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Growth After Headcount

Haris Odobasic

Growth After Headcount is about the companies rewriting it — founders building AI-native businesses that hit serious revenue with almost no employees, and the leaders inside established companies trying to catch up before it's too late.

Each episode is a conversation with someone actually doing it. How they structure the work, what they hand to AI and what they keep, where it breaks, and what it means for everyone still scaling the old way.

Hosted by Haris Odobasic.

Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled.

Connect with Haris on LinkedIn or X

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9 episodes
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S1 · E8
Wednesday · 34 min
The 5 Tiers Of AI Vulnerability — Bram Kaashoek (Main Capital) #008
Y Combinator's latest guidance to founders was blunt: AI has cut the cost of building software 10 to 100x, so clone an existing product and sell it for a tenth of the price. Bram Kaashoek is Partner and COO at Main Capital Partners, a PE firm with more than 50 enterprise software companies representing €12 billion in assets. His answer is not defensive. Cheaper code is real. It just isn't the game. The episode makes three arguments. First, the shift that matters is not cost but category: software is moving from a tool that helps a professional to a platform that executes the job, which unlocks budgets far beyond IT. Second, AI vulnerability is not evenly spread. Main scores its market in five tiers, from systems of record down to single-task tools, and only invests in the top three. Third, incumbents sit on the one thing AI-native startups cannot build: years of customer and usage data. The hard part is not orchestration. It is getting that data out of the product, especially when the product still runs on-prem. Chapters 00:00 — The room where the Dutch cabinet used to meet 01:03 — YC's advice: clone it and sell it for a tenth 02:23 — From software as a tool to software that does the job 03:17 — Where the moat sits: trust, domain expertise, delivery 04:37 — Main's five tiers of AI vulnerability 06:18 — A competitor is 40% cheaper. Why don't customers switch? 07:59 — Fortes built a CRM in three to four months 10:20 — Enterprise deals are still sold by humans 13:21 — Headcount used to be the flex 16:12 — Revenue architecture: one data layer or nothing 18:02 — Incumbents have the data. Getting it out is the problem. 22:51 — What incumbents can learn from AI-native companies 24:23 — What AI-native companies can learn from incumbents 25:57 — ClickUp, 30-35% EBITDA, and do-more-with-the-same-team 28:06 — This is not an efficiency game: Pointsharp and WoodWing 31:33 — Five winning recipes for incumbents Guest Bram Kaashoek, Partner and COO at Main Capital Partners. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bramkaashoek/ Main Capital Partners: https://main.nl/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E7
September 3 · 19 min
Building The 10x Accountant — Nick Knuppe (Neno) #007
Traditional accounting firms run one accountant per 30 to 35 clients. Nick Knuppe is building toward one per 150. Neno is an AI-native financial services company that is both the software and the accounting firm: business bank accounts, expense cards, AR and AP, in-house accountants and tax fiscalists, and its own general ledger. In August 2026, Neno announced a €6.6 million seed round led by AlleyCorp, with Motive Partners and Firstminute Capital. Seven months after commercial launch, Nick says they onboard a customer a day, have passed 150 customers, and get more than 60 percent of new business from referrals. Three arguments carry the episode. Accounting software fees are heading to zero, so brand, service, and distribution decide who wins. Every hire has to pass one test: is this person so important that AI cannot do their job? And instead of OKRs, Neno runs four non-negotiable metrics, from ARR growth to customers per accountant. If they miss any of the four, the thesis is false. Neno's funding announcement Chapters 00:00 — Intro 00:43 — The broken middle: 26 million SMEs, 220,000 firms on a 50-year-old model 02:25 — One accountant, 150 clients: breaking the industry ratio 04:29 — "Are you an AI company or an accounting firm?" 05:44 — Customers checking their accountant's work against Claude 07:44 — Expanding across tax codes: e-invoicing and API-led tax bodies 09:17 — Why Neno won't acquire legacy firms 10:47 — Trust at seven months old: referrals over marketing 13:05 — When software fees hit zero, brand decides 14:46 — Which billable-hours industries this playbook eats next 15:56 — The done-for-you end state: AI calls your late payers 17:06 — Non-negotiable metrics instead of OKRs Guest Nick Knuppe, Co-founder and CEO at Neno. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickknuppe/ Neno: https://www.neno.co/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E6
August 26 · 28 min
There's A New Chasm Before The Chasm — Yannick Dillen (Vlerick) #006
