GrowthX AI

We build end-to-end growth engines with expert-guided AI workflows. From content to distribution to conversion.

We're not another software company.
We're not trying to be an agency.
We're building something entirely different:

- AI-powered workflows that adapt to YOU
- Expert guidance every step of the way
- Zero burden on your team
- Results that compound over time

Why?

Because traditional options aren't cutting it:

- Agencies are expensive and often disconnected from your brand's reality.
- Freelancers can be hit or miss, hard to manage, and challenging to retain.
- In-house teams are costly to build and often bogged down by internal processes.
- AI alone lacks the nuance and contextual understanding that human expertise brings.
- Software tools require your team to do all the heavy lifting.

We believe in combining the best of both worlds—AI and experts—to drive real growth.

Already, 25 incredible companies – from seed startups to public giants – are growing with us.

And we're just getting started... 🚀

P.S. We're hiring (and yes, taking on new clients too)

CEO & Founder

Deepgram

Datagrid AI

Advisor

Scale AI

Scale AI is on a mission to accelerate the development of AI by focusing on the underlying infrastructure instead of any one application.

We are proud to already be partnering with and helping some of the world's most innovative companies like Airbnb, OpenAI, DoorDash, Pinterest, General Motors, NVIDIA, Nuro, and Toyota. 

We are also fortunate to have incredible investors like Founders Fund, Accel, Index, Tiger Global, Coatue, Thrive, Spark, Y Combinator, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Adam D'Angelo, Drew Houston, Scott Belsky, Justin Kan, Nat Friedman, and Greg Brockman.

Chief Marketing Officer 

Gradual

Community-led growth is the future.

As I was evaluating online community platforms for Scale AI it felt like everything out there was missing something. We previously used other tools and had a poor experience. Gradual was the only vendor that enabled us to host a 23,000 person virtual conference, white-label to our exact needs, and at the same time have a beautifully designed home to keep our community engaged post-event. Gradual has managed to combine all of the essential features for community AND virtual events, address the shortcomings of other tools, and provide a thoughtfully designed and very powerful community platform.

After the amazing experience, I decided to invest and join as an advisor. Let's build the future of community-led experiences 🚀

Investor & Advisor

UpKeep

UpKeep is on a mission to make life easier for maintenance, facilities, and operations teams. Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, yet this huge segment has been underserved by software. At UpKeep, we are investing in the future of maintenance by taking the work out of work orders with an easy-to-use, mobile-first platform.

We have been named the #1 Maintenance Management Software by Gartner and received the highest ranking in satisfaction by G2 Crowd. We've raised $50 million from top VCs like Y Combinator, Battery Ventures, Bain Capital, and Emergence Capital.

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan is one of the fastest growing SaaS platforms that helps home services companies (plumbing, HVAC, electrical & garage doors) streamline operations, improve customer service and increase sales. Its end-to-end solution for the multi-billion dollar residential home services industry includes CRM, intelligent dispatch, custom reporting, marketing automation, a mobile solution for field techs and accounting integrations with Sage Intacct and QuickBooks.

ServiceTitan is backed by an impressive roster of investors including Index Ventures, Battery, Bessemer, ICONiQ, and T. Rowe Price.

VP of Growth Marketing & Digital

HashiCorp

In this expanded role, in addition to digital, brand, and lifecycle marketing, I’m also responsible for overseeing go-to-market (GTM) strategy and operations. Historically, most companies create distinct organizations for the discrete elements of GTM operations: marketing, sales/revenue, and customer success. At HashiCorp, GTM Systems & Ops is a centralized function that oversees the overall systems end-to-end for a customer’s digital interactions with us: from engaging with us as users and prospects (prospect lifecycle), to becoming customers (customer lifecycle), and to becoming successful users and advocates (support and success lifecycle).

Managing the follow teams and functions:

* Digital and web development - Develop and manage the strategy, roadmap, and execution of our web properties and digital ecosystem
* UX/UI design, brand, and creative services - Building a design system to support a unified design language that scales across multiple platforms and medium
* Revenue and lifecycle marketing - Optimizing entire customer journey from acquisition, activation, monetization, retention, and loyalty with a heavy focus on account based marketing (ABM) and driving pipeline and revenue
* Marketing, sales, and customer success GTM strategy and operations - Ownership of core marketing, sales, and customer success systems and technology
* Analytics and data engineering - Building and maintaining the state-of-the-art ETL infrastructure to monitor, measure, and analyze our customer’s entire journey
* Technical project management - Supporting technical and creative teams from roadmap planning and requirements gathering to day-to-day execution

Head of Digital, Brand, Revenue Marketing, GTM Operations

HashiCorp provides a product suite to empower organizations to provision, secure, and run any infrastructure for any application. We help large organizations with cloud adoption and their move to modern architectures using DevOps. To do this, HashiCorp provides a suite of popular open source tools (Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, and Consul) with enterprise offerings for Terraform, Vault, Nomad, and Consul.

