Six Months Of Working at Profound

My life is different in every single way now compared to freelancing.

I’ve now worked at Profound for over 6 months and I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on my experience here so far and how it differs from my previous two years as a full-time consultant. Also I was on an 8.5 hour plane ride from Paris to NYC so I had some time 🙂

The Profound marketing team

If you subscribed since my last update, I worked for myself for two years before closing it all down to join another startup as their first marketing hire. I spent my entire career in startups, most recently at Loom before they were acquired by Atlassian for ~$1B, and I was getting a little bored of my freelancing work and a little worried that I would miss the AI boom.

So, what’s my life like now? Different in every single way possible.

First, a note on Profound

Profound is unlike any company I have ever worked at before. I thought Loom’s growth during Covid was crazy when everyone transitioned to remote work but Profound is next level.

If you haven’t heard of Profound, we help brands understand and control their presence in AI search. We give them tools to track their visibility in ChatGPT and other answer engines and then create and optimize content workflows to ensure they’re always listed in the answers when you ask ChatGPT “what’s the best men’s running shoes for a 36 year old man who is more of a weightlifter than a runner living in Brooklyn who wants to run in Prospect Park 3 times a week?”

I joined Profound when we were around 15 employees and we’ll approach 100 employees by the end of 2025. We announced our Series A in June and our Series B two months later in August.

That kind of growth, especially as the first marketer, makes my time at Profound very unique. I planned our Series A marketing announcement mostly by myself, and then two months later 3 other marketers helped plan our Series B announcement. We’re still at four total marketers as of writing, and we just wrapped up our second major user conference, Zero Click London, which had almost 500 attendees and was planned just five weeks after our first user conference, Zero Click New York, which had over 300 attendees.

If Loom was a hyper-growth company, Profound is a warp-speed company.

What have I been doing?

I sometimes struggle to articulate exactly what I do at Profound because I touch so many areas of this business. I’ll try again here:

Marketing:

From Zero Click London 2025

• I built and executed our marketing strategy, which involves sharing original research on LinkedIn to establish us as a market leader.

• I organize, schedule, and sometimes sit for interviews, podcasts, and webinars. Mostly I schedule them with someone else because he is our primary external voice.

• I’m the primary user of our own Profound account and I use it every week to dogfood our product and increase our own AI visibility.

• I organize, sponsor, and sometimes speak at industry events like brighton SEO. I’ve moderated two panels at both of our Zero Click events with Lily Ray, Mike King, and Aleyda Solis.

• I write content for our blog, external websites and partners, and I’ve been interviewed by the press (with excellent help from our Comms lead).

Sales:

• I have given about 50 sales demos of Profound, mostly when we didn’t have enough sales reps so I jumped in and took a bunch of them.

• I have personally closed almost a significant dollar amount of annual contracts and I’ve also influenced many more sales deals by leveraging my experience and existing relationships.

• I’m in sales retirement now that we have a much more robust sales team but I legitimately love assisting with deals.

Customer Support:

• I actively provide customer support to our customers via Slack and over Zoom. Most of the company does this though and it’s encouraged.

• I help new Profound customers get started with our product and I walk them through exactly how I use the product myself. This is one of my favorite activities that is nowhere in my formal job description.

Product:

• I’ve vibe coded new product features that are in active development right now by proper engineers and designers.

Ops:

• Until we hired a rev ops person, I was the primary owner of both our Hubspot account and our lead routing system. I was very happy to give this up to our expert RevOps lead now.

• I onboarded and built our first lead routing system which helped massively accelerate pipeline creation and meeting attendance for our sales team.

If you didn’t read all of that, the tl;dr is I have touched nearly every aspect of this business in the last 6 months. This is not a normal marketing job, Profound is not a normal company, and I am also not a normal employee. 10+ years into my career I have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at and I fully lean into my strengths here.

Differences between freelancing and full-time

With that additional context of Profound, my life over the last 6 months has been crazy. chaotic, and full of some unexpected events.

As usual, I will be as transparent as possible here with what is different. I figure it’s easier to lay out the themes in a table and then talk about them in more detail below.

Let’s start with the big one, working hours. I am putting in a ton of hours here. Working from 8am to 8pm is not abnormal, but nor is it every day for me. I occasionally go into the office on Saturdays, as do other people here, but I want to be clear: Profound is not a 996 company. Our co-founder Dylan wrote more about our working philosophy here.

Profound is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that is still putting it mildly. Everyone who works there is pushing hard to thread this needle. We’re all a little bit crazy but no one is forcing us to be at our desks all the time. We all want this to work and we’re willing to do whatever it takes.

All of the fun benefits of a warp-speed company come downstream of the effort everyone is putting in. There is no time to waste.

I can confidently say that I have never had this much fun at work, nor have I been this fulfilled at work either. I work with 3 of the best marketers in the world and we have each other’s backs in a way that I’ve also never experienced before. We get to plan insane events and we punch significantly above our weight considering there is only 4 of us.

I’ve told this to all of my close confidants (and our CEO), but I can say with very high confidence that I would’ve regretted not taking this job. Profound is the perfect job for me, which I think is reflected in the kind of impact I’ve made across the entire business. No one asked me to help take demos or close deals, I did it because I wanted to and because it helps the business. No one asked me to vibe code a new feature, although I do expect that to become normal for marketers in 2026.

Freelancing gave me the opportunity to sit on the sidelines, build up a different skillset, and patiently wait for the perfect job. I don’t think I would’ve been presented the Profound opportunity (or been hired if I was presented it) had I not spent the prior two years freelancing. Everything in my life and career was training to set me up to be perfectly suited for this job. I truly believe that.

Looking ahead

If this all ended tomorrow, I would have no regrets about how I spent the last 6 months of my life. Running my own business for two years gave me extreme confidence in myself. I can always do that again. Saying no to my clients asks for two years gave me the muscle to (sometimes) say no to my new CEO too :)

My job at Profound in 2026 will be different than it was in 2025. We’re a much larger company now, and the things I did when we were 20 people were different than the things I’ll do when we’re 200 people. That is part of the fun. I’m working on a ton of different projects, hiring a team, and planning our next big user conference.

In the free time that I have, I’m continuing to prioritize my physical and mental health. I religiously go to the gym every morning before work and I’m in the best shape of my life. Over the last month I’ve caught up with 3 of my close friends who live in Toronto, San Francisco, and London because Profound travel took me to those places and I took a few personal days at the end to see friends I haven’t seen in years (or in one case, over a decade).

The intention of this newsletter was not to instagramify the highlight reel of my time at Profound, but overall things are going quite well. Sometimes the work is hard and the hours can be difficult, but it’s all worth it right now.

Life comes in phases, and this is my warp-speed phase. I won’t be sharing this newsletter on LinkedIn so if you have any thoughts or just want to say hi, please hit reply :)

Nick

p.s. Long time subscribers will have seen many photos of my dog, Vito. I said goodbye to Vito in August. He was a good boy, not always the best boy (so stubborn!), but he enriched my life in ways that words cannot describe and I miss him so much.