Antenna’s latest “State of Subscriptions” for 2024,noted the popularity of bundling services as well as third-party agreements can reduce subscriber churn.

“S.W.A.T.” star Shemar Moore has launched a new fan campaign to save the crime drama from cancellation for a third time.

The Psychedelic Science conference, coming to Denver this summer, plans to bring U.S. legislators, scientists, authors, mycologists and more together to discuss the new frontier of psychedelic-assisted therapy and public policy.

The initial lineup, announced Friday, includes Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, former Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, famed mycologist Paul Stamets, and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, also author of the book “The Body Keeps the Score.” Pilar Guzmán, editorial director for Oprah Daily, is also listed as a keynote speaker, which is notable because Oprah announced this week she would soon do a podcast episode about psychedelics.

Psychedelic Science returns to the Colorado Convention Center on June 16-20, when both enthusiasts and industry professionals in the space will gather for workshops and panels. Discussions are expected to cover a variety of topics, from business and policy to scientific studies, culture and veterans issues.

Organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the conference made its Mile High debut in 2023 and welcomed about 12,000 people. MAPS founder Rick Doblin said by email that the response two years ago proved how the movement behind psychedelic-assisted therapies had grown with bipartisan support and the momentum of policy change. The fact that psilocybin therapy is legal in Colorado is one reason the conference keeps coming back here.

“Psychedelic Science 2025 is about turning breakthroughs into action,” Doblin said. “With rapid progress in research and policy, we’re focusing on real-world impact, ethical expansion, and safety. Hundreds of speakers will present the latest scientific results from both drug development and neuroscience studies, along with lessons from the plant medicine initiatives in Oregon and Colorado and other policy reforms.”

The initial lineup includes more than 50 speakers, but more are expected to be announced in the coming months. See the lineup, so far, here.

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Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Former Levelset CRO Martin Roth takes us behind the scenes of scaling a company from $0 to over $25 million ARR and a successful exit to Procore. One shift unlocked $500k per month in expansion revenue. They also had no sales playbook for 5 years, then had a $500M exit.

The early days

When Martin joined Levelset (formerly ZLien) in 2012, the company was a far cry from the high-growth SaaS business it would eventually become. At the time, it was a side business for its founder—a bootstrapped, transactional platform helping contractors file construction liens online.

Martin himself wasn’t the obvious choice for a sales leadership role. At just 23 years old, he had already experienced the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. His first startup—a consumer product company focused on group gifting—never gained enough traction, leaving him scrambling for work. In the months before joining Levelset, he was pedicabbing in New Orleans’ French Quarter and selling insurance, trying to find his next step.

His introduction to Levelset was pure chance. While selling health insurance, he mistakenly assumed that the company was much larger than it was and attempted to pitch the founder. Instead of a policy, the founder offered him something unexpected: a job building out Levelset’s sales motion from scratch.

Building a sales organization from the ground up

Like many early-stage startups, Levelset didn’t start with a well-oiled sales machine. There was no structured playbook, no hiring blueprint, and certainly no quota capacity planning. In those early years, Martin was carrying a bag himself, closing deals while figuring out enterprise sales on the fly.

For the first five years, the company lacked a formal sales playbook.

In 2018, everything changed. Martin led the charge in implementing a structured sales process, shifting from an instinct-driven approach to a disciplined, repeatable system. He embraced what he now calls “micro-coaching”—getting deep into the details of each deal, guiding reps through every stage, and ensuring full compliance with their new playbook.

It wasn’t about controlling reps. It was about eliminating inefficiencies and ensuring consistency in execution.

This shift set the stage for Levelset’s next phase of growth.

Related resource: How Outreach Scaled from $0 to $230M ARR

$1M to $10M ARR: The grind

Scaling from $1M to $10M ARR was one of the hardest phases of Levelset’s journey and a process that took nearly six years.

One of the biggest unlocks came when Martin and Levelset’s VP of Customer Success (CS) recognized a massive gap in their revenue strategy: they weren’t monetizing their existing customers effectively.

At the time, expansion and upsell were handled by the CS team, whose primary focus was retention and customer success, not sales. The result? Expansion revenue was trickling in at just $30,000 per month, a fraction of what it should have been.

The fix: moving upsell and expansion to a dedicated sales team.

Within six months, Levelset’s monthly upsell revenue exploded from $30,000 to $500,000.

Beyond upsell, hiring decisions during this period were driven by top-down demand modeling and bottom-up capacity planning.

Related resource: How Asana & Calendly Scaled Their PLG to SLG Motion

$10 to $20M ARR: Navigating it and a $500M exit

Just as Levelset was hitting its stride in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into uncertainty.

