Emir Atlı

3 BIGGEST MISTAKES I made last year scaling a $300M+ company (that cost us at least $400K): 1. Scaling paid ads from $40K to $120K a month with no change in pipeline In 5 months, we TRIPLED our paid media spend and saw no change in pipeline. It was a huge waste of money. A major screw up. Since then, we scaled back spend dramatically and 3x'd our pipeline QoQ. My takeaway: for paid media to work effectively, you need to support it with other initiatives. You need to have a solid outbound strategy, good SEO, good strategy on different paid channels to capture the demand, and you need to have a good presence overall to tell the same story repeatedly. 2. Over-obsessed about competitor lies As our brand grew, we have been a victim of a lot of false information from competitors. At first, we just ignored it. We ran a great sales process which led to 90%+ competitive wins against them in qualified opps. So, why bother? And then I kind of got into my head about it. I obsessed over competitive docs and correcting all the BS comparison sheets that new customers sent me from their evaluation processes. This led to us being less confident and sales cycles getting longer. In the end, we got back to what mattered: Providing the best experience possible and investing heavily in product Prospects can see BS - Don’t obsess about competitor misinformation. 3. Starting outbound too late I should have hired our Head of Sales Development 6 months earlier. Again, I got into my head and thought “everyone is saying outbound is dead, and our inbound is working so well. We can do it next quarter” And then I said it again and again. "We can do it next quarter". Turns out, outbound is a game changer for us. It still WORKS for many companies. Don’t believe everything you see on LinkedIn :) TAKEAWAY: While everyone loves celebrating wins (myself included). Remember, it’s okay to fail, get in your head, and make mistakes No matter what level of the game your’e at. Whether you’re a first-time founder or a 30 year executive. You’re going to try new things and takes risks. And sometimes those things don’t work out. When that happens, don’t hide from it, don’t get discouraged. Own it. Lean in. Learn. And just don’t make the same mistake again. The losses make you even stronger than the wins.

Opus 4.6 has been 10x worse in the last few days

Is anyone else having trouble with Comcast/Meter? our wifi is down multiple times every day at our SF HQ. We want to switch ASAP what’s the best and fastest alternative?

4/15/2026 🤫

1 hour of TravisCore to build and accelerate to

"Go all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable." - @travisk "If anyone says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, 'You messed up. You could have gone way further. More competitive advantage. More differentiation. Get it together.'"

2 secrets to enterprise sales at startups: 1. know someone influential at the company you are selling to 2. make sure that person likes you and your company everything else is noise

4 years ago, I was a nobody in Turkey. Since then we raised $50M+ and grew to 300+ customers. This is not a “how I made it” post. This is a story about what it felt like not to belong. In 2021, my co-founders and I moved to San Fransisco to join YC. We didn't know anyone and barely had enough cash for groceries. Only an idea, some early traction, and the drive to build. But at every industry event I went to, I had massive anxiety What if they ask me which company I built previously? What if they ask where I worked before? What if they ask about my "latest exit"? I had no answer. No credentials. No validation. Just fear. I didn’t feel like I belonged in the room. Let alone deserved to lead our GTM team. Even after YC. Even after raising our Seed. The doubt still haunted me. I hesitated to post on LinkedIn—thinking, who am I to say this? I second-guessed every cold email— thinking they’d Google me and ignore it. I watched friends raise rounds off last names or Stanford dropout stories. And every early deal we lost, I didn’t question the pitch—I questioned myself. So I overcompensated. I worked 12–14 hour days. I said YES to every opportunity. And I told myself if I just pushed harder, maybe the doubt would go away. It didn’t. Eventually I burned out. I was overworked. I was unhealthy. I was unhappy. Until one day, I had the chance to hear Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, speak at YC. He said : “There’s no better way to be the expert than just do the work. You might be surprised at how quickly you become the expert.” That line changed everything for me. I stopped chasing validation. I started chasing impact. Shortly after that, people stopped asking me these questions They knew about HockeyStack And it was enough “social proof.” This happened not because of a “Resume” But because: - We went all-in on product. - Built a world-class GTM engine from scratch. - We closed Hundreds of logos like Outreach, RingCentral, ActiveCampaign, etc. that once felt out of reach. - Beat all competitors in EVERY single metric. - We built a product that CMOs loved enough to tell their peers about. - And we 4.5X’d revenue in one year. In a single year everything changed. That's why today, I’m embracing my story. You don’t need a past exit to create a future one. You don’t need a last name to build a name. You don’t need permission to go all-in. Keep building. Even if no one’s clapping yet.

