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My Seattle Tech Week talk is almost full
The registration just opened. 159 people have registered, and there are only 41 slots left. Then it goes to the waitlist, and you may or may not get in. So if you’re in the PNW for Seattle Tech Week, be sure to register now.
July 28, 2026: Seattle Tech Week
From Zero to $1M+ in ARR: How to Market Your AI or SaaS Startup
1700 Westlake Ave N, Suite 200, Thinkspace Seattle, Washington
Starts at 5:30 PM
A follow-up to my hit Tech Week talk from last year, this is for AI and SaaS founders who want to learn how to build a repeatable growth engine.
SF Bay Area events in 2026
September 10, 2026: At Snowflake HQ in Silicon Valley
Vibe Your SaaS Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer
135 Constitution Drive, Menlo Park, California
Starts at 5:30 PM
Founders pitch your startups to our panel of experts, plus networking with founders, venture capitalists, and startup leaders from across the SF Bay Area.
November 19, 2026: At Atlassian HQ in San Francisco
Vibe Your SaaS Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer
Starts at 5:30 PM
Founders pitch your startups to our panel of experts, plus networking with founders, venture capitalists, and startup leaders from across the SF Bay Area.
Whiteswan Security: Identity-First Infrastructure Security
Founder & CEO: Vinay Mamidi
Location: San Jose, California, USA
Stage: Pre-See
Website: Whiteswansecurity.com
Social: LinkedIn
💥 The Big Idea:
Whiteswan is rethinking infrastructure security around identity. Instead of relying on network perimeters, VPNs, and standing privileges, it assumes that identities are the new attack surface.
🧠 How It Works
The system grants users and machines only the access they need, when they need it, while continuously validating identity risk. The goal is to eliminate standing privileges and reduce attackers' opportunities to move laterally.
🔥 Why We Like It
As organizations adopt more cloud services, AI systems, contractors, and machine identities, controlling who (or what) has access becomes increasingly important. Whiteswan is building for that future.
The AI conversation has shifted from “Can the model do it?” to “Does it have judgment?” Founders are talking about craft. VCs are talking about taste. Product teams are trying to make generated output feel less like generated output. This is the soundtrack for founders who know that “technically correct” is often the least interesting answer.
OpenAI Spends 47% of Revenue on GTM and You Should Too
We know from leaked OpenAI financials that they spend 47% of revenue on sales and marketing. That’s $6 billion in 2025.
Now think about it for a minute.
ChatGPT is the fastest-growing product in technology history. The company has one of the strongest brands on earth, runs Super Bowl ads, and receives an enormous amount of free publicity every single day. There is a market pull for this product as we’ve never seen before, and they are still spending nearly half of their revenue on GTM.
Premier SaaS companies like Salesforce, Snowflake, and Datadog also spend 30% to 50% of revenue on sales and marketing.
Even SpaceX, which relies primarily on earned media, spends roughly 14% of its revenue on what it calls Selling, General & Administrative (SG&A). And they own the X platform… so if you can buy a major media property and roll the costs into a different bucket on your balance sheet, that’s always an option.
These numbers show that low-cost product-led growth is mostly a myth. The idea that some clever implementation of AI will dramatically lower a company's cost of sales in a high-growth, competitive area is just not true, or at the very least, there is no data to back it up. (Or we don’t have it yet, but I am not holding my breath.)
It also means that you are not spending enough. So the obvious question every founder has now is: “Well, how much should you spend?”
A guide to marketing budgets
There are four fundamental budget areas required to build a predictable, scalable marketing engine. While the exact percentage you allocate to each bucket will shift as your company grows, your marketing spending should fall into one of these four categories.
1. Content Marketing
The creation of valuable text, audio, and visual assets to build trust and solve audience problems. Includes: Human copywriting, AI content automation tools, video/audio production, and graphic design.
2. Marketing Tools
The core infrastructure required to establish your online presence and capture incoming interest. Includes: Website development, web hosting, email distribution software, and conversion tracking or measurement.
3. Growth Marketing
The active, data-driven engine focused on immediate user acquisition and revenue scaling. Includes: Google Search Ads, paid social media, newsletter sponsorships, event booths, and conversion experiments.
4. Brand Development
The long-term positioning and public reputation strategy that builds credibility and authority. Includes: Public Relations (PR) retainers, brand identity design, and executive thought leadership.
How much to spend (by stage)
A percentage of revenue is my preferred approach.
If you are making under $1 million in sales, percentage-of-revenue math is completely useless. When you are under $1M, you do not budget based on your revenue. You budget based on where you are going, funded directly out of your runway.
Instead of getting bogged down in complex calculations, follow this simplified, stage-by-stage framework I built.
Pre-Seed (Under $1M Sales): Finding PMF
Forget percentages. You need a flat floor of at least $10K a month to effectively run GTM science experiments. Your goal here is not "brand building"—it is figuring out if anyone actually wants what you are building before the cash runs out.
Content Marketing: 40% ($4,000)
Core Marketing Tools: 25% ($2,500)
Growth Marketing & Brand: 35% ($3,500)
Seed Stage ($1M - $5M ARR): Acceleration
Once you cross that million-dollar mark, the math changes. Now you have early traction, and it is time to amplify it. You shift to investing a minimum of 15% to 25% of your revenue to build an active acquisition engine. Let's look at a typical $35,000/month allocation:
Growth Marketing: 45% ($15,750) straight into paid acquisition, newsletter sponsorships, and trade shows.
Content Marketing: 22% ($7,700) focused on scaling up high-converting copy, reports, and visual assets.
Core Marketing Tools: 13% ($4,550) dedicated to formalizing your marketing technology stack.
Brand Development: 20% ($7,000) to expand market presence and earned media coverage.
Series A ($5M+ ARR): Scaling the machine
You have raised a real round. Now you operationalize go-to-market. Like OpenAI and the enterprise giants, you should spend up to 30% or more of revenue to build an unyielding, predictable, and repeatable pipeline machine. On an aggressive $250,000/month scaling budget:
Growth Marketing: 45% ($112,500) to scale multiple demand-gen and outbound channels, and sponsorship at major industry trade shows.
Brand Development: 20% ($50,000) dedicated to PR retainers, corporate brand campaigns, and high-profile sponsorships.
Content Marketing: 20% ($50,000) to build your internal content production houses and specialized video/audio assets.
Core Marketing Tools: 15% ($37,500) to dedicated marketing operations, advanced measurement, and enterprise CRMs for pipeline visibility.
If OpenAI needs to drop $6 billion a year on market penetration while holding the keys to the cultural zeitgeist, you cannot afford to starve your own go-to-market engine. The takeaway is clear. Stop waiting for product-led growth to magically build a multi-million dollar business for you on a shoestring budget.
Whether you are survival-testing your message at $10,000 a month or scaling an aggressive $250,000 monthly machine, success comes down to allocation and clarity. Define your stage, fund your four buckets properly, and execute ruthlessly.
Building a legendary product is only half the battle. If you want to scale, you have to build the machine that sells it.
🎙️ 052 Gregory and Paul Show -The 2025 Best Of G&PS
We're on vacation this week. Enjoy the very best of the Gregory & Paul Show in 2025. This best-of-2025 episode pulls together five standout conversations from Gregory and Paul: 1) the rise of “Retard Maxxing,” 2) AI data centers in space, 3) Dave Ramsey memes, 4) the junior job crisis, and 5) what the internet era can teach us about AI disruption.
I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After two decades in Silicon Valley, convincing people to click on things, I went rogue and created Vibe Your SaaS.
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