The company had just raised a $30M Series C at the end of 2019 and was aggressively hiring. On March 16, 2020, two days after lockdowns began, a class of 14 new reps was supposed to start onboarding in person. Instead, the company slammed the brakes.

But as the construction industry proved resilient, Levelset was able to re-accelerate hiring in 2021, refining its sales processes and scaling its upsell motion even further.

The result? By the time Levelset was acquired by Procore for $500M, they had:

• A well-defined SMB and mid-market sales motion.
• A high-velocity upsell engine generating $500K+ in expansion revenue per month.
• A culture of managerial durability, where key leaders stayed with the company through scale.

While aggressive hiring can be tempting, a learning from Levelset’s growth was the importance of hiring for leverage, not headcount. This is related to Price’s Law, states that ​​“the square root of the number of employees in a company do about half the work.” Meaning, it’s actually a small fraction of people who drive half the productivity. For example, in a 100-person company, 10 people will be doing half the work.

Levelset’s leadership team stayed intact throughout the company’s rapid growth.

Related resource: Hiring, Scaling, and the Impact of Price’s Law

3 lessons for the journey

Reflecting on the experience, three tactical lessons stand out:

1. Remote sales environments are suboptimal for early-career reps — remote reps miss out on the osmosis learning that happens in an office.

2. Cold outreach is still a foundational GTM strategy — it’s not dead, it’s just poorly executed.

3. In-person field events drive outsized impact — don’t avoid in-person, that’s where relationships are built and deepened.

The overarching takeaway: Strategy matters, execution matters, and there’s no shortcut to scale.

Related resource: What’s Actually Working for GTM Leaders

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More for your eardrums

Jessica Gilmartin has nearly 20 years of go-to-market leadership experience, most recently serving as both the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Calendly. Prior to that, she led marketing teams at an impressive array of companies, including Asana, Honor, Google, and Microsoft. As the cherry on top, Jessica also built and sold a successful frozen yogurt chain in San Francisco.

GTM 136: How Asana & Calendly Scaled: PLG to SLG Playbooks That Work | Jessica Gilmartin

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Tavus – launched AI with emotional intelligence. AI isn’t just responding anymore – it’s thinking, perceiving, and evolving. This is a big step closer to feeling like true face-to-face communication. The system is powered by huge leaps forward in AI research:

• Phoenix-3: now with full-face rendering, emotions, & micro expressions
• Raven-0: Real-time perception of movement, gestures, and emotion
• Sparrow-0: Transformer-based turn-taking for natural dialogue

Default – announced both an additional $4M in funding and a huge launch around their new inbound orchestration platform. The launch of Default 2.0 unlocks endless new capabilities via website intent and session tracking, AI routing agents, waterfall enrichment, and much more.

Spekit – launched a completely refreshed brand identity. This brand refresh is far more than just a new look. It represents their growth and leadership as an AI innovator in the enablement industry and their unwavering commitment to delivering intuitive, AI-driven enablement solutions, specifically designed for what they call the ‘Change Economy.’

More for your eyeballs

The State of Marketing and AI Report. The report reveals why marketing and creative leaders are making strategic investments in generative AI to pull ahead of the competition.

YouTube now has over 1 billion monthly viewers of podcast content. In 2024, users watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts each month on living-room devices.

Sales reps are not fine wine or cheese. They don’t get better with time, they get better with more at bats.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

1. Revenue Operations Lead at Patch (San Francisco)
2. Market Development Representative at Patch (San Francisco)
3. Director, Customer Marketing at Writer (Hybrid – San Francisco)
4. Product Marketing Manager at Marqii (Hybrid – New York)
5. Head of Marketing at Ask-AI (Hybrid – Toronto / Tel-Aviv)
6. Enterprise Account Executive at Patch (London, UK)
7. Enterprise Account Executive at ModelOp (Remote)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

• The GTM Workshop for AI Founders (GTMfund event): March 25, 2025 (San Francisco, CA) – private registration
• GTMfund Dinner: March 25, 2025 (San Francisco, CA) – private registration
• More GTMfund events TBA
• Spryng by Wynter: March 24-26, 2025 (Austin, TX)
• Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
• Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
• Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
• SaaStr Annual: September 10-12 (San Francisco, CA)
• Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Dallas, TX)

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This newsletter was entirely written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi and Scott Barker (not AI!).

The post How Levelset scaled to $25M ARR, then sold for $500M appeared first on GTMnow.

Netflix’s CFO told investors the company will spend $18 billion on content in 2025. An analysis of recent viewership says new shows and other company’s old shows are hot.

Deezer reports 78% of the tracks it received during the past year have never been played. These numbers portend changes to come in for streaming music services.

Actress Pamela Bach, the former wife of “Baywatch” star David Hasselhoff, has died at the age of 61.