Yannick Dillen teaches entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School and watches students kill good startup ideas over a 1,000 euro token bill. Meanwhile, Belgian scale-ups that fired their software engineers are quietly reposting the same vacancies. His argument: the zero-employee startup is not the cheap startup. Salary cost became token cost, and the pendulum between AI and software will settle in the middle. Three claims carry this episode. There is now an extra chasm before the innovators, because every market is flooded with lookalike vibe-coded products, and that is pushing B2B companies back to trade fairs and billboards. The "beautiful-weather entrepreneur" who sets up an AI company and waits on a terrace will fail the way 97% of dropshippers did. And the companies that win will be the ones that remove complexity, not the ones that add features. Chapters 00:00 — Intro 00:15 — Zero employees, not zero costs: the token bill that kills student startups 01:45 — Cheap wins: open-source models and how long corporate AI budgets last 04:16 — Belgium re-hires its fired engineers: the pendulum ends in the middle 06:44 — The rising water: which human peaks does AI submerge next? 08:04 — The beautiful-weather entrepreneur will not survive 10:46 — Swan's seven-day weeks, RB2B's seven months hands-off, and the dropshipping déjà vu 14:27 — Crossing the chasm at AI speed: the new pre-chasm before the innovators 17:45 — "It has never been that easy to build the wrong product" 20:10 — Does founder brand matter? The Marple Data counterexample 23:07 — The rise of analog: trade fairs, billboards, guerrilla marketing 27:34 — Complexity kills: the parting advice Guest Yannick Dillen, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannickdillen/ Vlerick: https://www.vlerick.com/en/find-faculty-and-experts/yannick-dillen/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E5
August 18 · 28 min
AI in Go-To-Market: Building a Revenue System for 2026 — Jacco van der Kooij #005
Jacco van der Kooij has spent over a decade telling SaaS companies how to build revenue systems. His read on AI is not that it makes teams faster. It's that AI revealed what was already broken. Companies never trained their people properly, and their marketing and sales systems were built not to talk to each other. The tools didn't cause the problem. They exposed it. The conversation runs from why the knowledge gap between buyer and seller has flipped, to why incumbents can't copy AI-native companies without rebuilding their data layer, to why the channels most GTM teams lean on for pipeline, SEO, cold email, and LinkedIn, are all losing their pull at once. Jacco argues for building systems over hiring people or buying more tools, makes the case that a real-time data system is the single most urgent thing a company can build, and pushes back on revenue per employee as a number that means one thing to a VC and something else to whoever has to run the business. Chapters 00:00 — Intro: what a revenue system is 00:31 — Why AI hits the whole customer journey, not one tool 01:01 — The knowledge gap flipped: buyers now outknow sellers 02:41 — From people-led to system-led 05:09 — Why incumbents can't just switch: data and mentality 06:14 — When coolness beats brand, and when brand wins back 07:23 — Trust isn't relationships, and three channels are collapsing 10:21 — The rise of analog: a magazine with a paper route 13:54 — AI didn't make you faster, it revealed you never trained your people 20:04 — The most urgent build: a real-time data system 23:57 — Revenue per employee: VC metric or operating one? 26:43 — What stays the same: customers, systems, data Guest Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaccovanderkooij/ Winning by Design: https://winningbydesign.com/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AIinstead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E4
August 12 · 24 min
$8.6M ARR, Nobody's Touched It In A Month — Adam Robinson (RB2B) #004
Adam Robinson runs RB2B at $8.6M ARR. His CTO has not touched the code in over a month, he posts on LinkedIn three times a week about something else entirely, and the business keeps growing. He did not get there by wiring together the most sophisticated agents. He kept the product stupid simple, designed the whole thing from first principles so AI could handle the work a team used to, and priced it below what it costs anyone else to acquire a customer. The episode turns on one disagreement: what an autonomous business actually is. Adam's answer is a business built from the start to run itself, not a business with a pile of agents and three founders working around the clock. He lays out the three things that let RB2B outlast the copycats: awareness he creates for free through his own brand, a fixed-cost data asset that makes each new contact cost nothing, and a hard refusal to add features. He is also blunt about the ceiling. Churn is high, so he is not chasing $100M. He wants cash flow and a portfolio of sub-VC-scale bets, and his next one, MoltSets, sells contact data built for AI agents. Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:00 — Why he built the audience before the product 03:00 — The Labor Day test: three posts that found the market 05:00 — Keep the product stupid simple so the AI runs support 08:21 — What an autonomous business actually is 10:56 — The data asset that costs nothing per new contact 15:19 — Contact data for AI agents: the next bet 18:30 — Can incumbents catch up? The 6sense problem 20:44 — Retention.com: six people to $13M ARR 23:11 — The one-person billion-dollar company Guest Adam Robinson, CEO & Co-founder of Retention.com, RB2B, and MoltSets. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/retentionadam/ Retention.com: https://retention.com/ RB2B: https://rb2b.com/ MoltSets: https://moltsets.com/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E3
July 30 · 21 min
CRO 2.0: $25M To $100M From The Terminal — Omar Ismail (Ascend) #003
