Marcel Santilli

CEO/cofounder @GrowthXAI - AI powered growth 🇧🇷🇺🇸🚀 // Previously CMO/growth at @DeepgramAI @scale_ai @HashiCorp @ServiceTitan

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

BIG NEWS: We just launched CheckThat[.]ai

Buyer Intent + Free AEO Platform + Shared Prompt Library

No cold start. Historical data included.

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"Seriously!? Yet another AEO tool?"

I get it. I felt the same way.

But I'm convinced the AEO category is fundamentally broken.

Not the tools themselves. The assumption behind ALL of them:

That tracking = improving.

It DOES NOT.

Google Analytics doesn't grow your traffic.
An AEO subscription doesn't grow your AI visibility.

What actually happens:

Sign up → bad context → random prompts → zero data → $500-$3K/mo invoice.

For prompts you're not even confident in.

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We took the complete OPPOSITE approach with CheckThat:

We did the heavy lifting before you show up:

→ Top B2B software categories mapped
→ 5,800+ brands researched (and growing)
→ Millions of AI responses tracked daily
→ Human-reviewed prompt library (shared + free)

Why?

Working with 100+ brands at @GrowthXAI taught us:

CONTEXT is everything.

Your context drives your content quality.
Your content quality drives your AI visibility.

You can't create great content without context.

You can't get context without understanding your buyers.

You can't understand your buyers without data.

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To celebrate the launch, I'm doing
50 Free AEO Audit + Strategy sessions over the next month

Retweet this post & comment "checkthat" and I'll send you a DM to get scheduled.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

https://t.co/pAZRZXgvVS

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

Survey is live. 27 questions on AI adoption, budget, content ops, and AI visibility. Not asking if you use AI -- asking how your strategy has actually changed. Link in comments.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@nbaschez Been using Obsidian but def not ideal experience back and forth. Curious

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@dharmesh We built https://t.co/iwhwbJxMZq as a typescript agentic workflow framework, Claude Code native :)

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

That's why we built and open sources https://t.co/EuIyJZko2J

As we were scaling service as software for https://t.co/s3WGJgaTnA we needed something that was like what Terraform was for infra but for knowledge work.

Agentic workflows as code
Evals. Tracing, cost tracking , human reviews
Durable execution (temporal abstraction)
Plug and play with coding agents

Feedback welcome

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

Skills are great for things that are not meant to be shared, don't require more structure input / output, doesn't require long durable execution, where traces are not as important.

If you think of skills as knowledge work as written spec that needs to be "run" consistently I think you end up needing agentic workflows with things like scenarios, traces, evals, runtime etc.

https://t.co/dwZN7l7aqY

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@garrytan That's partly why we built and open sources https://t.co/iwhwbJxMZq

As we were building https://t.co/KMsabZhnuR (service as software) we felt like we needed:

Agentic workflows as code (Claude Code native)
Evals, tracing, llm as judge, cost tracking
Durable execution (run time)

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@HenryLSchuck Super helpful mental model and approach. Any advice for a series A founder like me?

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@Jason I'm in

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

The opportunity is there. We scaled https://t.co/s3WGJgbrd8 to $15m+ in 18 months. The hardest part of figuring out where you need human judgement and relationship.

You need long term contracts and retention+ a distribution system. That's usually not easy to build unless you already have some credibility in the space.

I did a 2 hour session last year on how we scaled https://t.co/cRxZ6YKHs7

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

Interesting, I've been running something a bit similar for the past three months locally. I'd say the biggest unlock has been how good your deep researcher is.

For me, I do a research-to-study-guide process that is really deep, sometimes running for about an hour on any given topic. That process generates all logs around the research: the notes, the highlights, and everything else. I have a scratch pad to go from research to output, from output to study guide, and then it gets post-processed into context files or actual knowledge wikis.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

Feels to me like many services are highly subsidized for the heaviest of users. This is about how you mitigate insane usage for the craziest, most intense usages. OpenClaw is probably out there. How can you possibly serve hundreds of millions of people in a semi-subsidized way? If you don't and still allow people to use it in an insane amount. The reason using API is going to tend to 100x your cost is because that's what you're actually using it as the actual cost of doing it, so that's how much Claude is subsidized in order to get market share and adoption.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@businessbarista Nice! quick tip: try flipping this to 3 or 4 a.m. That way you don't hit their peak hours.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@arlogilbert @pitdesi 😂 That's hilarious, but yes, it does scream shady all around it. Impressive. Shady. Shady nonetheless.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@pitdesi The story is so crazy. I had some of my agents that do deep research and build study guides for me. Help me pull together a study guide in case it's helpful.

https://t.co/I8clUSxUN5

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@Charles_SEO Happy to! DMs are open and love sharing as much as I can.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@thesamparr Build it with Claude Code + Figma MCP. Deploy using something like @vercel, then instrument with a HubSpot pixel and if you want it to integrate with HubSpot forms, you can. Manage updates directly from Claude Code.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@rauchg Context is everything now. It is the job.

[Marcel Santilli @santilli]

@aferrari @etnshow @sequoia @JulienBek @GrowthXAI @danielvlopes appreciate the shoutout 💜