Behind the Bill – the analyst engagement campaign that shifted our narrative

An analyst asked me a question in a briefing prep call last fall that stopped me mid-slide: "So you're competing with Chargebee?"

I'd been at Gotransverse for about a year. We were prepping her for an upcoming platform evaluation, and she was scanning our public materials while we talked. Everything she was seeing — the pricing page, the product tour, the case study excerpts — reasonably suggested we were a mid-market subscription billing tool. Which we are not. We are a distributed, cloud-native, event-driven monetization platform that ingests usage across formats most people don't know exist, mediates and normalizes it, and turns it into revenue-ready data at enterprise scale. Chargebee is a great product. It's also serving a different customer, in a different price band, solving a different problem.

I didn't blame her for the question. I blamed us. If someone whose job is to evaluate this category couldn't see the difference from our website, that was a positioning failure and it was my job to fix it.

That call is where "Behind the Bill" started.

The gap wasn't the product

Here is the thing that took me longest to accept: we did not have a product problem. Our engineering team ships hard, complex, real infrastructure. Our customers include Ethoca–Mastercard, Clearwater Analytics, FlexTrade, StarzPlay, Ziply Fiber — companies whose billing operations would break a lightweight tool in a week. Every one of those deployments involves multi-entity account hierarchies, event-driven mediation, revenue recognition workflows tied to compliance-grade financial systems, and integration surface area that takes months to design correctly.

What we had was a communication gap. Analysts were reading our public surface and inferring a smaller, simpler product than the one we actually operate. Our sales team could close the gap in a discovery call. Our analyst calls could close it in an hour of demo. But the analyst reports being written between those interactions were still working from the surface impression. That was the perception cost, and it was showing up in comparative positioning and in the categories we were being placed in.

You can't fix that with a rebrand. A rebrand is a haircut. What we needed was to bring analysts inside the platform — into the technical layers they never see, the workflows that never make it into a pricing page, the parts of the product that exist specifically because enterprise billing is hard and someone has to solve for it.

Hence the name. The bill — the invoice, the customer-facing artifact — is the easy part. Everything behind the bill is where the actual complexity lives. Mediation. Rating. Reconciliation. Revenue recognition. Data lineage. Auditability. Traceability. The stuff that lets a CFO sign off on a quarterly close without a rewrite.

What we actually built

"Behind the Bill" ended up as a series, not a campaign. That was deliberate. A one-off analyst white paper gets read once and archived. A rhythm gets remembered.

Each installment took one workflow that lives behind the bill and unpacked it end-to-end for a technical-but-not-engineering audience — analysts, RevOps buyers, IT evaluators. The formats varied by topic. Some were long-form written pieces with architecture diagrams. Some were fifteen-minute video walkthroughs. Some were live demos we ran during analyst briefings and then packaged as recorded assets for asynchronous distribution.

The topics were chosen deliberately. Not "here are our features" — that's a product tour, and analysts already have those. Instead: "here is what actually happens to a usage event between the moment your customer swipes and the moment your CFO closes the books." One installment on mediation. One on rating engine architecture. One on revenue recognition for usage-based products. One on how account hierarchies work in real customer deployments. One on what changes when you move from a subscription model to a hybrid usage model mid-contract, which is a question analysts get asked constantly and had no good answer for.

Every piece was a collaboration. I don't want to overclaim solo authorship on this — I wrote the narratives, held the through-line, and owned distribution. But the technical accuracy came from our Product Managers and Engineering leads sitting with me in working sessions and correcting my drafts until we had something that would survive an analyst asking a hard follow-up question. Our Chief Solutions Officer was in most of those sessions. Our RevOps lead reviewed anything that touched attribution or reporting. Sales heard about topics before analysts did and gave me the objections they were hearing in the field so we could preempt them.

The AI avatar came from a production problem

I made a choice early on that I want to be transparent about. Producing this much video content on our schedule was not going to happen through a traditional production process. We didn't have a video team. We had a marketing team of three, plus me. Our nearest full production capacity was a vendor engagement I couldn't get budget for.

So I trained an avatar of myself using HeyGen, cloned my voice with ElevenLabs, and drafted scripts through a workflow that started in ChatGPT and ended in careful human editing. The videos you see on my LinkedIn Featured section with me in a white button-down shirt in the same car — that is not me filming sixteen videos in one day. That is me and a well-prompted avatar sharing production duty.

I want to be clear about what this did and didn't do. It did not replace my writing, my subject-matter judgment, or my editorial standards. Every script was written by me, every technical claim was verified with Product or Engineering, every published version was reviewed for accuracy and tone. What it did was collapse the production step from "block off a full day, book a studio, redo takes" to "generate, review, iterate, publish." That collapse is what made the cadence sustainable. The output would not have existed without the AI workflow, and the AI workflow would have produced garbage without the editorial rigor.

I mention this because I think a lot of PMM work is going to look like this soon and I would rather be honest about how I do it than pretend I filmed sixteen videos in a car.

What shifted

Analyst evaluation outcomes shifted in a few ways. I'm not going to publish comparative scores here — not my call — but I can share the shape.

Comparative positioning against our actual peer set improved. Analysts stopped grouping us with mid-market tools in casual conversation. When I asked our lead analyst at one firm what changed, her answer was: "I have a clearer picture of what your platform actually does now." That was the entire point.

Sales cycles started referencing our analyst positioning earlier. Our AEs stopped having to spend the first thirty minutes of enterprise discovery calls explaining why we weren't Chargebee. Analyst content ended up in customer decks. The through-line was working.

Internal alignment tightened. This one surprised me. Product and Engineering saw their work described in market-facing language, and started using some of that language themselves in their own roadmap documents and customer-facing calls. That is not a metric anyone tracks but it matters.

What did not shift

I want to be honest about the parts that were harder.

Some analyst perceptions are downstream of category taxonomy that no amount of content will fix. If a firm's coverage model puts us in a category we don't fit, no narrative work moves us into a category we do fit. That's a longer conversation with each firm about how they define coverage, and it happens over multiple evaluation cycles, not one campaign.

Some deals were not going to close on positioning alone. A better analyst perception opens the door but does not sell the deal. I got asked, more than once, "did Behind the Bill drive pipeline?" The honest answer is that it made pipeline conversations start from a better place, and I can defend that. It did not, by itself, close deals. Nothing does.

Production quality on some early videos was rougher than I'd like. The avatar has come a long way, and so has my prompt discipline. The first three episodes I would remake if I had the time.

What I would do differently

Start the technical working sessions earlier and make them longer. Half of my first drafts were about 60% right, and the 40% correction ate hours per piece. If I ran this again, I would spend a full week upfront with Product and Engineering, mapping the technical territory, before writing a word.

Publish to the developer surface too. We optimized for analysts and enterprise buyers, but there's a case that some of this content would have done real work on our developer documentation site as well. That was a missed distribution channel.

Ask sales for the questions earlier. When I finally sat down with a couple of AEs and asked "what do prospects ask that we don't have a good answer to," I got the next four episode topics in twenty minutes. I should have started there.

"Behind the Bill" continues to run at Gotransverse. If you're an analyst covering monetization and want to be added to the briefing list, or if you're a PMM working through a similar analyst perception problem, send me a note. Happy to compare approaches.