Your Favorite Tweener Times Articles Over the Last Year and What it Tells Us...**OR** How To Build a MONSTER GTM-Inbound Strategy!
Tweener is built on transparency, building in the open and founders sharing best practices, this post has it all...
Having a content strategy or what’s more popularly called an inbound marketing strategy, used to be optional for founders. But, in today’s insanely noisy GTM World that is also increasingly flooded with inauthentic AI slop, it’s no longer optional, it’s imperative to getting your message out, getting your ICPs attention and closing deals.
Go build an AMAZING GTM Inbound strategy - no time like the present!
Top founders today are focusing on and investing in a holistic GTM inbound motion and it’s driving anywhere from 25-50% of their overall GTM strategy. Like I said - imperative!
Today’s Top Founders are LOCKED IN a comprehensive GTM inbound motion and it’s driving anywhere from 25-50%+ of their overall GTM strategy.
Tweener Fund: Building in the Open - Let’s Go Meta.
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Long-time readers will have picked up on what we’re doing here, but if you’re new to the Tweener-verse, the NC Tweeter Fund and our family of offerings operate at two levels. There’s level one - the obvious what-you-see-is-what-you-get level. Then there’s a level up - the meta level.
Tweener is a sandbox where we can build in the open, super-transparently AND tell you and show you, fellow founders, what we’re doing, how it’s working. Why would we do this? Well, we want you to copy the best practices so you’re companies are successful. It’s part of our pay-forward program. Since we’re tightly owned and not venture backed our sandbox here is a unique opportunity to do that.
This is one of those articles where we’re going to work at both levels. Let’s start at the Meta-level and be transparent about what we’re doing here and how we do it - please take what you want, execute on it, make improvements, make it yours and grow. After the meta portion, we’ll pop down back to the lower level.
But before we go further, we want to thank our incredible sponsors, without their generous support of NC Tweener Fund and our state’s founders, we couldn’t do what we do… 🫡
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The Foundations of a Great GTM-Inbound Strategy
A modern GTM-Inbound strategy will include the base of the foundation, which is the content itself. Today’s must-haves are:
Content Base
A direct newsletter- This is where you build a 1:1 connection with your audience and control the distribution. Top platforms are Substack and Beehiv - we use substack.
A podcast - Reading involves the sense of vision, modern podcasts pull in audio and video which gives you hearing and vision.
Distribution
The content should be amplified through distribution. A newsletter has the benefit of it’s own natural distribution, the amplification comes from:
Text Social media distribution - LinkedIn is currently where the most juice is, but you should also look at X and other channels.
Video media distribution - YouTube should be the foundation for long-form content with shorts as a top-of-the-funnel strategy to drive audience into the long-form content and accelerate the build of the
Deep + Regular Analysis
As part of any great GTM-Inbound strategy, you should be analyzing your podcasts, newsletter and your entire content strategy monthly, quarterly and annually - do more of what’s working (driving desired engagement/pipe) and do less of what isn’t working, always leave 10-20% room for experiments - have fun with it! We’ll get to more on analysis with a live-world example here in a sec, but one more thought while we’re in meta mode…
GTM-Inbound Strategy: Putting it All Together
Most founders at first don’t get the true value of GTM-Inbound. They think of it like one of 4-5 things you do like this→
But what you have to realize, that this dramatically undersells a content strategy, once you start building it after a quarter or two, you will realize it ACTUALLY works like this→
Have you ever read a piece of our content, or listened to our podcast and though - wow, that was just what I needed, when I needed it - awesome! Or you are thinking about problem and we write about it on these virtual pages? Since we’re stepping up a level, the reason this happens is because we think of the content-layer as the foundation for our whole strategy. Why?
Content as the GTM Foundation
Content has superpowers in today’s World you can’t get, much less buy anywhere else:
Real-time/Fast Feedback - publish/measure/iterate in < 5 days cycles.
Ridiculously inexpensive compared to other GTM channels
Direct-to-ICP capability, no middlemen
Authentic brand building
Perfect sandbox to throw messaging spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.
Last, but actually most importantly, it’s 100% measurable! No attribution arguments, no questions of who gets credit, just raw, easy-to-capture beautiful, actionable data.
