40% Reply Rate. Zero Magic Messaging.

AI researcher turned founder turned growth engineer. Still figuring it out, in public.

M.Sc. in deep learning. Former AI Team Lead. Published. Then I got hungry for more impact and founded The Voice Box, my AI agency.

Needed leads, so I went deep on LinkedIn: 40,000 followers in 8 months, $100K closed in 90 days. All organic.

Growth is a blend of experimentation, data, and human psychology, increasingly engineering.

Now I'm the founding growth engineer at Swan, building the first autonomous business where humans are amplified 100x.

This is where I unpack it as it happens.

Stick around.

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We grew 21% last month.

The one thing I'm going BANANAS about? Our reply rate.

40% of our outreach gets a reply.

It all comes down to a few principles:

1/ Organic content (founder led + company)

2/ We only message people who are interested in us

3/ I'm OBSESSED with capturing every signal there is, auto-magically, per account: LinkedIn engagement & DMs, website visitors, profile views, webinars, events, and more. We work HARD on content, and we want every inch of that intent & awareness captured.

4/ Every account gets researched before we reach out, buying committee mapped, full context given.

5/ Swan AI learned Jeremy's voice. It drafts his messages (learned over hundreds of iterations), he approves, and it gets better with every send.

6/ ZERO manual work policy: AI native by design.

7/ We have a GTM brain that knows everything. Every customer call. Every touchpoint that account has EVER had with us.

With that level of research it feels less like an autonomous business and more like an intelligence unit.

Theoretically we could hire a few more salespeople and scale faster.

We WON'T.

We want to optimize Jeremy Hurst's work so much that he only spends time on conversations that already want to happen.

Once we do that, imagine the amount of leverage we could have.

• Ariel

The Hypothesis

Signal capture drives reply rate

40% of outreach gets a reply. Behind it: every account tracked before a single message goes out. LinkedIn engagement, site visits, profile views, webinars. All logged automatically. Outreach only starts once someone's already shown intent.

The Test

Turn On One Signal

Pick one signal you're not tracking: profile views, site visits, webinar signups.

1/ Turn it on this week. Just watch, no outreach yet.

2/ Log who shows up and what they did.

3/ After seven days, count how many were already warm before you reached out.

That number is your baseline to beat next month.

You can have access to all of my skills and signals free: gtmskills.com/ariel-cohen

Your Data Point

Which signal do you think would move your reply rate most?

Turn on one signal this week. I dare you to reply with what you catch.

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1,000 GTM operators. Four days. One room. Swan's sponsoring Pavilion's GTM2026.

Ten years running, same format: VP+ operators comparing notes on what's actually working right now. Real strategies from the people running GTM today. No pitch decks.

Geoffrey Moore's speaking. So are Nick Mehta and Jamie Domenici. Amos is giving a keynote on building an autonomous business. The rest of the Swan team will be there too, happy to talk shop.

• September 28 to October 1
• The Glasshouse, NYC
• attendgtm.com
• Code SWAN20, 20% off registration, active through October 1

Community Notes