies such as Ramp, Capchase, and Vercel.

Today we talk about how marketing to companies has evolved over the last 10 years, the advantages of doing marketing with an engineering approach, and Martin’s recipes for applying AI to his marketing strategies. We also talk about growth and his techniques for reviving the growth of your business.

I leave you with this master class on marketing and growth.

Youtube Timestamps*

[1:05] - Intro to Marketing and Growth

How did he get into the fascinating world of startups and, in particular, marketing, coming from a career as a software engineer?

He has spent around 10 years working on marketing and growth for companies, including large B2B startups such as Auth0, Atlassian, and Vercel.

These companies are good examples of the paradigm shift in how B2B is sold globally: from a sale aimed at buyers to a sale aimed at the end users of the products.

What have been the most important changes in how marketing to companies is done in recent years?

Something interesting is that on his website he defines himself as a Chief Technology Marketing Officer.

What is this term, and why does it represent a different approach from traditional marketing?

A good part of Auth0’s growth team was made up of engineers.

What challenges or advantages come with doing marketing with an engineering approach?

In general, most founders in Latin America are not technical.

What recommendations would he give them for bringing that engineering approach to marketing?
What are the things that do not require as much technical ability?

[13:01] - Growth Methodology

When Auth0’s sales started to slow down, they had to make drastic changes to the team structure and the strategy in order to reaccelerate their growth.

Today, Martin sees similar cases in the companies he works with at his firm, Hypergrowth.

What are the main reasons a business does not grow?
Martin told us the first thing he does to determine whether the problem is Product Market Fit or whether there are methodology challenges on the growth side.

Martin talks about multiple growth strategies: community, content marketing, Product Led Growth, and so on.

How does he evaluate which growth strategy works best depending on the situation?

Over the last 2 years, we have seen companies experiment with very large marketing budgets in a very ineffective way. Today, we are in a completely opposite context, where marketing budgets are squeezed.

How does he think about growth experimentation when the leadership team’s tolerance for risk is lower?
How does he think about the role of data versus intuition in experimentation?
How can intuition be developed?

[27:20] - AI and Marketing

Why does Martin not believe in marketing books or playbooks?
What are the use cases where Martin sees artificial intelligence applied to marketing generating the greatest impact?

For many people, AI still seems like a curious and brilliant trick, but not a crucial technology they should implement in their companies as quickly as possible.

What advantages will the companies that adopt these tools in their marketing have, versus those that do not, in the coming years?

Content marketing is the most obvious use case on social networks. We have all tried ChatGPT to write blog articles or social media posts.

What are the biggest challenges or problems when relying on AI for content creation?
How does he think about the future of SEO, and how will search engines such as Google, and the role of brands, change?
What general recommendations does he have for implementing AI in the tasks of a marketing team?
Which skills become more important than ever, and which ones less so? How should a professional who wants to get into marketing today prepare?

[41:38] - Rapid-Fire Questions

If he were to start a company again, what would be the main piece of advice he would give himself?
What is a piece of advice he would have given himself in his 20s?
What would he like to change about the startup world in Latin America?