Case study: Gumlet turned ChatGPT mentions into 20% of inbound revenue. Read it →
Moment 01 · 0–90 days post-close
You just raised. Now you have 18 months to prove the unit economics work.
The Series B median is now $5M–$15M of revenue with 15–20% monthly growth. The Series C round after that needs to land in 18–24 months. Every month between now and then, the board is watching one number: how predictable is your pipeline. If you raised in the past 90 days, this page is the playbook we’d run for you.
★★★★★
5.0 on Clutch · Proven on Gumlet, REsimpli, Verito
The board’s clock
Revenue growth expected2–3x
Window before next round18–24 mo
Growth-infra buying window~4–6 mo
CAC payback expected< 12 mo
B2B buyers using AI to research87%
If you wait 6 months to start GEO, you’ll need results in 2 months.
The situation you’re in
What just happened to your marketing job.
You raised, hired, or are about to hire a CMO, VP Marketing, or Head of Growth. The mandate is clear: triple revenue in 18–24 months, with CAC payback under 12 months, without burning the round on a paid acquisition channel that doesn’t compound.
Every marketing leader in this seat is searching the same thing in their first 30 days: what do we invest in that compounds, not just spends?
The answers in 2026 are different than they were in 2023. Paid has gotten more expensive (CAC has risen 60% in 5 years according to GTM 8020), and SEO alone no longer captures the buyer journey because 87% of B2B software buyers are now using AI tools to research vendors.
The answer is a coordinated SEO + GEO engine built in the first 6 months post-raise. Not because it’s faster than paid (it isn’t). Because it compounds: every citation, every ranking, every entity signal gets stronger every month, while paid spend resets every quarter.
4–6
Month window
If you start citation engineering in month 5, you don’t see meaningful AI visibility until month 8 or 9.
Why this matters now
The buying window for “growth infrastructure” closes at month 4–6.
Origami’s research on Series B buyers in 2026 found something specific: if you start investing in growth infrastructure 6 months post-raise, you’re already late. The VP of Sales has already bought Outreach, Gong, and ZoomInfo in months 2–4. The CMO has signed with paid agencies. The window for foundational decisions closes inside the first quarter.
For SEO and GEO, the window is even narrower, because the work compounds slowly. Citation engineering started in month 5 produces meaningful AI visibility in month 8 or 9, exactly when you need it for the next board update.
The 90-day post-raise playbook
What we’d run for you, in three phases.
We’ve run this engagement for funded SaaS companies enough times to have a defined shape. Here’s what the first 90 days looks like.
1
Days 1–14
The audit, the baseline, and the AVS reading.
We start three things in parallel. By day 14, you have a defensible answer to “where do we stand and what’s the gap” that you can take to your CEO or board.
01
A full technical SEO audit. Site architecture, crawl budget, Core Web Vitals, indexation. Unsexy but non-negotiable. You can’t compound rankings on a broken foundation.
02
An AI Visibility Score (AVS) baseline. We run 50–80 ICP buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini and score where you stand today. Most funded SaaS companies score between 15–35 out of 100.
03
A citation surface map. We catalog every place AI tools currently retrieve information about your category, who’s being cited, and where the structural gaps are.
By day 14: a board-ready “where we stand vs the gap” document with named numbers, not vibes.
2
Days 15–45
Foundation pages, entity work, and the first citation push.
This is where the heavy lifting starts. Three workstreams running in parallel.
01
The 8–12 foundation pages every funded SaaS needs that most don’t have. Comparison pages, pricing-page rebuilds, “what is [your category]” definitional content, and the framework or methodology pages that anchor your entity in LLM memory.
02
Entity optimization across the open web. Your Crunchbase, your LinkedIn company page, your Wikipedia entry if eligible, your founder profiles, your G2 and Capterra listings. LLMs build trust through consistency across these sources. Funded companies usually have inconsistent entity signals because the rebrand or repositioning happened recently.
03
The first wave of third-party citation building. Guest posts and inclusions in the listicles that LLMs cite when answering “best X for Y” buyer queries.
By day 45: you should be appearing in 8–15 new AI prompts that you weren’t appearing in at baseline.
3
Days 46–90
Pipeline attribution, first citation lift, and the board-ready report.
The last 45 days are about proving the channel, not just running it.
01
GA4 pipeline attribution setup. We configure attribution to identify AI-sourced sessions as distinct referral paths, then trace them through conversion events.
02
Bi-weekly citation tracking reports. You see how AVS is moving every two weeks, with specific deltas vs your top 3 named competitors.
03
The day-90 report. A board-ready document showing the citation lift, the pipeline contribution to date, the ranking movement on target keywords, and the projected 6-month trajectory.
