Steve Armenti
Key takeaways
- 3:03ABM predates the term: Steve saw it 12-13 years ago at a Boston agency using the ITSMA definition of every account as a 'market of one,' with landing pages hand-built for every prospect — and old-school sales reps argue it's just good selling with a marketing label.
- 8:07After being let go from DigitalOcean in October 2024, Steve gave himself 4 months to match his corporate salary or return to a W-2 job — he hit the goal on referral-led inbound from LinkedIn, but that growth eventually ran dry and forced him to actually market and sell.
- 10:11His advice to new agency founders: do all the work yourself first and experience the hardest parts, and document the challenges as you go — a mistake he only fixed retroactively.
- 22:22Howdy is a managed AI workflow that researches 'hobby signals' — personal interests outside work — across web search, social profiles, and transcripts, then pairs each prospect with a concierge experience the sales team delivers as a one-to-one ABM tactic.
- 27:27Steve hired experiential and field marketers rather than SaaS marketers for Howdy, because human-in-the-loop judgment is needed to catch signals that are 'a little cringe' and rein in AI's overly wild experience ideas.
Questions Steve Armenti answered
At a Boston content and demand gen agency 12-13 years ago, a VP of marketing introduced ABM using the ITSMA 'market of one' definition — with no tech, they hired an offshore developer to hand-build a landing page for every prospect. It fit the big B2B brands he served, like HP, IBM, Samsung, Verizon, and Capital One.
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 051:02
It was always happening — good account reps have long researched the person and company and pitched each as the most important client. Marketers gave it a name, and Steve concedes his sales friends have a point, but ABM is the right motion for expensive products with complex buying processes.
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 053:03
He'd had the entrepreneurial bug since consulting as '12th Street Digital' out of college. After leaving Google and being part of a riff at DigitalOcean, he felt the universe was telling him this was his window, so he went all-in in October 2024.
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 055:05
As an optimist and dreamer he leaned in, but made a deal with his analytical wife: if he couldn't get close to his corporate salary within 4 months, he'd go back to a W-2 job. The pressure motivated him, even through three months with no clients, inbound, or revenue.
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 058:07
Referral-led growth from your network will eventually run dry, and you'll have to actually go market, sell, and handle contracts and proposals yourself. It's a scary moment where self-negativity doesn't help — treat it as a hard problem to figure out.
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 0511:11
In Steve Armenti's words
“I think you do have to have a healthy bit of that dreaming and a little bit of carelessness — you have to ignore logic in some sense.”
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 058:07
“Do all the work yourself. Figure it all out, do all the hard stuff, be stressed out, experience the hardest parts of it, because you'll overcome that stuff and you'll learn so much through it.”
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 0510:11
“We're going to try to design a short moment for you that makes you feel seen. The whole goal of it is we want to deliver something that a friend would get you.”
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 0524:25
“At the end of the day what we're doing is connecting people to people, and that's kind of my mission for the company.”
Swapping swag boxes for saunas sessions with Steve Armenti | People are People | Ep. 0528:28