Ascend grew from zero to $25M ARR with no growth team. No growth marketer, no ads manager, no paid engine. Word of mouth, referrals, and a small set of partnerships. Then Omar Ismail joined as COO and built the entire go-to-market stack himself, orchestrated end to end in Claude Code. The target now: $100M ARR without meaningfully scaling headcount. Omar calls the second half of his job CRO 2.0: one person owning strategy and the machine that executes it. He argues the real trust problem with AI is not hallucination but software bugs in the systems it builds, which is why his next hire is a go-to-market engineer, not a marketer. And when everyone has the same tools, differentiation moves back to taste, judgment, and the things AI can't do at scale: physical mail, conferences, human relationships. Chapters 00:00 — Intro 00:35 — Banking, VC, and a music-tech exit before Ascend 03:08 — Zero to $25M ARR on word of mouth, now going AI native 03:46 — No growth team: one COO owns the whole go-to-market 07:18 — Claude Code as the orchestration layer 08:48 — The trust problem is bugs, not hallucinations 10:24 — The next hire: a go-to-market engineer 11:22 — HubSpot backbone, natural-language dashboards on top 13:15 — Where humans stay: taste, judgment, 14 usable hooks out of 20 15:24 — When everyone runs AI outbound, mailers and conferences win 19:08 — $25M to $100M without adding people 20:44 — The KPI that never changes: retention Guest Omar Ismail, COO at Ascend. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarismailb/ Ascend: https://www.joinascend.com/ https://omarismail.com/projects/growth-engine About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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S1 · E2
July 26 · 26 min
100x The Human, Skip The Headcount — Amos Bar-Joseph (Swan AI) #002
Amos Bar-Joseph built and scaled two B2B startups on the old playbook. Raise big, hire to forty people before the first million in revenue, then spend years fighting the bloat you created. With Swan AI he threw it out. In 2025 Swan went from zero to over 200 customers and seven figures in ARR with three founders and no additional hires. The number he's aiming at is ten million dollars in ARR per employee. This episode is about how that actually works. Amos started where most teams start, building a specialized agent for every task, and it didn't hold. Swan now runs its entire go-to-market on a single coding agent with a file system and a knowledge base it updates itself. We get into why data is not context, why the job that's left for humans is specification and review, and why he'll never let AI write his LinkedIn posts. Chapters 00:00 — Intro 00:21 — Two startups on the old playbook, and why it broke 01:10 — The autonomous business: scaling ARR per employee, not valuation 01:39 — Zero to 200 customers with three founders 02:54 — Why Swan killed its specialized agents and runs one 04:54 — Data is not context: what your CRM teaches an agent 06:40 — Context engineering, and why it's the core RevOps skill now 10:29 — Fully automated, semi-automated, human-first 12:19 — Different beats better: don't give AI your edge 14:17 — Personal brand, and the rise of the analog 18:14 — Scaling one seller to 100x instead of hiring ten 20:41 — What this means for VC and bootstrapping 23:03 — Talent, compensation, and widening inequality 25:09 — A software revolution, not a labour revolution Guest Amos Bar-Joseph, co-founder of Swan AI. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amos-bar-joseph/ Swan: https://www.getswan.com/ About the show Growth After Headcount is a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of people. New episodes weekly. The book lands in 2027. More at https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards (https://revenuewizards.com/), a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum (https://geni.us/revops-pendulum). He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisodobasic/ X: https://x.com/OdobasicHaris
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July 22 · 1 min
Growth After Headcount — The Podcast (Trailer)
The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. That playbook is dead. A new generation of companies is running on AI instead of headcount. Small teams, serious revenue, and org charts that would have looked impossible three years ago. This podcast goes inside those companies to find out how they actually work, from the founders building them. Each episode is a conversation with someone running an AI-native company: what they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers really look like. No hype, no "AI is transforming business" filler. Just how these companies are built and what it means for everyone still hiring the old way. The podcast runs alongside the book of the same name, Growth After Headcount: How to Scale a Company with AI Instead of People. New episodes coming soon. Subscribe so you don't miss the first one. 🔗 Website & newsletter: https://www.growthafterheadcount.com/ About the host Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards, a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. Connect with Haris: LinkedIn & X
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S1 · E1
July 21 · 5 min
Growth After Headcount — What is this about? #001
The old playbook said scale revenue by scaling people. A new generation of companies is throwing it out. I'm Haris Odobasic, and this is Growth After Headcount — a podcast and a book about how companies scale with AI instead of headcount. I come from revenue operations, where the whole job is aligning people, process, technology, and data into one efficient revenue system. It works, but it's still people-dependent. Plug AI into that system and something changes: a handful of people can run work that used to take a hundred. That shift is creating a new kind of company, built lean from day one, and it's putting pressure on incumbents who grew the old way. Over the coming months I'll talk to the founders, investors, and operators building these companies. What they automated, what they didn't, what broke, and what the numbers actually look like. We'll get into the big questions too: can there be a one-person, billion-dollar company? What does a truly autonomous business look like when marketing, sales, service, and even the product improve themselves? New episodes weekly. Occasionally it'll just be me. Everything feeds the book, out in 2027. Follow along and build alongside me. Haris Odobasic is Managing Partner at Revenue Wizards a GTM and RevOps consultancy, and the author of The RevOps Pendulum. He writes and speaks about how AI is changing the way companies are built and scaled. Connect with Haris on LinkedIn or X
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