By day 90: a defensible answer to “is this working?” with named numbers, not vibes.
The 3 common failure modes
Why funded SaaS companies underperform on AI search.
We’ve seen the same three patterns in funded SaaS companies who try to build this in-house or with a generic SEO agency.
01
Hiring before scoping.
You hire a senior SEO lead at $180–220K, expect them to also own GEO, AI strategy, content production, and link building. They can’t. You burn 6 months realizing the role was scoped wrong.
02
Treating AI search as “just better SEO.”
Your existing SEO agency tells you they’re handling AI search now. They publish more blog posts. Nothing changes. Six months in, you find out they’re not tracking AI citations, not measuring AVS, not building third-party citation surfaces. They were optimizing for Google and hoping it spilled into AI.
03
Underinvesting in the entity layer.
You publish good content but your Wikipedia entry doesn’t exist, your Crunchbase profile is out of date, your G2 listing has 4 reviews, and your founder LinkedIn says “Stealth.” LLMs can’t form a confident entity from inconsistent signals, so they default to citing your better-anchored competitor.
What this looks like for you
Two profiles. Two different first 90 days.
Most funded SaaS companies coming to us in this moment fit one of these two profiles. Here’s what we’d run for each.
Profile 01
Just closed Series A
$3M–$8M ARR · Building marketing from scratch
You’re building the marketing function from scratch. There’s no in-house SEO lead, no GEO motion, and no attribution setup yet.
The right engagement is Rank & Get Found for the first 6 months, then upgrade to Own Your Category once the foundation is set. The 90-day pilot covers technical SEO, entity setup, foundation content, and AVS baseline tracking.
Recommended package: Rank & Get Found $3,500/mo, structured as a 90-day pilot.
Profile 02
Just closed Series B
$10M–$30M ARR · SEO team in place
You have an SEO team already. The Google work is running. What’s missing is the GEO layer: entity work, citation engineering, AI visibility tracking, and pipeline attribution to AI sources.
The right engagement is Own Your Category or Market Leader depending on the competitive landscape. We work alongside your existing team to add the GEO layer without disrupting Google work already running.
Recommended package: Own Your Category $7K/mo or Market Leader $12K/mo.
The proof point that matters most for this moment
Two funded SaaS companies. Two compounding outcomes.
Neither company outspent their competitors on content. They started earlier and built the right foundation in the right order.
REsimpli · Real estate investor CRM
#1
ChatGPT-recommended CRM in category
Came to us shortly after raising. Within 90 days, REsimpli went from absent in AI answers to being the most-recommended CRM in their category on ChatGPT.
Read the REsimpli case studyGumlet · Video infrastructure SaaS
20%
of monthly inbound revenue from AI search
In a similar funded-and-growing moment. Gumlet now attributes a fifth of monthly inbound revenue directly to AI search, measured through Mixpanel pipeline attribution.
Read the Gumlet case study
Questions we get
Frequently asked.
The five questions every newly-funded marketing leader asks us in the first call. Honest answers, not pitch answers.
Ask your own questionFor B2B SaaS companies at $5M–$15M ARR, allocate $40K–$120K per year on organic growth (SEO + GEO combined). This typically replaces 1 to 1.5 senior in-house hires while shipping faster than a hire can ramp.
The DerivateX entry tier at $3,500 per month sits at the low end of this range, and is structured as a 90-day pilot specifically so newly-funded companies can validate the channel before committing longer.
You can wait. But every month a competitor is being cited in ChatGPT for your category is a month that LLM is being trained to recommend them when buyers ask. AI citations compound the same way backlinks did in 2010.
The brands that build citation surface area early become the default recommendation for years. Waiting 6 months means starting 6 months behind a competitor who didn’t wait.
We work alongside in-house SEO leads regularly. They own strategy and Google-side execution; we add the GEO layer (entity work, AI citation tracking, third-party citation building, pipeline attribution to AI sources).
Most clients describe it as “the GEO function we couldn’t justify hiring for as a standalone role.”
Citation movement in 60–90 days. Ranking movement in 90–120 days. Pipeline attribution becoming readable in months 3–6. Compounding revenue impact in months 6–9.
Gumlet hit 20% of inbound revenue from AI at approximately the 8-month mark from start of engagement.
“Too niche” is the most common false reassurance in this space. We’ve worked across real estate proptech, legal tech, video infrastructure, accessibility testing, and reputation management. Every one of these categories has buyers using AI to research vendors.
The narrower the category, the faster you can dominate citations, because fewer competitors are doing the work.
What happens next
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll run your AVS live on the call.
We’ll run your domain through our AI Visibility Checker live during the call, show you your current AVS baseline, identify the 3 highest-leverage gaps, and outline what a 90-day engagement would look like specifically for your stage and category.