@jamessloankelly yep always

@emiratli_ Did you or do you find you still need to educate the buyer on this space? Revenue agents are still very new

In 3 years, HockeyStack went from a 3-person startup getting ghosted on $5,000 deals with SMBSs to a $300M+ company closing 6-figure deals with the Fortune 100. Here are the 4 major changes we made to our GTM: 1. We turned every call to a science by watching every single call for 18 months Won deals. Lost deals. Deals that stalled for no reason. Deals that closed in two weeks. All of them. Most founders stop listening to calls once they hire a VP of Sales or start scaling. That's the beginning of the end. Watching every single call allowed us to control every minute of every call and onboard reps faster. After 18 months, I could predict which deals would close within the first 10 minutes. And when your team knows the founder watches every call, preparation quality goes up overnight. Not because they're scared. Because they know someone cares about the craft. 2. We built outbound from scratch Our first year, if inbound dried up, we had nothing. Just a team refreshing their lead queue hoping marketing would save them. Then I brought in Alex Choi, who built $100M+ in pipeline at Carta. He jumped on the phone himself, saw what worked, and hired and onboarded reps personally. One of our largest enterprise deals ever started from a cold call and closed in 4 months. But the numbers aren't the point. The culture shift is. We went from a team that waited for pipeline to a team that created it. 3. We built blueprints of our best deals Every sales org has tribal knowledge. The top 10% of reps know things about winning that exist nowhere except their heads. They can't even articulate it if you ask. So we stopped asking. We mapped every closed-won deal and reverse-engineered what actually happened. Not what the rep said in the deal review. What came out was a blueprint. A decision tree of what winning looks like at our company. We compared it to what our VP of Sales had documented. The gap was massive. Not because anyone was wrong. Because the human brain cannot hold that level of detail across hundreds of deals. Now every rep runs against the blueprint. A living map of how our best deals actually close. 4. We built a culture of collaboration This one wasn't planned. It was a byproduct of everything else. We reviewed calls and deals together. Held group sessions on deal progression to come up with ideas together. We started seeing reps jump on each other's deals uninvited. Not to steal credit. To add context. "I sold into that persona last month, here's what landed." "That objection came up in my deal, here's how I handled it." You can't mandate this culture. You can only create the conditions for it. Shared blueprints, transparent call reviews, and comp structures that don't punish collaboration. None of this is a secret. Watch calls. Build outbound. Study your wins. Help each other. Every sales leader already knows this. The difference is doing all of it at the same time and refusing to stop when it gets uncomfortable.

Cold outbound works. White papers work. SDRs work. SEO works. Google ads work. Automation works. Cold calling works. Gated content works. Everything WORKS if you do it right. It pays to be negative on X. But the fundamentals of B2B GTM still work. And they will continue to work… If you invest the time to understand your buyer, their pain, and how you can solve it. It’s not the channel that’s the problem. It’s the message.

We just solved creating infinitely long AI videos from a single prompt. We built Latted as the unified workspace for AI video projects. Then, we made the world's first AI generated feature film with it!

Dunyanin en iyi designerini ariyorum. 3-3.5M TL/yillik, flexible is saatleri. Reklam creativeleri, website, ve branding. Porfolyonuzu DM'den gondermeniz yeterli.

We just hired an unpaid intern to run Growth, and he came up with a crazy idea to 10x our pipeline. “Let’s scale direct traffic.” I asked how. He said: “Idk. Make people type the URL more?” He’s onto something. Will report back.

Introducing HockeyStack Platform. The end of GTM Guesswork. What feels like magic today, will be the new normal tomorrow. Today, your top rep knows exactly what to do for their deals. They have the “instinct” that feels like magic. Who to talk to, what to say, who to build relationships with, and how to close the deal. But if they have 10 big opportunities, they can only handle maybe 2-3 of those. And the rest of your team doesn’t have that instinct. Not yet… The best Marketing leaders already know what drives pipeline, what to scale, and they know the buyer journeys like the back of their hands. But they are extremely rare. And even if you have one, they don’t have the time to be involved in every decision. Now… imagine a brain chip that guides you through the entire way to close a deal, make smarter marketing decisions, and drive more pipeline. Today, we are launching HockeyStack Platform: Everything you need to build pipeline and close deals in one platform. Our Marketing Intelligence platform is powered by Odin, our AI analyst, to answer any complex business question in detail with your own data. Even in Slack. Our Account Intelligence platform collects all 1st and 3rd party data, transforms them into 1-1 account plans, stakeholder maps, and lets you learn the entire context of the account and take action with Nova AI. All in Salesforce. It’s time to replace: - "What’s Working?" meetings - Spreadsheets with plans and contacts - Hundreds of hours of analyst time And put the Magic back in GTM.

We spend years getting comfortable at companies building consensus. Then, we join the dictator and finally ship something that matters..

I am hiring a Vibe Marketer. No college degree or experience required. Here's what it means & how to apply 👇 First step, read this essay (image). It should be required reading for founders - and marketers. The #1 reason HockeyStack was able to scale brand awareness and pipeline quickly is our LinkedIn presence. And we're going to double-down. I’m looking for someone who understands social, virality, and trends. What you’ll do: 1. Scale our internal creator program 2. Work with our video team on commercials (both AI and non-AI) 3. Expand into TikTok, X, and Instagram 4. Scale our message in creative formats. No limits. There is no set background for this role. You can be a creator/college student looking to drop out and join a rocketship or someone in a different career path but obsessed with short form and social. I’ll personally review every single application. Send me an email with why you, what you are working on, and any ideas for HockeyStack. emir@hockeystack dot com

When I saw the story of the engineer who was secretly working at EIGHT DIFFERENT startups, I got paranoid and did what any rational founder would do. I hired a PhD lie detector to see who at HockeyStack is lying to me

help my son turned into a b2b marketer