How You.com rebuilt its GTM strategy with multithreaded marketing

Towards the end of last year, I spoke to Kady Srinivasan, now CMO at Freshworks, just before she wrapped up her time at You.com.

We talked through why the old playbooks are broken and how she rebuilt You.com’s GTM strategy, 10xing MQLs and increasing ACV by 86% in the process.

The conversation covers the multithreaded marketing model behind that shift, how the team was structured to execute it, using AI as an accelerator, and why marketing to AI natives versus AI laggards requires completely different thinking.

The move to multithreaded marketing

At $100M, You.com has gone through multiple pivots. The company moved from a consumer search engine to an AI search infrastructure business selling into enterprises. At the same time, it shifted from the application layer down into the infrastructure layer of the stack:

“Everything was different, who we were selling to, what we were selling, and how we needed to explain the value.”

Kady joined midway through the transition and rebuilt the GTM strategy from the bottom up, starting with a clear view of who they were selling to:

“We landed on this idea of AI laggards and AI natives as the two types of company that we want to go after. And they’re significantly different to sell to.”

AI laggards aren’t problem-aware. This adds an entire extra layer where content, thought leadership, social proof, and sales conversations all have to work together:

“I couldn’t have a PMM function building one playbook for laggards and another for natives…so I created what I call a multithreaded organisation.”

A multithreaded model runs on a few key principles:

Parallel execution across channels.
Generalist marketers who own outcomes end-to-end,
Flywheels with workflows that feed each other and compound over time.

“If you do these three things, you can get an edge. We 10x’d our MQL volume and ACV went up 86%. So it’s working.”

Building a multithreaded marketing team

The multithreaded model works because the team is designed to support it. That includes:

Generalists marketers who are comfortable owning outcomes, not channels.
Prompt marketers with deep, native AI fluency who can automate workflows and build systems.
Forward-deployed engineers who can apply their work with customers to internal marketing workflows.

Digging into the prompt marketer skillset, Kady explained that: “they know how to work with Zapier, n8n, Make, and APIs. They can build apps with Replit and things like that.”

In Kady’s view, every company should hire a prompt marketer early to build automations you’ll need anyway.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re small or big, you can start to apply them to those flywheels.”

Compounding flywheels in practice

A lot of people talk about flywheels but it’s not always clear how to build them or where AI adds value. For You.com, it involves automating where possible while keeping human judgment in the right places.

Kady shared two examples:

Content-led flywheel

Like many, Kady believes that quality content is key. The content flywheel scales production, provides consistent leads, and sources a stream of thought leadership topics.

GrowthX augments content production (from two ebooks a quarter to four or five a month),
Content is distributed through newsletters,
ICP leads are routed to sales,
Those conversations feed topics straight back into content production.

Founder-led marketing flywheel

The second flywheel is built around founder activity on LinkedIn.

Founders post on LinkedIn,
Engaged contacts are captured, filtered for ICP fit, and enriched,
Contacts are routed into nurture flows, sales conversations, or in-person experiences,
Those conversations generate insight that feeds the next round of thought leadership.

A 22-solution GTM stack

Running these flywheels requires a hefty tech stack. At last count, You.com was running 22 tools across go-to-market, including 11x, Clay, Connect the Dots, Gong, and You.com itself.

While it’s working, Kady is realistic about its complexity:

“We have 22 tools, which is crazy. And that’ll only increase fragmentation. The question is, do we use more prompt marketers to stitch all of it together or do we just get rid of a bunch and consolidate?”

For now, making the tools work together is the priority because there isn’t a single tool of choice that could consolidate the stack.