Growth, startups, Tweets etc. | fCMO @ week over week | Growth Partner at https://teapawt.org/t.co/qGvxkQoHGx | ex-@OutPointHQ, @Borrowell, @ProperlyHomes, @PolicyMeHQ
Toronto, Ontario
Joined June 2012
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Rob Palumbo retweeted
Every guy in SF wants all these things
- six figure salary
- 6 feet tall
- 500 models in a unified LLM gateway
Rob Palumbo retweeted
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath.
except for our product, of course.
in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much.
we're special that way.
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Other routers compete on charging nothing over list price.
We wanted to go below it.
Hopscotch Passes give each seat twice its price in model usage, across virtually every model, with allowances that reset monthly.
Proud of the team for shipping this. Feedback welcome.
Today we’re launching Hopscotch Passes, an all-in-one subscription to virtually EVERY AI model at half price for a flat monthly fee per seat.
Each seat gets twice its price in model use at provider rates, frontier models included. You can buy one in three tiers:
Starter: $20 a month for $40 of LLM access
Growth: $50 a month for $100 of LLM access
Pro: $200 a month for $400 of LLM access
Over a year that’s up to $2,400 of bonus LLM access per Pro seat.
Starter costs the same $20 a month as ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, but it buys $40 of API use across every model. Other routers compete on charging nothing over list price. A pass goes below it.
For teams, you pick a tier and a seat count, then assign seats to members. Allowances reset every month.
It’s all a little crazy, so we’re offering 1,000 passes for a limited time only. We think this is the best LLM router offer on the market, PERIOD.
Passes are live now: platform.hopscotchlabs.ai/pr…
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Before you launch anything, have Opus 5.5 send 5 subagents in as your first users.
Paste this into Claude Code:
"Act as my launch QA lead. Spin up 5 subagents, each a different first-time user:
1. The impatient one: skims, clicks the first button, quits at the first error
2. The skeptic: reads pricing, terms and privacy before signing up
3. The mobile user: does everything on a 375px screen on slow 3G
4. The non-native English speaker: only follows what the UI literally says
5. The breaker: pastes junk into forms, hits back mid-flow, double-clicks everything
Each one opens the app in a real browser, goes from landing page to first success, and screenshots every moment they get confused, stuck or annoyed.
Merge everything into one list ranked by how many users hit it. Fix it all in one pass, then rerun the 5 users to prove it's fixed."
Your first 100 real users won't tell you why they left. these 5 will.
(Works best with a browser MCP connected, Playwright or Chrome DevTools)
Rob Palumbo retweeted
AI has a funny way of deceiving people into thinking that they can do everything on their own.
AI Vibe Coding? Imagine hiring an engineer who knows what they are doing instead who can vibe code.
AI video editing? Imagine hiring an agentic editor who can now edit 10x more than before.
Building an AI enabled brand? Imagine what a person who has built a brand can do in terms of damage.
The only people getting the 10x use cases are people who were deep experts in their thing before AI.
in short, hiring the cracked team member is still the unlock and will continue being the unlock
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Two weeks ago a life changing amount of money was wired into my bank account from the sale of my business.
Since I'm no longer a competitor in this particular arena, I'm gonna drop some sauce on how I completely mogged an entire industry on meta ads.
I'm going to be vague so I don't dox myself, but here it goes:
Rob Palumbo retweeted
A few thoughts on agentic video editing I’ve had over the last few days:
1. 99% of ads should be edited agentically now. If your editors are still editing in the timeline, they’re falling behind. I got a message from my senior VE saying that he’s putting out 5x edits/day now at the same quality he was before.
2. The conversation with video editors will be uncomfortable because the timeline is all they’ve ever known. Some will be hesitant and some will be fearful for their job. I think the best way to address this is head on. The tech is inevitable, but having taste is still going to be incredibly valuable to train and give feedback to agents. Those who have this will become more valuable, those who don’t will struggle.