If you use this data right, it will not only loop back into your GMT-inbound/content strategy, but it will inform and amplify all of your GTM.
This post is a build-in-the open reflection of this strategy, again, so you can see how we do it, so you can too! Let’s begin.
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Tweener Times Analysis: Give the Audience What They Want!
With over 65k followers across the Tweener-verse and nearly 5 million annual engagements, it’s clear this community loves founder-to-founder content with a real operational angle. We thought it would be fun to look back at the top 10 most-viewed and engaged-with posts from the past year and reflect on what resonated most. Hopefully it goes without saying, you’re going to see a lot more content like this and a lot LESS content that didn’t resonate. With 2 posts a week and a couple weeks off, there were 100 posts over the last year - <meta-mode> Like we said - sandbox to test messaging <end meta-mode>
Let’s dig in by counting backwards from number 10 and working our way up to the top spot, David Letterman style for you OGs out there…
……Drum roll please 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁
#10 published on February 20, 2026, the post Announcing: NC IDEA and Tweener Fund Partnership. In this piece we talked about one of the biggest milestones in the Tweener Fund’s history — our partnership with NC IDEA. This $4 million, five-year LP investment is expanding the fund statewide under the new name “NC Tweener Fund, Powered by NC IDEA.” We then broke down what’s changing (bigger checks, more companies, all of NC), what’s NOT changing (Robbie and I are still running the show from Raleigh Founded), and how the community can help us uncover great Tweener companies from the mountains to the coast.
#9 published on April 2, 2025, the post Must See Tweener Events Coming Up. In this article we talked about the slate of can’t-miss Tweener events during Raleigh Durham Startup Week 2025. We announced two founder workshops Robbie and I hosted at American Underground — one on GTM in a GenAI world and another on accelerating product motion with ShapeUP. Plus the annual Tweener List Awards at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. We also gave the backstory on the whole Tweener-verse for our wave of new subscribers and highlighted the growth of the Tweener List from 50 companies in 2015 to 300.
#8 published on February 10, 2026, the post The Tweener Founder Bat Phone is Ringing Off the Hook: SaaS Blood is in the Water. In this article we talked about the SaaS valuation crisis that hit in early 2026 after Anthropic’s Cowork Skills launch spooked Wall Street. Our founder “bat phone” was ringing off the hook with portfolio companies getting rug-pulled and re-traded on deals. We walked through the two walls of worry (AI eating software and Mag7 capex doubling), explained how public SaaS multiples crashed to their lowest since 2014, and laid out a three-phase action plan for founders: batten down the hatches, analyze your AI/vibe-coding churn risk, and go AI-native to motor through to the other side.
#7 published on September 3, 2025, the post FLASH: Bionic Health Acquired by Thrive. In this article we talked about a NC-to-NC deal we were obviously pretty close to — Thrive (part of MDO Holdings) acquiring Bionic Health, co-founded by our own Robbie Allen and Dr. Jared Pelo.
#6 published on October 7, 2025, the post Bank of America Triangle Innovation Summit Recap (Part 1/2). In this article we talked about the highlights from BofA’s Triangle Innovation Summit at the Spark Campus in Morrisville. The event brought together founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders for economic briefings, founder pitches, and panels on AI and venture markets.
#5 published on January 27, 2026, the post Cracked Productivity Hacks for 2026. In this article I shared an annual update to my personal productivity system — and wow, what a year it was. AI tools went from “try it and give up after 30 days” to genuine game-changers. I shared my full 2026 productivity stack including Superhuman, Perplexity Comet, Granola, Claude, Manus, and more. The core philosophy stays the same: find 4 hours a week of optimizations, compound that 10% every year, and over time you’ll build a superpower. This one clearly hit a nerve — it’s the topic founders mention most when we meet in person - that feeds back into the content engine and here it is at number 5!
