---
title: "Episode Guide: Month One in the Growth Org"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/5c160aa5-1451-457a-8b87-067c484a6dc6
stack: https://stacklist.com/c/podcast/stack/d713f50c-8baa-40f3-9242-ac469e5cb490
summary: "Building Stacklist episode featuring two new hires, Ivanha (marketing) and Nick Gebhardt (growth), discussing their first month and how to sell a product in an undefined category to real estate professionals. The episode explores growth tactics, customer acquisition through existing networks, and the challenge of positioning Stacklist as something entirely new rather than a bookmarking tool or link-in-bio page."
tags: "growth-strategy, startup, sales-motion, real-estate, product-market-fit, ai-discovery"
key_entities: "Stacklist (organization), Ivanha (person), Nick Gebhardt (person), real estate (location), AI answers (technology), product-market-fit (concept), ideal customer profile (concept)"
classification: "transcript"
content_hash: "sha256:269fe3a29d5779739a6f23d62d02480803f350d12165ef2319d40d9f7d22e65e"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 3803
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# Episode Guide: Month One in the Growth Org

# Building Stacklist | Month One in the Growth Org

**Show:** Building Stacklist (co-hosted format)
**Voice mode:** stacklist_brand
**Audience:** Business / general
**Episode length:** ~19.5 min

---

## Description

Two new hires, one month in, one honest question: how do you sell something people don't have a word for yet?

## Episode summary

Ivanha and Nick Gebhardt both joined Stacklist about a month ago — she runs marketing, he leads growth — so this is two new hires comparing notes in real time. Nick lays out the growth motion so far (outreach, and a lot of it) and why real estate is the first focus: a realtor only matters to a client in rare, far-apart windows, and the real opportunity is staying useful in all the time between. That leads to the sharpest insight of the episode — realtors already own the lists worth having, the trusted painters, roofers, and inspectors, but they're trapped in binders and memory, and Stacklist turns them into cards and stacks inside a hub. From there, the honest part: selling something that sounds like a bookmarking tool or a link-in-bio page and is none of them, what it means to pitch getting found in AI answers, and the moment a sale stops feeling like a sale. An honest, builder-to-builder look at what growth actually looks like in month one — the tests, the challenges, and what's starting to land.

## Key topics

- Why real estate comes first: a realtor is only top-of-mind in rare windows — buying, selling, painting the house a decade later. The real job is staying useful between them.
- What the growth org learned about the ICP: realtors already own the valuable lists — trusted painters, roofers, inspectors — but they live in binders, spreadsheets, and memory. Stacklist turns them into cards and stacks.
- Selling through a network that's already there: how Nick's mother, a 30-year realtor, became both the first user and the first referral engine.
- The hardest part of the pitch: a product that sounds like a bookmarking tool, an RSS feed, or a link-in-bio page — and is none of them.
- Getting found in AI answers: what it means to sell AI discovery to realtors, and the first organic leads that trace back to it.
- Why helping outperforms pitching: the moment a sale stops feeling like a sale, and why that's when it starts working.
- What actually lands on a demo: the jump from "I see how I'd build it" to "wait — Stacky did that in seconds?"

## Timestamps

```
[00:00:00] The growth motion so far
[00:01:00] Why we're starting with real estate
[00:02:41] What we learned about our ICP
[00:04:23] Selling through an existing network
[00:05:14] The hardest part: no category to sell into
[00:07:04] Getting found in AI answers
[00:08:42] Why helping outperforms pitching
[00:10:09] Learning AI on the job
[00:13:21] What actually lands on a demo
[00:17:24] The bet we're making
```

## Episode context

Building Stacklist goes behind the scenes of the company as it's being built. This episode focuses on the growth org — how Stacklist is reaching its first customers and what's being learned in the process. Recorded as a casual conversation between Ivanha and Nick Gebhardt, who both joined the team about a month before recording.

## Links and resources

- Stacklist: [www.stacklist.com](https://www.stacklist.com)
- Stacklist for real estate: [www.stacklist.com/real-estate](https://www.stacklist.com/real-estate)

---

## Full transcript

**Ivanha** [00:04]
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Building Stacklist. I'm here with Nick today. What's funny is Nick and I started around the same time — maybe a day apart. I do marketing at Stacklist, and Nick basically does everything sales. Nick, can you tell us a bit about what the past month has been like?

**Nick** [00:14]
Yeah, thanks. It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of outreach. If I had to consolidate the role into one word, it's outreach. From a growth lead perspective, that's really it: how do we grow, how do we scale, and how do we attract people to this product?

