Partner spotlight: Understory

Most B2B agencies sell one channel and call it a strategy — outbound, or paid, or content, or RevOps. Understory was built on the opposite bet: that those channels only work when they feed each other. Founders Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim came up in different corners of growth and built one team that runs all of it.

Understory is an OutboundSync agency partner — and OutboundSync sits in their own go-to-market stack, which is the kind of detail that tells you an outbound agency actually ships what it sells.

Who’s behind it: Alex Fine and Ali Yildirim

Understory has two founders who split the work along the exact line the agency is built to erase. Alex Fine came up through Clay and outbound — an early Clay expert and GTM engineer who runs much of Understory’s own sales through the same automated systems the agency builds for clients. Ali Yildirim came up through paid media and demand generation — a Georgia Tech grad who spent years running paid social, Google, and Meta campaigns and obsessing over attribution.

Put those two halves together and you get the whole pitch: the person who builds the outbound engine and the person who builds the paid engine, in one shop, working off one set of data. Understory went full-time in late 2023 and has grown to a team of 34.

Why allbound beats specializing

Most agencies specialize — one runs your ads, another runs outbound, a third runs content — and none of them share what they learn. Understory’s argument is that the specialization is the problem. When one team runs paid, outbound, social content, and RevOps off the same data, signals from one channel trigger the next: a founder’s post on social warms an account, that account gets worked in outbound and retargeted in paid, outbound replies sharpen the ad targeting, and RevOps wires it all to the CRM so nothing leaks.

The clearest proof is in the data. Understory enriches paid-social audiences with Clay before they go live, which lifts audience match rates from roughly 60% to 90% — the kind of compounding you only get when the data team and the ads team are the same team. It’s why they describe allbound as a flywheel, not a checklist.

What Understory actually does

In practice, Understory runs the full go-to-market motion for B2B SaaS companies from seed to IPO across five connected services: paid media across Google, Meta, Reddit, and social; trigger-based outbound and GTM engineering; founder and executive content on social; creative and landing pages; and the RevOps that connects it all. Content sits upstream — the posts that build a founder’s audience are the same signals that feed paid targeting and warm outbound. The engine runs on Clay, where they are one of the top Clay Enterprise Partners, alongside HeyReach and Instantly — and they are equally adept running RevOps in HubSpot and Salesforce, so every ad impression, outbound reply, and social engagement lands on the right record.

The track record is broad:

The fit with OutboundSync

Understory’s outbound runs through the platforms OutboundSync supports — Clay, HeyReach, Instantly — and lands in HubSpot or Salesforce, both of which the team runs natively. OutboundSync is the piece that gets all of that multi-channel activity — paid, outbound, and social alike — onto the right records in the CRM, which is why it already sits in Understory’s own stack. They build the flywheel; OutboundSync keeps the CRM in sync with it.

If you’re a B2B SaaS team tired of stitching five agencies together, Alex and Ali’s team is worth a look.