Tom Llamas has been named the next anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” replacing Lester Holt. Here’s everything to know about the new face of the program.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Thursday postponed 25% tariffs on many imports from Mexico and some imports from Canada for a month amid widespread fears of the economic fallout from a broader trade war.

The White House insists its tariffs are about stopping the smuggling of fentanyl, but the taxes proposed by Trump have caused a gaping wound in the decades-old North American trade partnership, and Canada has felt compelled to quickly take aggressive countermeasures. Trump’s tariff plans have also caused the stock market to sink and alarmed U.S. consumers.

In addition to his claims about fentanyl, Trump has insisted that the tariffs could be resolved by fixing the trade deficit and he emphasized while speaking in the Oval Office that he still plans to impose “reciprocal” tariffs starting on April 2.

“Most of the tariffs go on April the second,” Trump said before signing the orders. “And then we have some temporary ones and small ones, relatively small, although it’s a lot of money having to do with Mexico and Canada.”

Trump said he was not looking to extend the exemption on the 25% tariff for autos for another month.

Imports from Mexico that comply with the 2020 USMCA trade pact would be excluded from the 25% tariffs for a month, according to the orders signed by Trump. Imports from Canada that comply with the trade deal would also avoid the 25% tariffs for a month, while the potash that U.S. farmers import from Canada would be tariffed at 10%, the same rate at which Trump wants to tariff Canadian energy products.

Roughly 62% of imports from Canada would likely still face the new tariffs because they’re not USMCA compliant, according to a White House official who insisted on anonymity to preview the orders on a call with reporters. Half of imports from Mexico that are not USCMA compliant would also be taxed under the orders being signed by Trump, the official said.

Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum has planned to announce any retaliatory measures on Sunday, but Trump credited her with making progress on illegal immigration and drug smuggling as a reason for again pausing tariffs that were initially supposed to go into full effect in February.

“I did this as an accommodation, and out of respect for, President Sheinbaum,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Our relationship has been a very good one, and we are working hard, together, on the Border.”

Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs threats have roiled financial markets, lowered consumer confidence, and enveloped many businesses in an uncertain atmosphere that could delay hiring and investment.

Major U.S. stock markets briefly bounced off lows after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick previewed the month-long pauses on CNBC on Thursday. Significant declines already seen this week resumed within an hour. The S&P 500 stock index has fallen below where it was before Trump was elected.

Sheinbaum said she and Trump “had an excellent and respectful call in which we agreed that our work and collaboration have yielded unprecedented results,” on a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Mexico has cracked down on cartels, sent troops to the U.S. border and delivered 29 top cartel bosses long chased by American authorities to the Trump administration in a span of weeks.

At a press conference, Sheinbaum elaborated on her call with Trump Thursday, saying that she told the president that Mexico was making great strides in fulfilling his security demands.

“I told him we’re getting results,” Sheinbaum said. But the U.S. imposed the tariffs, so she asked Trump “how are we going to continue cooperating, collaborating with something that hurts the people of Mexico?”

She added that “practically all of the trade” between the U.S. and Mexico will be exempt from tariffs until April 2.

She said the two countries will continue to work together on migration and security, and to cut back on fentanyl trafficking to the U.S.

From January to February, the amount of fentanyl seized at the border dropped more than 41%, according to Sheinbaum, citing data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. She cited the dip as meeting a commitment made to Trump.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, the leader of Canada’s most populous province, said that starting Monday the province will charge 25% more for electricity shipped to 1.5 million Americans in response to Trump’s tariff plan. Ontario provides electricity to Minnesota, New York and Michigan.

“This whole thing with President Trump is a mess,” Ford said Thursday. “This reprieve, we’ve went down this road before. He still threatens the tariffs on April 2.”

Ford’s office said that the tariff would remain in place even if there’s a one month reprieve from the Americans. Ford has said that so long as the threat of tariffs continue, Ontario’s position will not change.

Lutnick said that he will be watching fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. as a key “metric” he will focus on when evaluating Canada and Mexico’s efforts to combat the synthetic opioid.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, Trump portrayed tariffs — which he has has also levied on China at 20% due to their role in fentanyl production — as a source of increasing wealth and power for the United States.

Yet most economists expect the import duties to send prices higher, slow the economy, and potentially cost jobs.

The Yale University Budget Lab has estimated that the tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico would increase inflation by a full percentage point, cut growth by half a percentage point and cost the average household about $1,600 in disposable income.

Trump appeared to acknowledge Tuesday night that there could be some pain: “There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re okay with that. It won’t be much.”

Associated Press writers Rob Gillies, and Megan Janetsky contributed to this report. Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Gillies reported from Toronto.

Louis Litt returns via Rick Hoffman, who the producers of “Suits LA” hope will ignite interest in the “Suits” spinoff.