Podcast Summary: How You.com 10x’d MQLs with Multithreaded Marketing

Podcast: The SaaS Revolution Show
Host: Alex Theuma
Guest: Kadi Srinivasan, CMO of You.com
Release Date: January 15, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep dive into how Kadi Srinivasan, CMO at You.com, led a radical transformation of the company’s marketing organization. The conversation explores You.com’s pivot from a consumer search engine to an AI infrastructure vendor, the evolution towards a multithreaded marketing model, the growing role of AI and “prompt marketers,” and the strategies and tools that resulted in a dramatic 10x increase in MQL volume in one quarter and a significant ACV uplift. Kadi shares detailed practical insight into hiring, operating models, GTM pivots, tooling, and the realities of marketing in an AI-first era.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Major Pivot: Consumer to AI Infrastructure for Enterprise

• Dual transitions: From consumer search engine to enterprise-focused, selling "picks and shovels" for AI, and from an application-layer company to an infrastructure-layer one.
  • “We are now trying to sell to enterprises a set of picks and shovels in the tech stack. So it's a very different audience. Everything is different.” (Kadi, 03:55)
• Initial confusion internally over ICP, value prop, and GTM. The need to rebuild everything “from ground up.” (04:15)
• Identification of two key personas: AI Laggards and AI Natives. Each requires a distinct value proposition and GTM approach.
• Standard SaaS marketing org structures “don’t work anymore.”

2. The Multithreaded Marketing Model

• Three pillars:
  • Parallelization: Running many initiatives in parallel rather than sequential silos.
  • Threaded responsibility: Individuals oversee a “thread” end-to-end—from content to measurement and iteration—rather than narrow functional roles.
  • Compounding flywheels: Activities are connected in recursive loops, reinforcing each other for compounding growth.
• Results:
  • “We went from our MQL volume was super low. We 10x'd our MQL volume by doing these things. In the course of just one quarter, ACV went up 86%.” (Kadi, 01:02; 06:45)
• “I think this is the future. I think the future is this multi threaded model.” (Kadi, 06:56)

3. Team Structure and the Rise of the Prompt Marketer

(07:09 – 12:04)

• Talent: The existing team of broad-thinking generalists who take strong outcome ownership enabled rapid change.
• Prompt Marketers:
  • New role requiring deep AI and automation fluency—Zapier, Make, APIs, etc.—to “take workflows… and just convert that into an AI process, connect all the dots.”
  • “If you hire a prompt marketer, it doesn't matter if you're small or big, you can start to apply them to those little flywheels.” (Kadi, 10:36)
  • Prompt marketers enable speed, automation, and integration across the stack.
• Result: What once took nine months now takes “five weeks” (website project), because the org “moves at the speed of AI.” (Kadi, 09:58)

4. Operationalizing Change at Speed

(12:04 – 14:22)

• Cut extensive planning/iteration cycles—rapidly prototyped the new website, focused on the "top 10% of top performing pages" and ignored low-value legacy content.
• Website became an extensible platform for quickly publishing relevant content.
• Weekly iteration, with content frameworks in place for continuous scaling.
• “In nine months I bet you this is going to look a lot better than what I had at Klaviyo because we have been on the journey of updating it.” (Kadi, 13:57)

5. Inbound and Outbound—Flywheels in Action

(14:22 – 16:47)

• Majority of MQLs now inbound; outbound is high ACV but smaller in volume.
• Two main MQL-generating flywheels:
  • Content flywheel: AI-assisted high-quality content → newsletters → leads → routed/nurtured based on ICP → sales conversations → inform new content topics → repeat.
  • Founder social flywheel: Engage founder’s social posts → scrape and enrich respondents → qualify for ICP → event invites (e.g., Niners suite), nurture, and generate further content.
• “You can see there's that flywheel that just worked beautifully and we got so much stuff out of it.” (Kadi, 15:36)

6. Tooling: Enablers for the New Model

(17:18 – 18:57)

• Mix of manual and automated tools, with emphasis on speed and experimentation:
  • Key tools: Clay.com, Connect The Dots, Sumble, Salesforce, Lovable, Gong, and You.com’s own agent-building capabilities.
  • Manual work (e.g., scraping LinkedIn) where needed, with an urge to automate over time.
  • Weekly “AI tool standups” to share discoveries and encourage adoption (“everybody had to present what AI tool they used in the past week”—Kadi, 19:08)
  • Hackathons and internal labs push ongoing tool experimentation and comfort.