In this role, my focus is on creating marketing campaigns and marketing tactics at all stages in the customer journey with HashiCorp, encouraging interest and engagement in both our open source and commercial products, that will drive adoption and growth for the HashiCorp product suite and business.

My responsibilities include: 

* Own and drive the company’s web strategy to accelerate the customer journey and our business goals
* Create and optimize the outbound lead generation programs and campaigns (including email, paid search, paid social, and various advertising approaches)
* Work with product marketing to implement their product GTM strategy digitally, building on technical other customer-facing content from that team and from the developer advocates
* Run smart and creative tactics that use content aimed at our specific potential customer personas in ways that accelerate and improve their interactions and engagement with us
* Drive brand and brand marketing efforts
* Lead the creative and design efforts for the marketing team, in partnership with the product design team
* Work closely with GTM operations & strategy to implement, optimize, measure, and improve your programs
* Prioritize which programs to focus on now and how best to build for the future
* Hire, grow, and lead a small team to accomplish these objectives

Director of Digital, Brand & Growth Marketing

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

I help to rethink how content gets created, produced, and managed globally across HPE. In just a few months, I've launched Enterprise.nxt (insights.hpe.com), a thought leadership platform to help IT professionals shape the future of business. I help oversee creative (UX/design), development (product owner), content/editorial, and social media/amplification. 

The initiative has already grown to 140,000 monthly unique visits and over 1.2M email subscribers. 

- Launched insights.hpe.com in record time and serving as product owner and creative lead, 
- Driving innovation and results for our web platform, leading an agile web engineering and design team with continuous focus on testing and optimizing the user experience
- Leading a team of four experienced managing editors and recruited over 50 writers and experts to contribute content
- Overseeing HPE content teams and network of freelance writers, videographers, and designers
- Responsible for strategy and execution around SEM, SEO, email/newsletter, and content syndication
- Managing the overarching content strategy and editorial calendar in support of all marketing initiatives and campaigns
- Defining KPIs and measuring the effectiveness of content across multiple platforms and formats
- Building governance, structures, systems, and processes for consistently producing high-quality, industry-leading work
- Partnering with Editor in Chief to oversee writing, editing, and curating of branded content—articles, video scripts and storyboards, infographics—on a daily basis

Global Head of Publishing and Content Operations

I’m the head of content marketing and demand generation for HPE’s Online Business, an ecommerce platform focused on marketing and selling HPE's extensive portfolio of next generation SaaS-based B2B software. I manage a team that is responsible for content creation, web and user experience, and end-to-end demand generation.

- Launched TechBeacon.com, one of the most successful content marketing and demand generation initiatives across HPE.
- Grew site to 100,000+ unique visitors monthly in just 10 months. Built subscriber base of 40,000 users. Generated 22,000 marketing qualified leads (MQLs), generating millions in new opportunities for the business.
- Oversee content creation, SEO/SEM, paid media, growth hacking, social media, email, lead generation, web development, and overall design and user experience for TechBeacon.com.
- Serving as editor-in-chief, overseeing team of eight managing editors, copy editors, and production editors responsible for creating content around topics like application security, DevOps, software development, and more.
- Recruited and grew contributor network of 190+ experts, writers, and influencers from more than 50 different companies.

Head of Content Marketing and Demand Generation

TechBeacon

TechBeacon is an exciting, fast-growing information hub for technologists and IT professionals seeking guidance to real business challenges. Its goal is to connect readers to the technically-savvy experts and visionaries who understand what it takes to succeed. The editorial mission is simple: deliver content that challenges readers to be better professionals and compete more effectively.

In less than a year since founding TechBeacon, it has already become one of the most successful content marketing programs at HPE. We've reached over 500,000 users, published 600+ articles and reports, aggregated 60,000+ subscribers, and generated 22,000+ marketing qualified leads (MQLs). We now have a thriving network of 190 expert contributors from more than 50 companies contributing in-depth content.

Highlights:
- Serving as editor-in-chief, overseeing a team of four senior managing editors and hundreds of writers and contributors
- Lead product, engineering, and design for TechBeacon.com
- Oversee social media and community management
- Head of demand generation, responsible for end-to-end creation, execution, and reporting of campaigns and nurtures

Co-Founder, Chief Digital Officer and Editor-in-Chief

Passionate CMO with a proven track record of creating exceptional digital experience, driving revenue growth, and elevating brand awareness for both large enterprise (IBM and HPE) and hyper-growth startups (Scale AI, HashiCorp, ServiceTitan, and UpKeep).