3. Opus 5.5 can natively edit all of your ads without needing any MCPs or plugins. I’ve tried the alternatives and couldn’t find anything that was significantly better than doing everything inside of Claude.
4. Have your senior editor(s) build skills for each style of edit (e.g. mashups, UGC, AI animations…). You can build these by feeding 4-5 inspo edits to Claude and tell it to make a skill out of it. I prefer building lots of mini-skills to one big video editing skill, so that the context stays as relevant as possible.
5. Once you have a base skill (e.g. ugly ads edits), the best way to train it is through feedback loops. Have the skill re-edit the last 25 ads each senior edited then put them in an artifact, and have the senior VE give feedback on each. Keep doing this until the skill is refined and it understands what a good edit is.
6. If you do this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make edits that need little/no feedback. Most of ours are approved after v1 or v2, sometimes v3.
7. Only A-player editors should be training the skills.
8. Re adoption in the team, the AI champion builds the v1. Then get out of the way. I’m not the best editor on my team, so my job is to build the harness that lets the best editors train the skills, not build the skills myself.
9. If you want to supercharge this process, have your top editors record their screen as they edit. Turn on Gmeet or loom and get them to narrate the reasoning behind their process. E.g. why they chose this cut, pacing or b-roll clip…this is all context that gets fed into your skills.
10. It takes time to build, train and refine these skills. You have to go through the dip to get out the other side. Budget time in for senior VEs to work on this - otherwise you’ll end up with skills that put out subpar edits and don’t save you much/any time.
11. Operate under the assumption that this is the worst video editing is ever going to be. Opus 5.5 can do most of our editing today…what will Opus 6/Fable 6 be able to do? The editing skills you build are only going to become more valuable as the tech evolves.
I still don’t think people realise how big video editing being unblocked is. Things that I thought were 3-6 months away are now on the table.
Will continue to share more as I learn. CRAZY, crazy times.
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Gavin Baker says the Anthropic S-1 will break a lot of investors' brains
"The Anthropic S-1 is going to be really important. And it's going to break a lot of people's brains. There are a lot of macro and value investors who are very confidently making these prognostications about AI with the assumption that tokens are subsidized."
"Anthropic is generating cash. They're profitable. Open source tokens are profitable. OpenAI, if they're not generating cash, they will be imminently. SpaceX, same thing."
"These macro and value investors are ignorant. They're very smart, but they're ignorant of the facts. They're making an assumption that tokens are subsidized and this is all going to collapse in some circular financing bonfire."
"They're just wrong. The overwhelming majority of tokens are profitable for everyone in the chain. Everyone."
"It's saying I'm very bearish on the world economy because oil is at $500 a barrel. If oil was at $500 a barrel, that'd be a good reason to be bearish. It's just not. They're just wrong. The central fact is wrong."
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Modern ad systems have always been run on machine learning algos, but in the past 5 years the trend has accelerated with AI now doing all the targeting for you. In the past you would hire a media buyer to tweak things. You could adjust the demographic you want to target, the exact locations, the time of day, etc... You used to have hundreds of these levers you could a/b test and optimize. In the past 5 years this has shifted to AI, so you don't need a media buyer anymore. You just set a conversion target and the AI targeting systems will grind on it.
When you're selling something cheap like yoga pants, all you have to do is create good ads and set your conversion target to gross margin. The AI will find you sales, and it will even optimize for the exact customer profile that you'll earn the most margin on.
However, when you're selling $20,000 items, you'll never hit enough of volume to properly train the ads. You need at least 50 conversions per week so unless you're doing $1 mil revenue weekly, you can't target margin.
Instead you target something higher up the funnel like a phone call or a lead form submission. You can even put additional qualifiers- such as the phone call needs to last at least 5 min.
What we did at first was to ask a follow up question after a customer submitted a quote request on our website-:
How were you planning to pay?
Option 1- Pay cash
Option 2- Finance with FICO over 650
Option 3- Finance with FICO under 650.
