About / Position paper 001

StackedGTM.AI

About.

StackedGTM is a research led growth firm. A publication, a services team, and the software built to run the work.

Discovery moved.

Buyers ask a model and act on the answer. Answer share is now the demand metric that sits upstream of pipeline, and almost nobody is running it well.

The org chart cracked.

Agents collapsed the distance between research, building and reporting. Work that took three teams now takes one operator who knows how to build.

Founded by Josh Grant, former VP Growth at Webflow, to work on exactly one problem: how companies win when the answer is the interface.

What the firm is, who runs it, and the full thesis with the receipts attached.

Josh Grant

The thesis

How I think about this

Proof

01 / Josh Grant

Who runs it

An operator who held the number, not a commentator.

Josh Grant

Founder, StackedGTM.AI

Webflow, VP of Growth

Affirm, VP of Growth and PMM

Worldpay and FIS, 12 markets

23,000+ subscribers

Marketing Leader of the Year 2026

Top Growth Leader to Watch 2026

I run StackedGTM. It is a media and services company for teams that intend to outgrow their market while AI rewrites how buyers find and choose. We work on two things: how you get discovered, and how you get understood. Discovery is AEO and modern growth channels, and we built some of the best practices the industry runs on. Understanding is messaging and positioning. We tie the two together so human readers and agent readers alike can find your brand and know exactly what it is for.

No filler, no theater. We write down what we learn as we learn it: wins, failures, what is working, what is not. 23,000+ GTM operators read it every week, including teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Ramp, Rippling and hundreds more. Lovable, Profound, Gamma, AirOps and dozens of other brands partner with us to shape how their category is understood before buyers start comparing.

Before that, fifteen years building the revenue system in three different motions.

StackedGTM

Founder

A media and services company for teams that intend to outgrow their market while AI rewrites how buyers find and choose. Two things: how you get discovered, and how you get understood. The newsletter, the services team, and the software built to run the work.

Webflow

VP of Growth, on the exec bench

Ran centralized revenue marketing across self-serve and enterprise acquisition, expansion and retention. Built the model that read product signals to predict which self-serve accounts would grow into sales-led ones, so the two motions fed each other instead of cannibalizing, and used it to push the business upmarket into enterprise CMS. Built the AEO program: over 80% answer share in the category against under 2% market share, and 300+ incremental AI citations. Reaccelerated growth past $300M ARR.

Affirm

VP of Growth and Product Marketing

Through the IPO. Grew the org to 65. GMV from $8.3B to $20.2B. Wired data science into growth to predict what millions of people would buy next, then rebuilt marketing measurement so finance could see the incremental revenue and fund more of it. All under a GAAP profitability mandate.

Worldpay, then FIS

Global digital marketing and marketing operations

Six years. 120 people, 12 markets, every line of business, through the $43B acquisition. Built market entry once and reused it instead of rebuilding it country by country.

02 / The thesis

The thesis, in full

Eight positions, no hedging

AI rewrote go to market on two fronts at once. Discovery moved into the answer, and the org chart that served the old model stopped making sense. Everything below follows from those two facts.

Discovery moved into the answer.

Buyers no longer browse a results page. They ask a model and act on what it says.

Research, shortlisting, comparison and diligence now happen inside a chat window, weeks before any intent signal reaches a CRM. The ten blue links still exist, but they are the citation layer for an answer someone else already read. A company that is absent from that answer is not ranking lower. It is not in the consideration set at all.

So what

Answer share is the demand metric that matters. Everything else is downstream of it.

Answer share is won on structure, not volume.

Models cite sources that are easy to parse, easy to attribute and hard to contradict.

Publishing more pages does not move answer share. Clear claims, specific numbers, consistent entities, crawlable structure and corroboration across independent sources do. Most of the lift in an AEO program comes from fixing what already exists and making the strongest assets legible, not from adding content nobody asked for.

So what

The first job is an audit of what the models already believe about you, and what that belief is costing.

The category is full of repackaged SEO.

A lot of what is sold as AEO is a keyword audit with a new cover page and triple the retainer.

Answer engines do not rank, they synthesise. That changes the unit of work from a page to a claim, and the unit of measurement from a position to a share of answers. Firms that cannot explain the mechanics in plain language are running the old play. This is half the reason the research gets published in the open.

So what

Ask any partner to show the measurement before the strategy. The answer tells you everything.

Measure what a model says, not what a dashboard guesses.

Answer share, citation counts and the exact prompts you lose are measurable today.

Run the questions your buyers actually ask, across the models they actually use, on a schedule. Record who gets cited, who gets recommended, and where you get replaced. That baseline turns AI search from a narrative into a line on the same report as pipeline. Without it, every AEO engagement is an opinion with an invoice attached.

So what

No baseline, no program. Every engagement starts with where you stand today.

The org chart cracked.

Agents collapsed the distance between research, building, shipping and reporting.

Work that needed three teams and a quarter now needs one operator with the right systems and a week. Market research before breakfast, a build by lunch, a live test by dinner, results read before bed. The constraint is no longer headcount. It is whether anyone in the building knows how to design the system.

So what

The best GTM operator now runs like a small org. Hire for that, or get outrun by someone who did.

The wall between marketer and builder is gone.

Marketing teams can ship software now, and the ones that do compound faster.

Two products came out of this business in a year, built without an engineering team, because the work needed them. Internal agents, data pipelines, diagnostics and customer-facing tools are all inside reach of a marketing team that is willing to build. The excuse expired.

So what

Build the system, then run the channel. In that order.

Proof before explanation.

Nothing gets sold here that has not been run on our own P&L first.

Frameworks come out of client work, get pressure-tested on this business, and ship with the data attached. When something fails it gets published too, because the failures are where the mechanism becomes visible. No ghostwriters, no thought leadership calendar, no case studies that cannot be checked.

So what

If a claim on this site has no number behind it, treat it as an opinion.

Operators learn faster in the open.

Peer to peer learning is the fastest compounding asset in go to market.

This career started in the Marketo forums, trading playbooks with strangers who became peers. No gatekeepers, no pedigree, just people showing the wins, the faceplants and the edge cases nobody writes case studies about. The newsletter runs on the same engine for 23,000+ marketers, sales leaders, operators and founders.

So what

Publish the data. Get sharper in public. Compound.

03 / How I think about this

Two things I can do for you

Get your brand into the market, or run the work for you.

Brand partnerships

I can get your brand into this market in a meaningful way. The publication reaches 23,000+ subscribers who buy software, and a partnership puts you in front of them in context, next to the research they already read.

Partners pay for reach. Editorial choices and client recommendations are never for sale, and client work stays confidential.

Sponsor StackedGTM

Fully managed operator teams

I have staffed the best operators in the industry to take these problems on in full: AI search, messaging and positioning, growth channels, marketing engineering and AI agents, and measurement.

Fully managed. The team builds it, runs it and hands it over, so nothing depends on us staying in the room.

See all services

Every engagement starts with the same question: what are the answer engines saying about you right now, and what is that costing you this quarter.

Work with our team

Exclusions