Currently, I'm the CMO at Deepgram.

Prior to that I was the SVP of Marketing at UpKeep. In that role I led the marketing function as well as more recently Revenue Operations, GTM Systems, and Sales Development (SDR and Outbound BDR teams).

Previously, I was the VP of Demand Generation and Growth at ServiceTitan. In that role, I was responsible for all aspects of revenue and lifecycle marketing, including website, content, social, community, and organic and paid acquisition.

Previously, I was the Head of Digital, Brand, Growth, and GTM Strategy and Operations at HashiCorp. During my time there I helped the company nearly 16X recurring revenue (ARR) while scaling from 100 to 500 employees.

Before HashiCorp, I've successfully started and managed multiple publications and digital teams for major global brands including IBM and HPE. I helped to rethink how content gets created, produced, and managed globally across HPE. In just a few months, I've launched Enterprise.nxt (hpe.com/insights), a thought leadership platform to help IT professionals shape the future of business.

Prior to that, I founded and was the chief content officer for TechBeacon.com (part of HP and later HPE). Before that, I launched IBM's SecurityIntelligence.com from the ground up and served as the editor-in-chief. To this day it's IBM's most successful off-domain content hub.

Today we’re launching my CRAZY idea!

Investing $1M to build the most valuable resource for growth operators who want to be AI-native.

(I bought this domain before I started GrowthX AI btw)

Every day we get to help companies like Lovable, Ramp, and Webflow grow organically.

We’re experience insane organic traction:

  → $13m+ in revenue
  → Cash flow positive
  → 8-week waitlist for new customers


But everything started with ONE WORKSHOP. Giving away everything I knew. Genuinely trying to help and give value.

Hopefully by now I’ve earned enough trust with everyone to know this is not a marketing gimmick.

I believe the best marketing is no marketing. It’s building resources so valuable that people would be willing to pay for it.

That’s what we are doing!!

Launching a paid community and committing to invest $1m+ to make it by far the most valuable resource for GROWTH OPERATORS who want to be AI-native.

---

⭐️ Introducing the AI Led Growth Community ⭐️ 

I don’t ask for favors often, but if you ever got any value out of our content or things we’ve done, I’d be forever grateful for your support ❤️

Just comment GROWTH or leave a nice comment.

As a thank-you, I’ll DM you a 90% OFF discount to the community.

Marcel Santilli

CEO @ GrowthX.ai 🇺🇸 🇧🇷 // Ex- Deepgram, Scale AI, HashiCorp, ServiceTitan // CMO, Advisor, Investor

No alternative text description for this image

Got to vibe code with the one and only Anton yesterday!

Working with Cecilia and the team at Lovable has been amazing.

It's so energizing to work with companies that move insanely fast and are willing to do things differently. 

The room was filled with insanely smart and accomplished builder like Claire Vo, Camilla Matias and so many more.

It's crazy how anyone can build now.

I vibe coded for 9 hours straight yesterday 😱 (with Lovable of course)

This project includes:
- Landing page
- Sign up with user management
- Full database
- Edge functions
-- Document processing with classification
-- Auto enrichment of profiles 
- Subscription with Stripe
- Custom domain GetLoanKit[dot]com
- Analytics

All done via prompting in Lovable!

That is literally insane. The biggest unlocks?

- Using the "chat" feature first and then implementing plans
- Using deep research in Perplexity, Manus, and Claude
- Creating a detailed chat in Claude with all the context as a helper
- BIGGEST ONE = Lovable Cloud with edge functions


Here's what I actually built and the back story...

My wife went out of town with our 2yr old and our Airstream. I had the whole weekend to myself 🫣

Then yesterday, a friend of mine came over that had a lot of knowledge of Loan Officers. He told me he had an app idea.

I immediately pulled up my computer and said STOP, just talk again. 

- Step 1: got a Notion doc and had him dictate it using Wispr Flow
- Step 2: used a shaping doc prompt and started to come up with a plan
- Step 3: kickoff a ton of deep researchers to plan out the knowledge and data
- Step 4: took a high level plan and asked Lovable to build initial screen
- Step 5: started to build out the views, data model, and functionality bit by bit
- Step 6: bought domain and built landing page
- Step 7: built advanced features with AI (simple prompts in Lovable that used edge functions, just gave OpenAI API key)
- Step 8: Created a quick logo in Figma and polished SEO stuff


Used about $100 of credits and used tools that cost me about $200/mo in max subscriptions. 