And then we simply targeted option 1 and option 2 as the reward function. This filtered out a bunch of the poors, but we still captured the lead even if they refused to answer. If they didn't answer the question, we would just pass them along to their quote automatically after 6 seconds, plus we had automated text and email notifications sent in case they closed out before they seen it.
This had amazing results, so I realized that the biggest lever I could pull is setting a better target for the AI to grind on.
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Today we’re launching Hopscotch Passes, an all-in-one subscription to virtually EVERY AI model at half price for a flat monthly fee per seat.
Each seat gets twice its price in model use at provider rates, frontier models included. You can buy one in three tiers:
Starter: $20 a month for $40 of LLM access
Growth: $50 a month for $100 of LLM access
Pro: $200 a month for $400 of LLM access
Over a year that’s up to $2,400 of bonus LLM access per Pro seat.
Starter costs the same $20 a month as ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, but it buys $40 of API use across every model. Other routers compete on charging nothing over list price. A pass goes below it.
For teams, you pick a tier and a seat count, then assign seats to members. Allowances reset every month.
It’s all a little crazy, so we’re offering 1,000 passes for a limited time only. We think this is the best LLM router offer on the market, PERIOD.
Passes are live now: platform.hopscotchlabs.ai/pr…
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Distribution is the only moat left in B2B SaaS.
If you're a B2B company founder, here's exactly what you should be focusing on👇
1. AI search (get recommended by ChatGPT before buyers Google you)
2. Multichannel (LinkedIn creates demand, Reddit builds trust, Google gets the credit)
3. Day one shortlists (get picked before buyers even talk to sales)
4. Reddit (earn trust in communities that hate being sold to)
5. Content distribution (make your best ideas impossible to miss)
6. Founder-led media (turn your expertise into an audience that buys)
7. AI citations (find out WHY ChatGPT cites your competitors)
8. Zero-click discovery (influence buyers who never visit your site)
9. AI content filtering (surface that single useful insight buried in 100 AI posts)
10. Dark social (capture buying signals hidden in Slack, DMs & private groups)
11. Niche creators (reach 5K relevant buyers instead of chasing 500K impressions)
12. Research syndication (turn one original report into months of exposure)
13. AI buying agents (get shortlisted when AI compares vendors for buyers)
14. Customer advocacy (turn happy customers into your strongest referrals)
15. Search-to-social (show up across Google, Reddit, YouTube & AI answers)
16. Category positioning (stand out when every SaaS competitor sounds identical)
17. Content repurposing (turn forgotten webinars & podcasts into fresh assets)
18. Outcome-based content (optimize for pipeline, demos & revenue, not post counts)
19. Distribution OS (connect research, creation, publishing & measurement in one system)
20. Branded demand (make buyers search for YOUR company, not just your category)
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Two key charts to think about Anthropic:
they have a CRAZY power law for their customers. Potentially over 30 that are paying 100M plus.
they have the best NRR in the history of public tech companies at 900%
“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
Rob Palumbo retweeted
obviously all enterprises will all pay $10m+ per year for ai, it's INTELLIGENCE ON A TAP, the most sought after resource
and only 250 companies pay $10m right now???
how people are bearish on ai right now, can someone explain. i dont care what finance people in NY says
Rob Palumbo retweeted
Today we’re launching Hopscotch Passes, an all-in-one subscription to virtually EVERY AI model at half price for a flat monthly fee per seat.
Each seat gets twice its price in model use at provider rates, frontier models included. You can buy one in three tiers:
- Starter: $20 a month for $40 of LLM access
- Growth: $50 a month for $100 of LLM access
- Pro: $200 a month for $400 of LLM access
Over a year that’s up to $2,400 of bonus LLM access per Pro seat.
Starter costs the same $20 a month as ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, but it buys $40 of API use across every model. Other routers compete on charging nothing over list price. A pass goes below it.
For teams, you pick a tier and a seat count, then assign seats to members. Allowances reset every month.
It’s all a little crazy, so we’re offering 1,000 passes for a limited time only. We think this is the best LLM router offer on the market, PERIOD.
platform.hopscotchlabs.ai/pr…