Right now we're focusing on two sectors. First and foremost is real estate — because of the power a real estate agent has in today's world. They're the epicenter for so much commerce, and Stacklist is built well to let a realtor become that hub, that invaluable source for everything.

Why real estate? Think about a real estate agent and the real estate lifecycle. It's not bubblegum — you're not buying a new house every day. The cycles of relevancy are few and far between: sometimes years, sometimes decades. If I'm only paying attention to my realtor in that window, that's pretty limited. They're in my mind only for those short windows.

So what Stacklist lets a realtor do is maintain that relevancy constantly. For example, we're looking at painting our house — we've been in it 12, 13 years, and it's starting to fade. I went to my wife and said, who do we know that might know some painters? A lot of people go to their realtor for exactly that.

Those lists of painters, roofers, home inspectors — those are lists realtors inherently have and own. A lot of them keep it in a binder, physically, the analog realtors. Sometimes the "binder" is a bunch of emails in a document, or a spreadsheet, or notes, or just all in their head. What Stacklist lets them do is create cards for each vendor. I can add notes: this one's expensive but you get what you pay for; this one's cheaper but quick and efficient. The realtor accumulates all those cards, and when someone needs painters, they pull a card, create a list, and send it over. Not to mention everything happening on the home itself, the neighborhood — there's an infinite amount of possibilities.

**Ivanha** [03:59]
Yeah, that paints a really good picture. Stacklist is such a useful product, especially for real estate agents who are always trying to send things and have a bunch of links saved everywhere — it's nice to have them all in a hub. You've been here a month and you already know so much about the audience. Did you know real estate agents before? What's your connection?

**Nick** [04:23]
That's so funny that you ask. My mother's a 30-plus-year realtor, and I've helped support her marketing efforts along the way.

**Ivanha** [04:33]
Is your mom on Stacklist?

**Nick** [04:35]
Absolutely. She's been an incredible resource, and she's of the older analog mentality — she actually has the binders, and all that local knowledge in her mind. Bringing her digitally into this space has been a real awakening for her. And as she gets more adept at using it, she keeps saying: you know who could really use this? You know who could use this? It's built on itself. It's been really interesting.

**Ivanha** [05:14]
I want to know what you see as the biggest challenge. From my side in marketing, the challenge isn't really getting people to use it once they know what it does. It's that it's such a new way of doing things — but it sounds like things that already exist. When you talk about stacks, people associate it with a bookmarking thing, or an RSS feed, or a link-in-bio thing. And it's none of those. That's what I find hardest in marketing.

**Nick** [05:42]
Right, and you nailed it — there's nothing like it yet. That's what's so neat about it. In terms of pure functionality, it's unique to the whole offering. I'm not even talking about the AI side, which is a completely amazing advantage on its own. But like Kyle says, it's a little bit like this, a little bit like that. From a marketer's seat: how do you get information to clients, to family members, to friends going on a trip? Everyone has their own system, so many variables. How do you make it relevant — it's like this, but it's that?

It's like a facial tissue you use when you sneeze. What's Kleenex? Before Kleenex owned the category, you'd say, what is this? It's the same thing. There's nothing like it yet, so you have to pull relevant touchpoints from every audience member, and that's so different and varied. That's another part of landing a sales message, a marketing message. Because of the variety — the age, the wisdom, the preferences — the digital natives who grew up in a Zillow, Compass, Redfin world don't know what preceded that. They already have their own systems.

So it's really landing the message that this is built to be like an AI scroller's dream. My own mother, just a couple weeks in, has said, I've gotten some leads — and when she asked them, they said they found her through AI. She said, I don't even really know what AI is. But the real proof is when I get those truthful, organic "I don't know where this lead came from, but they found me on AI" moments. And I'm like, yeah, that's Stacklist. That's exactly what I told you it would do. On top of the functional, organizational help — it's a double win.

**Ivanha** [08:32]
What's the thing you're most excited about this past month? When you think about your job, what makes you go, yes?

**Nick** [08:42]
Great question. Personally, it's the learning. I've been around long enough to see how social media came in and transformed business, marketing, advertising, everything. Now I'm watching AI come in — it's an evolution, and I'm learning. As a lifelong learner, that's so fun for me.

Professionally, it's when I land a message and the light bulb goes off. Those little kernels where people realize it's not me selling them — it's genuinely trying to help. This works, and I want you to know about it so you can use it and it helps you. When they realize I'm not just trying to sell them another piece of software they may or may not need — that's when it's really satisfying. And it's happening more and more.