#4 published on November 12, 2025, the post Tweener Times and Tweener Talks Update: Elevated Experience for 2026!. In this article we talked about our first-year results and 2026 plans with full transparency. The numbers were wild: 65k total followers across all platforms, 4.9 million annual engagements, 400k YouTube views, and 5,000 podcast downloads across 50 countries. Richard Holcomb dominated the most-popular content charts (no surprise there). We also announced our elevated 2026 sponsor lineup with a new Gold/Silver tier structure and transparently shared our plans for Act II of the Tweener-verse.
#3 published on March 3, 2026, the post The 2026 GTM Tech Stack Playbook - A Guide for NC Tweener Founders. In this article we talked about the full GTM tech stack our portfolio companies are actually using in the trenches. We surveyed ~165 portfolio companies and mapped every layer: CRM (HubSpot dominates), enrichment (Apollo vs. Clay), outbound email (spray-and-pray is dead), LinkedIn automation (don’t do it — risk-reward is way out of whack), intent data, and the critical orchestration layer tying it all together. We identified three founder profiles — the Lean Operator, the Builder, and the Pioneer — so founders could find their fit, load their GTM stack and ROCK on!
#2 published on May 27, 2025, 9 Ways AI is Disrupting the Startup Landscape. In this post we talked about the expanded version of my NC Tech Association “State of Tech Exponential” keynote. We walked through 9 massive shifts AI is driving across the startup world: data as the new network effect, AI-native speed (Cursor hitting $300m ARR with 60 people!), non-human org charts, seedstrapping, AI vacuuming up 60% of all venture capital, tokens as the new vanity metric, usage-based pricing killing seat licenses, the “8090ification” of Big SaaS, and GTM falling off a cliff. Whether you’re a founder, exec, or just curious — this one had something for everyone. This one’s about a year old - it holds up pretty well which in AI Time is…very hard! Spoiler for those of you paying attention… <meta> you’ll see this topic again very soon - it is number 2 by the way 😉 <end meta>
#1 published on March 10, 2026, the post The 2026 DevStack for Ludicrous PR-Production: How Founders Are Building 10x Faster. In this article Robbie capped off our 4-part founder optimization series by pulling back the curtain on his AI-powered developer stack. After 25 years of “digging ditches with a shovel,” tools like Claude Code and Codex gave him a backhoe. He built the entire Tweener fund management portal (NPC) in a single weekend — 20k+ lines of production code that would have taken 3 months the old way. He walked through his full toolchain from Replit for quick prototyping to Claude Code in YOLO mode for serious work, and dropped the controversial take that we may stop maintaining codebases entirely and just regenerate apps from specs. The biggest insight? The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification. This one topped the charts and it’s not hard to see why.
What Topics Does Our Audience Love Most?
When you zoom out and look at what cracked the top 10, a clear picture emerges. The dominant theme by a mile is AI-powered founder tool stacks — four of the top five posts (#1 DevStack, #2 9 Ways AI is Disrupting, #3 GTM Stack Playbook, and #5 Productivity Hacks) are all about the specific tools, strategies, and workflows founders are using to build and sell faster in the AI era. This isn’t surprising. Our community is made up of operators who are in the trenches every day, and they want actionable, real-world intel on what’s actually working — not jargon-filled Gartner reports or theoretical frameworks. The fact that Robbie’s DevStack post took the #1 spot tells you everything: founders want to know a mix of strategy AND tactics- how to leverage AI coding tools to compress months of work into days. The same energy drove the GTM and Productivity posts — show me the stack, show me the results - give me an un-fair advantage by sharing your playbook.
The second big theme is ecosystem news and community moments — five posts (#4 Tweener Update, #6 BofA Summit, #7 Bionic Health acquisition, #9 Must See Events, and #10 NC IDEA Partnership) are all about what’s happening in the NC startup scene. M&A deals, big partnership announcements, ecosystem events, and year-in-review transparency — our readers clearly care deeply about the local community and want to stay plugged in to what’s moving and shaking.
The data is telling us - our ICP clearly wants two things: give me the tools to win, and keep me connected to the ecosystem that’s got my back.
Thanks for reading, subscribing, sharing, and showing up. We couldn’t do any of this without you. Stay tuned — we’ve got a LOT more coming in 2026.
Go build YOUR AMAZING GTM Inbound Strategy - no time like the present!