7. Selling to AI Natives vs. AI Laggards

(20:20 – 23:51)

• AI Natives: Easier to sell due to inherent understanding of AI potential.
• AI Laggards: Sellers must
  • a) Define the problem
  • b) Sell the solution
  • c) Overcome risk aversion (security, data, governance, especially for Fortune 5000s)
  • d) Anticipate long adoption cycles and change management.
• “When you go and try to sell to a Fortune 5000 company... they are really scared about how this will impact governance, risk, security, data retention... So you have to be very forward or security forward.” (Kadi, 22:36)

8. Email and Content in the AI Era

(23:51 – 28:47)

• Cold outbound is largely ineffective.
• Email works “in narrow slivers” when highly targeted, highly contextual, and relevant (e.g., retargeting, newsletters for first-party audiences).
  • The future is building high-quality, proprietary audiences and consistently delivering educational, value-rich content (e.g., "five AI use cases you should know about," governance checklists).
• Content creation pipeline:
  • Human outlines → AI-driven drafting → AI fact-checking → human review and editing.
  • “So like you said, human in the loop at the right points of time. So it becomes a really strong thing. But we are leveraging the two power of AI.” (Kadi, 27:38)
  • Transitioned from ~1 ebook/whitepaper every two months to 4-5 per month.

9. The Road Ahead: The Future of AI Marketing Orgs

(28:47 – 32:53)

• Scaling flywheels: Belief that compounding systems, not one-shot projects, drive defensibility and growth.
• Tech stack complexity: 22 tools in use, growing need to stitch or consolidate.
• Prompt marketer pipeline: Challenge of finding, training, and shaping this new generation of marketers.
  • Not every marketer is currently suited, but with the right mindset, current team members can be upskilled.
• “I'm going to try to train my marketers. I'm also going to try to find and shape the, the new generation of marketers, if nothing else, because those, those kids are going to be the ones I'll be working for someday.” (Kadi, 32:44)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the power of multi-threaded marketing:
  • “I’ve changed the full nature of marketing and I think this is the future.” (Kadi, 06:48)
• On prompt marketers:
  • “These are the people who are going to become the experts about taking a plan or playbook and then putting that into the systems that you're building.” (Kadi, 10:52)
• On content quality:
  • “It's so easy to slide into average stuff and you won't even realize it. So you have to be very, very careful about whether it's... creating the right prompt or appending the right context...” (Kadi, 28:19)
• On selling to AI laggards:
  • “You have to be really careful about selling the security stuff. First you have to change management is important and then you have to sell the problem. Those are the three things that ... are very different from AI natives.” (Kadi, 23:24)
• On marketer upskilling:
  • “It's almost like you need to have the right amount of hustle and ownership and learning and curiosity and discomfort with not knowing a lot of things.” (Kadi, 31:43)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:43 – Kadi explains You.com's dual pivots and the resulting internal confusion
• 06:45 – The impact of the new marketing model: 10x MQLs and higher ACVs
• 07:37 – Building the team: generalists and prompt marketers
• 09:58 – Speed with AI vs. legacy timelines: five weeks vs. nine months
• 14:38 – Inbound/outbound mix, construction of content and social flywheels
• 17:18 – Tooling and technology choices for scale and automation
• 19:08 – Forcing AI adoption: weekly "AI tool show and tell"
• 20:38 – Detailed strategies for selling to AI natives vs. laggards
• 24:24 – The real limits (and opportunities) of email in the AI era
• 27:13 – Human-in-the-loop AI content, the new volume reality
• 29:18 – What’s next: flywheels, tooling, prompt marketer talent
• 31:40 – Upskilling marketers: requirements and mindset

Tone and Final Impressions

The conversation is candid, practical, and forward-thinking, blending high-level strategic insight with in-the-trenches tactics. Kadi comes across as pragmatic, experimental, and deeply engaged with both people and process challenges in AI marketing, while Alex provides the perspective and questions relevant to founders and SaaS marketers at every growth stage.

For SaaS founders and marketers, this episode offers a blueprint for not just moving faster, but for rethinking the structure, talent, and tools required to deliver exponential results in an AI-first world.