Growing Autohive with Autohive: Growth Hack Week reflections from our CEO

What happens when you dogfood your own AI product for a week?

Two weeks ago, we hit pause on the daily grind for our first-ever “Growth Hack Week.” The mission was simple, if a little meta: use Autohive to accelerate the growth of Autohive. We split the company into small cross functional teams of 2-3 people and for a full week, their only job was to build agents that would solve real problems for our Marketing and Sales teams (of course we still looked after support and customers during this week, but everything else was on hold).

The energy was electric. This wasn’t just about building cool stuff. It was about seeing what’s possible when you truly give freedom to the team with the right tools.

The playbook: how we built real business assets in days

I want to break this down because this wasn’t just a free-for-all. We ran it with a clear playbook that any company could follow. We formed cross-functional teams, pulling people from every part of the business, including Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Ops and more. The timeline was tight: just five days to go from an idea to a live, operational agent (or agents!).

The week had a simple agenda:

• Day one was for planning and brainstorming
• Days two through four were pure, heads-down building
• Day five was for show and tell

Each team had three clear deliverables:

1. A live and operational growth agent or agents
2. Any necessary integrations up and running
3. A 90-second video asset to showcase their work

To make sure everyone was deeply engaged, each team had just 7 minutes (including their 90-seconds demo) to present their agents. There’s nothing like that to keep you on your toes!

This structure created focus and a ton of energy. But the collaborative design was the real secret sauce. We didn’t just have eight teams working in silos; we deliberately designed the projects so the agents would need to refer to each other, creating a powerful, interconnected network.

For example, the agent built by our analytics-focused team became the single source of truth for critical data. Other agents, like those for content and social media, could then query that analytics agent to inform their positioning and measure their own impact. It’s a system of systems, all working together.

The teams

To give you a sense of the scope, here’s a snapshot of what our eight teams produced in just five days:

• The Analytics Team tackled our siloed data problem. Instead of our team spending 12+ hours a week manually pulling reports from 8 different platforms, they built a Marketing Intelligence agent that brings our data together from Google Analytics, HubSpot, Gong, and more. It’s now our single source of truth, allowing anyone to ask plain-English questions and get real-time answers on what’s working.

• The Content Team built a suite of content writing agents to break our content bottleneck. It conducts deep research on topics and keywords and from that produces high-quality, on-brand marketing copy at scale by connecting to the SEO Team’s, the Social and Community Team’s and the Product Marketing Team’s agents and publishing directly to our marketing channels.

• The SEO/Organic Team went after the next frontier of search. They built a suite of agents and integrations to help get Autohive mentioned in LLM responses (like ChatGPT and Claude) and also kicked off a programmatic SEO project to create hundreds of optimized landing pages for agents in our Marketplace.

• The Social & Community Team created a suite of agents to put a system behind our social media. It manages daily operations across all our platforms, helps us monitor and engage with our Circle community, and even assists our executive team in amplifying their thought leadership on LinkedIn.

• The Product Marketing Team built a suite of 6 agents that worked closely together with each other and other team’s agents. This suite of agents act as our central hub for competitive insights, synthesizes key takeaways from Gong sales calls, and automatically generates sales battlecards to ensure our positioning is always sharp and consistent.

• The Brand & Creative Team built an orchestration agent to manage creative production. It connects to a suite of AI tools and agents for image, video, and audio generation, allowing us to produce on-brand visual assets at a scale that was previously impossible, all while maintaining brand consistency.

• The Paid Ads Team created 3 agents to bring AI-powered optimization to our monthly ad spend. These agents manage budgets, test creative variations, and maximize our return across Google Ads and social platforms. This team’s agents are so successful that we’ve since made them available in the Autohive Marketplace.

• The CS & Sales Team built 2 powerful agents to help us with sales coaching and win/loss analysis. The first agent is called the “Win/Loss Coach” that mines Gong calls to tell us exactly why we lose deals. The second is a virtual SDR called the “Deal Analyzer” that crafts highly personalized outreach to new inbound leads, cutting down response times from hours to minutes.

Here is the 90-second demo video from the Product Marketing Team showcasing the power of their agents and how they work together:

The payoff: real growth, smarter teams, and a better product

The results were a massive win, for three key reasons:

1. It actually helped our growth teams. This wasn’t a theoretical exercise. The agents are already in use, making a material difference. The original goal was met, and then some.

2. It built deep experience. It brought a smile to my face seeing an engineer refreshing Google Analytics over coffee, genuinely curious about traffic improvements. Having everyone on the team live in a growth role for a week builds a level of understanding that you just can’t get from a meeting. As I put it now: every engineer is now a GTM Engineer at Autohive.

3. We dog-fooded our own product, hard. We use Autohive every day, but being power-users for a week helped us flush out about 100 points of friction. Tiny little things that get in the way of a smooth experience. We’re already shipping fixes for those, which will make the platform better for everyone.

This isn’t new for us. Dogfooding is in our DNA and it’s how we build products people love to use. In fact, it’s the entire reason Autohive exists. It all started at our parent company, Raygun. As LLMs started to go mainstream, we saw a huge opportunity to do more with our Marketing, beyond just adding headcount.

So, we built 14 different agents to help our own Marketing team. The result? We tripled our output within just a matter of months. Those original agents became the foundation of Autohive. We realized that if we could do this for ourselves, we could build a platform that lets anyone, technical or not, build their own agents to automate the repetitive parts of their job. It’s about taking AI beyond just a chat interface and turning it into a teammate that actually does things for you.

This isn’t just our story, it’s a blueprint for you

I’m sharing this because it’s more than just our story; it’s a blueprint for what’s possible. The only reason we could achieve all of this in a single week is because the Autohive platform is designed for exactly this kind of rapid, high-impact work.

So think about your own business:

• What’s the biggest bottleneck holding your growth team back right now?
• What if you could solve it not in the next quarter, but next week?

That’s the opportunity here. Autohive gives your team the ability to build and deploy their own agents to automate the tedious work and focus on what matters. It’s how you go from talking about solutions to shipping them in days.

We’re going to keep refining all of these agents and get them into the Autohive Marketplace for you to use. But you don’t have to wait.

The Paid Ads Team’s agents were so successful that their suite of paid ads agents, Ad Planner Pro, Ad Analyst Pro, and Ad Digest Pro, are already live. You can check them out and start using them today in the Autohive Marketplace.

The Growth Hack Week was a powerful reminder of what happens when you combine a talented team with a platform built for AI collaboration. It’s a new way of working, and we’re just getting started.