**Ivanha** [10:09]
That's awesome. I don't know if you worked a lot with AI before Stacklist. My experience: I was at another startup — I've been at a couple of these — and as soon as AI started coming in, if you were an engineer you were way ahead, building all these setups. But if you were a marketer like me, you were trying to make it work and it never felt good enough. I didn't have the knowledge to know exactly how to apply it.

Then I get to Stacklist and I see Kyle and Martina, who are such experts. Stacklist really runs on AI — all our workflows are baked in with it, in every way, and it's all connected. For the first time I got to see what real AI workflows look like. This past month has felt like an internship in how to do marketing with true AI workflows. It's been eye-opening.

**Nick** [11:18]
For a lot of people, hearing "AI" felt inaccessible — like, that's only for devs, some super techie thing I don't need yet. But the more constant it becomes, the more people realize it's actually accessible. That's what being involved with Stacklist has done — it's made the learning curve more accessible, and helped people understand that AI is a tool to be used, not run from or intimidated by.

I remember someone at an agency saying about Twitter: what? No one needs real-time information. Who's going to tweet about their food? And years later — yeah, they are taking pictures of their food. That's kind of what's happening now. A product this accessible and easy to use, with Stacky right there alongside you — if you want to dabble in it you can, if you don't you don't have to. And seeing how much AI is embedded into every program and support tool we have has been really cool.

**Ivanha** [13:21]
Stacky is super magical. I actually recorded myself using it for the first time, so if anyone watches that video, the reactions are completely authentic. You can literally find any link, make a stack, pull the pictures — it does it all in minutes. Have you gotten to show it on a demo? What's their face like?

**Nick** [13:45]
On a demo, once people grasp how it works manually — okay, I copy a URL, plug it in, and it populates; here's a collection, here's a stack, here are the cards — once that clicks and they see they can do it just by moving their cursor and typing, then I go, now watch this. Hey, Stacky. And they're like, wow, are you serious? That's when you get the real jaw drops. It's great, because again it's proving what AI does here: another way to work more efficiently than ever.

**Ivanha** [14:37]
Do you have a hub yourself yet?

**Nick** [14:40]
I have multiple hubs. Not only am I helping my mother — I have a personal hub just for family trips. We're building a trip to California, so I've made a collection with all the hotels, the car, the flight information, the places we want to see. I can't wait to share it with my family and have them go, oh, this is great, it's all here. I've got a 14-year-old, and I'm going to flip it to him and say, dude, this is what you're going to grow up on. And I have a coaching business on the side, where I'm already seeing relevancy. So yeah — doing it, learning it, eating it, breathing it.

**Ivanha** [15:33]
My husband sells land, like plots, and I'm trying to get him on Stacklist with his profile. I'm like, this is the way.

**Nick** [15:41]
It's funny to say "this is the way," but — people will tell you, you need to blog, update your blog, make sure your SEO is good. That's cool, but it's a bit like still being on an analog telephone. This thing here is AI, and it's a completely different animal in terms of what it pushes up.

Where to go in San Francisco — I'll get a TripAdvisor, a visitors' guide. But "where to go for kids in San Francisco" — there are sites for that, sure, that's SEO. The collection I'm building right now, I know it's going to get served up. I know it'll get delivered in AI, because it's built in lists, which is what the laziest scroller wants. Kyle was telling me his profile gets scrubbed 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 times. That's pretty impressive for where this thing is.

**Ivanha** [17:07]
We're almost out of time. I'd love any final thoughts — anything you want people to know about Stacklist, about what it's like working here, what the sales organization is like. An insider look at the team.

**Nick** [17:24]
I'll say this. There's a realization within Stacklist — everyone jumping on those all-hands meetings — a pervasive sense that this is happening. I've been in startups before, and there's always that excitement of "we're doing this." But there's also, because of the type of people working on this, the knowledge that this is the way. Getting out ahead of it, there's a collective sense of: this is where we are now. You're recording this right now, which means we can go back next year, three years, five years, and say, wow, we were there when this was happening — and everything we're saying now is documented and proven out.

There's something cool about that confidence. It's not cocky or arrogant or exclusionary — it's very inclusive. We want to share this, we want to help people with it. That's what Martina and Kyle are pushing, and it's so nice to see. It's refreshing.

So I'm bugging Kyle to ship me all the swag he has. I saw him the other day in a hat and I was like, man, I need that hat.

**Ivanha** [19:12]
I should probably take over swag duties from Kyle — good reminder. This was awesome.

**Nick** [19:20]
For sure. Stay tuned.

**Ivanha** [19:24]
We'll do more of these.