Stack:
- What I used: Lovable, Perplexity, Manus, Claude, Figma, Stripe, 
- Project stack: Vite, TypeScript, React, shadcn-ui, Tailwind CSS
- Database, storage, user management, analytics, edge functions in Lovable native


I think that's roughly it. Happy to share prompts and details if anyone is interested. It wasn't anything fancy at all. Just plain language and simple tools.


At the end I asked my friend who had never vibe coded how much would he have paid for this prototype out of his own pocket knowing the output. 

$15,000 🤑 

That's ~$300 in cost + 9 hours = $15k+ in value.

Next, in our spare time we're gonna try to get this to 1000 paying loan officer users.

I used to draw a line between work and life.

Now I erase it on purpose.

We hosted a Halloween party this weekend. 

(Sorry this was literally the only picture I had 😆)

Customers, employees, friends.
All the same people.

---

Early in my career, I thought separation was the goal.

Keep work over there.
Life over here.
Don't let them touch.

I had it backwards.

The problem wasn't mixing it.

**The problem was who I was working with.**

I started GrowthX AI because I was tired of toxic founders.

Tired of environments that drained me.
Tired of pretending work and life were separate when work consumed most of my life.


So I wanted to build something different.

A company where I get to pick who I work with.
Where customers can become friends.
Where the office feels like an extension of my living room.

---

We FIRED a customer last month. (big logo)

One of the stakeholders was super rude to our team.
Not collaborative.
Not someone I'd invite to my house.

So we fired them.

That's the third one this year.
And we're still booked through next year.

Turns out when you're clear about who you want to work with, the right people show up.

----

This company is an extension of my life. It's my life's work.

Breakfast at the office.
Barbecues at the house.
Michelin star dinners with CMOs.
Courtside Warriors games.

At first I thought they were perks
But really they're reminders.

The journey is the destination.
Not the valuation.
Not the exit.
The daily work with people you actually enjoy being around.

Building a company is crazy hard.

You get hit from all directions.
So doing it with amazing humans should be a non-negotiable.

Here's to no boundaries between home and work.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Just a friendly reminder that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

Work can be fun too! 

Adding a little bit of fun makes a huge difference and energizes everyone.


what are some ways you've added some fun to your team's day to day? 

looking for ideas

Drug or Fuel?

I've been thinking about what drives my decisions. Not what I decide. But why I decide.

Every motivation falls into one of two categories. Drug or fuel.

💊 Drugs give you a quick hit.

They push you forward. But they come with side effects. Prove people wrong. Chase status. Avoid embarrassment.

These work. For a while. Then they burn you out.

⛽️ Fuel keeps you running.

It's sustainable. It energizes you. It clears your mind.

Building something that matters. Solving a problem you care about. Getting better at your craft.

----

Two frameworks I use to check myself:

1️⃣ Framework 1: What x When

Drug + Right Time = Necessary push (rare but acceptable) 
Drug + Wrong Time = Self-sabotage 
Fuel + Right Time = Peak performance 
Fuel + Wrong Time = Wasted energy

Sometimes you need a drug. A deadline. A competitor nipping at your heels. That's fine if it's the right moment.
But running on drugs long-term? That's when timing matters.


1️⃣ Framework 2: What x Why

Drug + Right Reason = Dangerous compromise 
Drug + Wrong Reason = Path to burnout 
Fuel + Right Reason = Sustainable excellence 
Fuel + Wrong Reason = Misaligned effort

You can have good fuel. But if you're using it for the wrong reason? Still breaks down.

Building something great to prove your worth to your parents isn't fuel. It's a drug with better packaging.


---


The questions I ask:

Is this energizing me or depleting me? 
Am I running toward something or away from something? 
Is this the right time to be driven by this? 
Am I doing the right thing for the right reason?

Most of us mix both. That's fine. The goal isn't purity. It's awareness.

When you catch yourself running on drugs, switch to fuel. When you're low on fuel, figure out what fills the tank. When the timing's off, wait. When the reason's wrong, recalibrate.

The work doesn't change. But how long you can sustain it does.

Drug or fuel. 
Right time or wrong time. 
Right reason or wrong reason.

taplio

Marcel Santilli's Linkedin Analytics

Marcel Santilli

Performance ScoreMarcel Santilli's LinkedIn Performance

Marcel Santilli's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Marcel Santilli's Linkedin Analytics

Marcel Santilli

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Marcel Santilli's LinkedIn Performance

Marcel Santilli's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Marcel Santilli's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreMarcel Santilli's LinkedIn Performance

Marcel Santilli's Best Posts (last 30 days)