Most people don’t think of CTOs as leaders who have a deep love for growth and marketing. But at Webflow, while building out the product as CTO, I also started our sales and marketing teams during our fastest growth periods — hiring the founding team members, testing new growth tactics, and expanding customer segments. It was an amazing period of learning, but it was also downright draining.
Over the last few years, growth teams have increasingly spent more time measuring than doing. Too much of marketing has become stitching together tools, creating dashboards, building attribution models, and coordinating across teams, instead of connecting with customers or telling stories that matter. I’ve heard this type of work called “measureship.” And it’s not just a problem at any one company. It’s what happened to the entire industry when digital took over and quantitative impressions started counting more than qualitative impressions on humans.
The original craft of marketing got buried under dashboards. Positioning, brand, point of view, deeply understanding your customer. And the people who got into marketing because they loved the creative work? They’ve been drowning in operations instead, because there was no other way to get it done.
I started my third company to change that with Ploy.
Introducing Ploy: The growth platform built around your website
Ploy is an all-in-one marketing platform built around your website, the hub that connects all of your growth channels. Our agents handle the operational and technical side of running those channels, end to end, so you can focus on what actually moves the needle: sharpening your positioning, telling your story, and building real relationships with your customers.
It’s not just a website builder. And it’s not just an SEO tool, an ABM page builder, a paid ad manager or a design assistant. It’s a system that operates your website and marketing channels the way the best growth team you could hire would: designing pages, writing copy, running campaigns, optimizing performance, and syncing data back to your CRM. Continuously, in the background.
Here’s a concrete example: a few weeks ago, we were getting great customer feedback at Ploy. I pasted some screenshots into our agent and said, “we’re getting all this great feedback — what should we do with it?” Minutes later, there was a fully designed wall-of-love page live on our site. You can check it out for yourself here: https://ploy.ai/the-ploy-effect On-brand, well-written, deployed without me touching code or opening a design tool.
That page would have previously taken a designer, a copywriter, a developer, and at least a week of coordination. More realistically, it just never would have gotten built. It wouldn’t have cleared the bar of what’s “important enough” to pull people off other work.
Ploy closes the gap between having an idea and seeing it live. The targeted landing page for a conference, the ABM page for a key account, the campaign you know you should run but can’t find the bandwidth for? Those things just happen now.
Who we built Ploy for
Founders and early-stage operators
I’m here right now. Building a company, wearing every hat, trying to scale marketing before I have a dedicated team to do it. Most founders know their product and their customer better than anyone, but they don’t have the bandwidth or the specialized skills to turn that knowledge into landing pages, campaigns, and optimized channels. Ploy lets you go from idea to execution without waiting to build out the function.
Matt Pasternack, the founder of Once, lived this. He’s non-technical, and after wrestling with a website builder and a string of cold AEO and SEO pitches he couldn’t even evaluate, he ported Once’s entire site onto Ploy, starting from the content he already had. In his words, it freed his marketing lead to “iterate far faster than he ever could before.” Adeel Yang at Dryvebox used Ploy to test and launch a new sub-brand, manage meta and google ad campaigns and build pages for 50 locations sourced from his HubSpot for long tail SEO.
Agencies
Agencies were a huge part of the Webflow story. I spent years working closely with them and understanding their business. They’re caught in a squeeze: clients want more output, faster, at the same price. And the overhead of building, managing, and iterating on client sites eats into time that could go toward strategy and creative. Ploy gives agencies leverage to take on more clients, deliver results faster, and spend your energy on the work that actually keeps clients coming back. Agencies like Tonik and TNT Growth already build and run client sites on Ploy. TNT Growth migrated their own site over and now uses Ploy to spin up SEO and landing pages across their 50+ clients.
Marketing teams
I know firsthand from Webflow that things only get harder when you have to coordinate across web, design, sales, marketing, growth, and engineering just to get a campaign out the door. That cross-functional coordination is where good ideas go to die slowly. Ploy lets teams spin up new campaigns and optimize channels without that overhead. Hex uses Ploy to power its enterprise account-based marketing — automatically generating on-brand, high-converting landing pages for its target accounts at a scale their team could never produce by hand. Ploy pulls Hex’s design system straight from their live site and ties each page to their account data, so marketing can launch personalized pages on demand without waiting on engineering. Clay is running a similar loop with programmatic SEO, using Ploybooks to convert its own data into hundreds of on-brand guide and template pages. A single Ploybook spins up an entire page type in minutes, turning what used to be one-off builds into a repeatable, on-brand content engine.
The website matters more, not less
A lot of people assume that in the age of AI, the website matters less. If customers are getting answers from an AI search engine, why would they ever click through to your site? I think the opposite is true.
When AI answer engines summarize your content, when agents browse on behalf of users, when every touchpoint is expected to feel personal, your website becomes the one thing you fully own and control. But that also means it can’t be static. It can’t be a brochure you ship and forget — it needs to be alive. Learning from your traffic, adapting to your industry, acting on signals in real time.
The next generation of internet users won’t just be humans browsing. They’ll be agents gathering information, making decisions, transacting on behalf of people. The companies that win will be the ones whose digital presence is built for that world.
An AI growth team for everyone
After twelve years at Webflow, I could have done a lot of things, but I kept coming back to the same frustration: the tools and playbooks that the best growth teams in the world rely on are locked behind massive headcount and budget. A founder with a great product and a clear point of view should be able to run marketing at the same level as a company with fifty people and a seven-figure tools stack. And right now, they can’t.
AI finally makes this possible. The operational and technical work that used to require entire teams can now be handled by agents that run continuously, learn from real data, and execute at a level that wasn’t feasible even two years ago. I’ve spent twenty years building up to this exact problem, and the technology finally caught up.
Start Ploying around!
Today, we’re opening up Ploy so anyone can try it out and announcing that we’ve raised $27M from First Round Capital and Y Combinator, along with a group of strategic angels who have built and scaled some of the companies we admire most: Ashley Sapien (Marketing and Growth @ Hex), Kai Mak (CRO @ Together.AI, Brave Capital), Josh Kim (Growth Marketing @ Cursor), Sherwin Wu (Engineering Leader @ OpenAI), Lenny Rachitsky, Ben Lang, Eoghan McCabe and more. We’re a small team based in San Francisco and New York, and we’re growing. If you want to change the way businesses grow, come join us.
Ploy is generally available to everyone — just bring your domain and watch Ploy get to work. Whether you’re a founder building something you believe in, an agency looking for leverage, or a marketing team ready to get back to work that actually matters, start using Ploy today.