Growth Unhinged is proudly supported by AirOps
The way people get information has changed more in the past year than in the previous twenty. That’s the 🔥 headline from the new 2026 AI Search Playbook from AirOps, and I’m seeing it firsthand.
The report pulls research from 15M+ AI queries to reveal four plays that drive visibility and pipeline from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. They found that 85% of brand mentions in AI search come from third-party sources, not your own. Freshness is critical: 70% of AI-cited pages were updated within the past year.
Get the framework, the data, and the 90-day action plan here.
Over the next two months, I’m going to share an in-depth playbook for launching and growing an AI-native business.
This series is the result of more than a dozen 1:1 interviews with founders from breakout AI-native companies. Some have already scaled to $100M ARR and beyond – including Clay, Gamma, HeyGen, Intercom (Fin.ai), and Fireworks AI. Others are fast-growing AI-native startups who are well-positioned to join them including 7AI, AirOps, bolt.new, Fyxer, GC AI, GrowthX, HappyRobot, and incident.io.
An overview of the series:
Part 1: A guide for reaching $1 million ARR (TODAY)
The conversations woke me up to just how different AI-native businesses are compared to B2B software, along with things that haven’t changed. Here’s a preview of some of the more interesting takeaways:
PMF isn’t gradual in AI.
AI-native companies reach $1 million ARR twice as fast as B2B SaaS.
Price sensitivity drops dramatically when AI does real work.
Product success hinges on AI performance crossing a reliability threshold.
Explicit user feedback (thumbs up/down) can be surprisingly insightful on its own.
AI companies tend to delay hiring their first AE until about $2-5M ARR.
The winning GTM motions combine bottom-up discovery with top-down sales.
The best GTM teams look more like consulting firms than SaaS sellers.
A huge thank you to: Alexander Berger (COO of bolt.new), Archie Hollingsworth (co-founder of Fyxer), Cecilia Ziniti (co-founder of GC AI), Des Traynor (co-founder of Intercom, Fin.ai), Jon Noronha (co-founder of Gamma), Joshua Xu (co-founder of HeyGen), Lin Qiao (co-founder of Fireworks AI), Lior Div (co-founder of 7AI), Marcel Santilli (Founder of GrowthX), Matt Hammel (co-founder of AirOps), Pablo Palafox (co-founder of HappyRobot), Stephen Whitworth (co-founder of incident.io) and Varun Anand (co-founder of Clay).
Subscribe to Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Growth Unhinged to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
UpgradeA paid subscription gets you:
- Full archive
- Subscriber-only bonus posts
- Subscriber-only discounts and perks
- Full Growth Unhinged resources library