Always Be Testing

Adam Dewer leads partnerships at Soci.ai — an AI-powered platform helping 800+ multi-location brands manage their local presence across social, listings, and reviews.
In this episode, Tye and Adam get into the "zero platform" future of local marketing, where AI agents replace dashboards entirely — handling updates, review responses, and social posts through a simple SMS conversation with the business owner. They also dig into Adam's approach to building and measuring partnerships (he tracks just two numbers: net new revenue and expansion revenue) and why he'd take 10 incredible partners over 100 mediocre ones any day.
What you'll learn:
• Why "automagically" is the most dangerous word in AI marketing
• How to identify your AI strength areas before trying to scale
• Why agency partners are Adam's #1 channel play right now
• The early signals that tell you a partner is going to scale
• How to tee up a partner for success without making it transactional
• What the "zero platform" future looks like for a local business owner
Connect with Adam: linkedin.com/in/adamdewer | soci.ai

The first episode of SaaS Class tackles one of the most pressing questions in B2B marketing: how do you win when your buyers are finding answers on ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google?

Tye sits down with Nancy Harnett (Head of Affiliate & Offsite AEO at HubSpot) and Guy Yalif (Webflow, formerly CEO of Intellimize) to break down what's actually working in the race to become the most visible brand in AI search. Nancy reveals how HubSpot generated 200K+ AI citations in 6 months and became the #1 most visible CRM across AI search. Guy shares how Webflow appears in 67% of the AI answers they care about — more than any other CMS including WordPress.

What you'll learn:
Why AEO is a natural evolution of great SEO, not a replacement
The 4 pillars of AEO: Content, Technical, Authority & Measurement
Why affiliate marketing is now the "new backlinks" — driving top and bottom-funnel AI impact
How HubSpot used Reddit to go from ~100 to 146K AI citations in 7 months
Content depth and localization: what actually moves the needle
How to build a closed-loop measurement system to iterate fast

In this episode of Always Be Testing, host Tye DeGrange sits down with Lacie Thompson, an experienced agency leader, affiliate and partner marketing expert, and former operator at brands like Expedia and Blue Nile. After successfully scaling and exiting her agency, Lacie is now building Media Pack—an AI-powered platform designed to modernize and streamline how brands buy media.
The conversation explores Lacie’s journey across brand-side, agency, and startup environments, highlighting how real-world frustrations led her to build solutions rooted in efficiency and transparency. From the broken workflows of flat-fee media buying to the lack of standardization across the industry, she unpacks the core problems that still slow teams down—and how AI is now making it possible to rethink the entire system.
Beyond product and tech, the episode dives into the mindset behind building and scaling—from making decisions beyond data, to taking risks before feeling “ready,” to focusing on what truly creates differentiation. It’s a grounded and insightful look at what it takes to build in today’s AI-driven landscape while staying anchored in real customer needs.

Kyle White is the CEO & Founder of Refinery, an AI-powered affiliate technology solution. He brings a rare blend of experience across affiliate management (Overstock, Uber), product development, and data-driven experimentation. He previously built tools at Impact, led global affiliate/ambassador programs at Uber, and now focuses on making affiliate programs smarter, more automated, and more profitable using AI.
In this conversation, Kyle breaks down how AI is transforming affiliate marketing, how brands can adopt product‑led growth principles, and why relevancy—not payouts—is the strongest signal in partner matchmaking. He shares lessons from scaling Uber’s Ambassador Program from a 7% to an 80% activation rate, what most brands get wrong about affiliate recruitment, and how to design tests that actually produce meaningful insights.
The episode also covers trends shaping the future: the threat of AI search bypassing the affiliate channel, the rise of pay‑per‑performance TV & audio partners, and why the next era will require filtering through more noise to find true value. Kyle also shares personal stories—building a company with a newborn, being featured in South Park, speaking Russian from missionary service in the Baltics, and his love of film photography.

In this episode, I sit down with Doug Bell — Fractional CMO, former leader at Automation Anywhere, LeanData, and Searchmetrics, top‑40 Substack writer, and co-host of Cannonball GTM — to unpack why modern go‑to‑market playbooks are breaking… and what the next generation of GTM looks like in an AI‑driven world.
We go deep into the new patterns shaping high‑growth companies — and the uncomfortable truths most teams don’t want to face.