We went quiet for a while. The brand kept pulling leads anyway — on a website with the contact forms switched off — which told us something worth paying attention to. So we’re back. But not as the same thing.

What we were.

MAD Kings started in 2016 as a growth-marketing agency. We ran the workshops, hosted the Growth Campfire meetups, built a growth academy, and ran full-funnel experimentation for clients from Microsoft to Belgian scale-ups. We grew to 16 people and tripled revenue in 2018. We built a framework — the Growth Marketing Canvas — that’s since been downloaded more than 56,000 times. It was a good run.

Why “growth marketing” doesn’t cut it anymore.

The label aged badly. “Growth hacking” came to mean Facebook ads and startup party tricks. Meanwhile the actual discipline got more serious: more technical, more data-native, more about systems than campaigns. The market started calling the serious version “GTM.” Founders, marketing VPs, and revenue leaders search for “go-to-market,” not “growth hacking.” Fair enough.

But most “GTM” today is half a funnel.

Here’s our gripe. The current GTM wave is mostly cold outbound — Clay, Apollo, enrichment, AI SDRs, bolted onto HubSpot. Top of the funnel, automated, at volume. It’s genuinely useful. It’s also a third of the job. Acquisition without activation, retention, and referral is just a faster way to fill a leaky bucket. We’ve spent ten years on the whole funnel, and we’re not about to pretend the bottom half stopped mattering.

And most of it locks you in.

The standard GTM stack — HubSpot, Marketo, Klaviyo, Segment, Clay — is rented. It holds your data, charges you more as you grow, and quietly becomes the thing you can’t leave. That’s not an accident; for a lot of agencies, the lock-in is the business model. We think that’s a bad deal for you, so we build the opposite: an open stack, on European infrastructure, that you own outright.

So here’s what we are now.

A technical GTM studio. We design, build, and run go-to-market engines across the full funnel — and we hand you the keys. We use AI where it pays off and we tell you exactly where. We host in Europe by default. Same obsession with the funnel we’ve always had. Better tools, sharper focus, and no interest in becoming your landlord.

Smaller this time. On purpose. If that’s useful to you — let’s talk. If you just want the framework we start from, the Canvas is free.

— JC