Filling the top of an enterprise funnel from zero

The challenge

Aucctus builds an AI operating system for enterprise innovation: agentic engines that take an innovation team from a raw idea through market and customer intelligence, testing, financial modelling and portfolio prioritisation. Weeks of research in minutes. The product was real and the team behind it had a decade of Fortune 500 innovation practice.

What it didn't have was a top of funnel. Innovation leaders inside large companies are hard to reach, harder to get in a room, and every one of them has already been pitched a "generic AI wrapper" this year. My mandate when I joined was narrow: fill the funnel, through outreach, events and whatever creative means worked.

What I did

An events motion, from nothing. We hosted an event every few weeks: dinners, workshops, breakfasts. Small rooms, innovation leaders, a demo and a conversation instead of a deck. Around those we worked the largest innovation conferences in the world, InnoLead and Innov8rs among them, running booths and the after-events where the real meetings happen.

Demo calls. Every first meeting was built around one question: what are you being asked to prove this year, and what's slowing you down? The answer decided which parts of the product we showed and which we left out.

A go-to-market system, built from scratch. There was no CRM worth inheriting, so I built our own: events, marketing, pipeline management and the follow-ups between them in one place, with AI agents doing the drafting and the remembering. It's what lets one person run an enterprise pipeline without dropping threads.

What happened

In six months the funnel went from empty to a full corporate pipeline, sourced almost entirely through the events and the system above. The conferences turned into booked meetings rather than badge scans, and the hosted events became the most reliable way to get a buyer into a real conversation.

What I'd do differently

The lessons were all logistical, and all avoidable: material and equipment missing on the day, events timed badly against the buyers' calendars, and invites that went out too late. Every one of those now lives as a checklist in the system.