What I walked into
In April 2024 HeyGen had product-market fit most companies never get near, a user base in the tens of millions, and almost no marketing infrastructure underneath it. No SEO program, no content engine, no community, no structured lifecycle automation, and no enterprise motion at all.
The brand had also outgrown its own positioning. HeyGen had spread virally as an AI video tool, which is a category that undersells what an enterprise buyer is actually purchasing, and the revenue operations architecture was not built for the motion the company was moving toward.
What followed was 21 months of building five systems that had to work together.
The five pillars
Repositioning for enterprise
ICP moved from individual creators to enterprise communications teams, with the messaging hierarchy rebuilt around training, marketing, localization and HR. The site had to serve enterprise buyers without breaking the PLG top of funnel, so the brand architecture carried both motions at once.
SEO from zero
Organic was not a channel when I arrived. Technical foundation first, then programmatic content against real use-case demand, which produced over 50% year-on-year organic traffic growth.
A 100,000 member community
Built from nothing to six figures of members in six months, on a dedicated platform rather than Discord so the content stayed discoverable. Weekly tips, user showcases, AMAs and a 50+ creator ambassador program. Community members retained materially better than everyone else, and enterprise deals started coming out of relationships that began there.
AI-native lifecycle
Free-to-paid conversion was strong and unsystematic. We segmented on behavior instead of plan type, fired sequences off specific product actions, and built a product-qualified lead model so sales reached people at the moment it helped rather than the moment it annoyed.
Enterprise ABM
An enterprise motion built on top of the PLG base: intent data and ICP criteria combined with existing user presence inside target accounts, hyper-personalized outreach at a scale manual research cannot reach, and the enterprise content that unblocks procurement. ROI calculators, SOC 2 and SSO documentation, video case studies.
Why five and not one. Each pillar fed the next. Repositioning made the SEO content credible to enterprise readers. SEO and community filled the top of the funnel. Lifecycle converted it. ABM harvested the accounts already full of free users. Any one of them alone would have produced a fraction of the result.
What I would tell a founder
Build the infrastructure before you need it. Every one of those five systems took months to compound, and the companies that start them at the moment they are needed spend that entire window flat.
The full write-up, with the sequencing and what each pillar cost to learn, is in the long-form playbook.
Building the infrastructure before you need it is the only way to sustain 5× growth.