Team Voices
Stage 4 in full: what the company's founders, leaders, and staff say in public about how they grow. Interviews and talks are often the strongest evidence a teardown gets, because people say outright what worked, when, and why. Their job posts say what they plan to do next.
Contents
- Finding the people
- Finding what they said
- Getting the words
- Extracting claims
- Job posts as strategy documents
Finding the People
Start with leaders whose work shapes growth: founders, CEO, heads of growth, marketing, product, sales, partnerships, community, and devrel. Sources:
- The team, about, and press pages, and author bylines on the blog
- X and Bluesky bios that name the company, and who the founders' accounts follow and reply to most
- Podcast guest pages and conference speaker lists
- Funding announcements and press releases, which name leaders and early hires
- LinkedIn company pages, read by hand (this repo doesn't scrape LinkedIn)
Keep it to people speaking publicly in a work capacity. Don't profile private lives, and don't contact anyone.
Finding What They Said
| Source | How to find it |
|---|---|
| Podcasts | Search "[name] podcast" and "[company] founder interview"; Apple Podcasts and Spotify search; podcast search APIs (Listen Notes, Podscan) if the user has a key |
| YouTube talks and interviews | Search "[name]" and "[company] [conference]", sorted by views |
| Conference talks | Event sites, slides on Speaker Deck or SlideShare |
| X threads | The person's top posts, and searches for "how we grew", "lessons", "ARR", "users" from their handle |
| Blog posts and newsletters | Their own blog and guest posts, investor blogs, growth newsletters that interviewed them |
| Founder AMAs | Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt maker comments |
Getting the Words
- YouTube, TikTok, X videos: transcripts via ScrapeCreators (
/v1/youtube/video/transcript,/v1/tiktok/video/transcript,/v1/twitter/tweet/transcript), or YouTube's own captions. - Podcasts: many feeds publish transcripts (a
podcast:transcripttag in the RSS feed), and many shows post episodes to YouTube too. Otherwise, download the audio and transcribe it locally. - Save each transcript to
teardowns/<target>/voices/<date>-<person>-<show>.txtwith the source link.
Extracting Claims
Read every transcript and pull out claims about growth into voices.csv:
said_on,person,role,source,claim,topic,dated_to,quote,link
- Topics: channel, tactic, number, mistake, hire, pricing, positioning, ICP, what's next.
- dated_to is when the thing they describe happened ("our first 1,000 users came from Reddit in early 2024"), which is often different from when they said it.
- Quote the exact words, short. Label every claim "reported": it's what they say, not what was measured.
- Each claim with a
dated_toalso becomes a row inmoves.csv(evidence: Inferred, source: reported).
Then look for:
- Claims that match the data (they say templates drove SEO, and the template family grew before the inflection): strong evidence.
- Claims the data doesn't back: note them. Founders remember the story, not always the order.
- Things they say didn't work: these go straight to plays to skip.
- Repeated phrases across interviews: that's the positioning they've rehearsed.
Job Posts as Strategy Documents
Read the full text of current and past job posts, not just titles. Past posts are on Wayback (web.archive.org/web/*/target.com/careers*) and on job boards.
What to pull from each post:
- The mandate: "own our PLG motion", "scale programmatic SEO to 10,000 pages", "launch our partner program", "build our first outbound team". This is the plan, written down.
- Numbers: team size, targets, budgets ("manage $2M/year in paid").
- Tools named: the stack the team uses.
- Reports to: where the function sits.
- First seen: the date the post first appeared, which dates the push.
Add each mandate to moves.csv as kind: hire with the posting date. TheirStack searches job posts by company if the user has it.