One person walks away with $50,000 at Clay Cup, a live competition for GTM engineers, a job that didn't exist two years ago. Munnawar Hashim, Head of Community at Clay, explains why Clay runs it and why he says the community built the company.

We talk about the three parts of Clay's community (Slack, Clay Clubs in about 90 cities, and Clay Cup), why he'd rather you leave a Clay event having a good time than buy, why in-person events will matter more in the AI era, what GTM engineers earn, and how he'd job hunt today.

The Quest is a podcast where growth, AI, and marketing meet, bringing you the best lessons from the people building in the trenches.

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Founders and marketers think they need 100K views to get anything out of YouTube. Nastia Dębowska spent six years inside YouTube HQ in London, working with some of the biggest creators on the platform, and she says that’s exactly the wrong thing to chase.

Then she built a channel from zero for her mum, who runs a real business from it now. On this episode she makes the case that views are not the thing that turns a channel into customers, and walks through what is.

We get into why YouTube is not a search engine, what the algorithm is actually looking for, the first video a founder should post when nobody knows them yet, and how a small channel ends up bringing in clients without a sales funnel.

She also built a free content plan for anyone starting out: the video types that work, with examples and why. The link is in the episode notes.

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Oscar Lance works in go-to-market at ElevenLabs, where GTM hires are expected to close fast and experiment even faster. In this episode he explains why he thinks people get too obsessed with automation, and what actually moves deals forward: cold calls, speed to lead, and knowing when to stop tinkering.This was the first Quest episode recorded in person, in the new studio.He walks through the three things that make a cold call work, the ElevenLabs sales cycle from first call to closed customer, and the event CRM he built in Lovable with ElevenLabs speech to text. Then the hiring side: what gets someone hired in GTM at ElevenLabs, how to ask for a referral properly, and the five-year-plan answer he actually wants to hear.One thing to try this week: build your own voice agent and train it on your FAQ.Frameworks and artifacts from every episode: dikshadutta.substack.comHow to stay relevant with AI, for growth marketers and founders.

Jonathan Martinez writes The AI Marketer and led growth at Uber, Postmates and Coinbase. In this episode he shares his screen and shows the system he actually uses to run marketing with AI.

The core idea: a marketer's GitHub is becoming the new resume, and a shared repo is how a team goes from singleplayer, with everyone's files and learnings scattered, to multiplayer, where the whole team and every AI they use pulls from one brain.

He walks through the GitHub build, then a lighter Notion version for teams that don't want the technical setup. He queries a marketing OS live in Claude, breaks down what a growth engineer is and earns, and gives the three things any marketer can do this week to start.

For growth marketers, growth leads and founders who run growth. Watch the screen share on YouTube.

Jay Yang googled how to make money online at 15. What came out of it was a ten slide pitch deck sent cold to the founder of beehiiv, and after that, work with Noah Kagan's content team and with Alex Hormozi at acquisition.com. He is not yet 20. His second book, Work With The Best, is his cookbook for creating those opportunities.

Diksha asks him the question the show keeps circling: would any of this still work now that AI writes everyone's cold emails. Jay's answer is that AI cut the cost of sending a message and left the cost of reading one exactly where it was, so the only thing that moves is proof of work done upfront.

They also get into where he refuses to let AI near his writing, the four pillar framework he used to justify a pay cut, and why he self-published both books.

Alex Svanevik did his masters in AI in 2010, then spent six years building Nansen into an on-chain analytics platform. In 2023 he decided the company would go AI native, and he started in a way most operators would call naive. He ignored outcomes and set a single target: 5,000 collective hours of AI use in one quarter, tracked with a survey every Friday.

Three years later Nansen has fewer than 80 people, flat headcount, tripled revenue per employee, and a 4x engineering deployment rate. Every team member is provisioned an agent centrally, the same way they are handed a laptop.

In this episode Alex breaks down what he measured and when, why the heaviest AI users sit in finance and HR rather than engineering, why he is bullish on junior talent again, and the four stages he says everyone goes through with AI: euphoria, anxiety, touch grass, enlightenment.

Patrick Haede is the CEO of Superscale, an AI platform that builds full paid ad campaigns from a single prompt. He has angel invested in more than twenty startups, including Lovable, and before this he ran a marketing agency.

In this episode, Patrick argues that every business function is being rebuilt around agents, and that marketers are about to work the way engineers already do. One person, five to seven agents, with the human bringing the ideas and reviewing the output. He explains why he believes every ad you see will soon be AI generated, why that pressure is competitive rather than aesthetic, and his rule for staying relevant: estimate when AI will work, then cut that estimate in half. He also breaks down the playbook behind his last launch and the thesis behind his angel investments.

The Quest. Growth stories from the people building AI.

Listen at dikshadutta.com.

Malte Landwehr is CPO and CMO at Peec AI, a Berlin startup tracking how brands show up inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. They're in the top 1% of fastest growing startups worldwide.

Before this, Malte led a 40-person team at Idealo. He quit after a vacation in South Korea where he planned the entire trip without opening Google once.

In this conversation, Malte argues that 5 to 20% of search traffic is already happening inside LLMs, that 60% of companies using AI content tools have already lost their visibility, and that clicks as a metric are dying. He also explains what he'd actually tell a founder who just raised 2 million dollars, and which AI search mistakes will cost companies the most over the next 2 to 3 years.

The Quest. Growth stories from the people building AI.

Listen at dikshadutta.com.