SaaS is an awesome space to be in.

  • Low barriers to entry
  • Recurring revenue
  • Almost infinite scalability

But for every high profile success story, there are literally thousands of failed startup attempts.

Yep, failing = learning, but it still sucks.

Mentorship can improve your odds

In the SaaS world, everyone’s bat shit crazy about the latest growth hack tactics.

But the best growth hack of them all though is the oldest in the book.

  • Talk to successful people doing things similar to what you want to do
  • Ask them what worked for them (and what didn’t work)
  • Leverage their insights to prevent the type of mistakes that are totally avoidable
  • Build relationships with them in the meanwhile

The skills necessary to excel at growth in SaaS are ridiculously broad.

  • Product management
  • Performance marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Social media
  • And the list goes on and on…

It’s impossible to be an expert at everything.

But being able to jump on a call with an expert on-demand and talk through your challenges can be a life saver.

How to find a SaaS mentor (the old way)

Traditionally, finding a SaaS mentor’s been a royal pain the ass.

Depending on which blog post you read, the advice can differ.

What most blogs recommend:

  • Do your homework, find someone you admire and lock-in
  • Give first, do something nice to catch their attention and win their respect
  • After enough rapport’s been built, ask them to be your mentor.

While this sounds great in theory, it’s time-consuming and kind of awkward.

The new (easy) way

Benefits:

  • Zero time wastage
  • Zero awkwardness
  • You know they’re game to mentor
  • The mentors are all rock solid since we vet them
  • The mentors hail from respected SaaS companies and have real-world experience (they aren’t preachy coaches)

Below are 25 mentors that are currently working in high growth SaaS startups.

Feel free to click into their profiles to learn more about the nuance of what they can help you with. From product management to performance marketing to customer success and more.

They are all super friendly and are down to help you out.

#GetGrowing

 

Albacross

Marcus Svensson

 

  • Mentor Name: Marcus Svensson
  • Role: Head of Growth
  • Website: Albacross.com
  • Product: IP reverse look up B2B lead generation
  • Founded: 2014

How Marcus can help you with your SaaS

 

Growth Marketing

Leading cross-functional team at Albacross, the closer marketing and product work, the more efficient and great outcome of your test you will see. Writing about “Growth Hacking” and Growth Marketing from time to time.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

You can drive as much traffic you want if you have no clue how to convert it, its just a waste of resources. CRO is an essential part of growth of your company.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is definitely one of the most powerful tools to leverage your business, bootstrapped or not. But also one of the most common way companies doing it all wrong, research, quality, and planning is key to any success.

Technology and Tools

I’ve tried well over 100+ tools related to marketing/sales/analytics, love to try new things. Set up the right tool stack for several SaaS companies who work with SME customers.

What mentees are saying about Marcus

We had a great call about Facebook retargeting ads using custom audiences. It was great to hear from another head of growth what’s working and what’s not working. I definitely recommend anyone in a growth role working in SaaS to book a call with Marcus. Great guy and super friendly.

Fotios Panagiotakopoulos - Founder at GrowthMentor

GoSquared

James Gill

  • Mentor Name: James Gill
  • Role: Co-founder
  • Website: GoSquared.com
  • Product: Analytics, live chat, and marketing automation for high growth companies
  • Founded: 2006

How James can help you with your SaaS

Product Management

Management of the GoSquared platform for 10+ years. Experience both managing product first-hand (ingesting feature requests, using data to inform decisions, understanding competitive landscape, and using instinct) to define product roadmap, and leading product management as a discipline within the team.

Content Marketing

Led the content marketing efforts for GoSquared for over 10 years – writing 100+ blog posts on product design, growth, business, and more. Also extensive experience in lead generation, and overall content marketing strategy.

Design / UX

Over 10 years of first-hand experience designing and implementing SaaS products, marketing sites, user onboarding flows, and more. Primarily in B2B. Extensive knowledge of Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, HTML, CSS, Marvel, and more.

What mentees are saying about James

Really great call with James last night. We organically found our way to shared ground and he shared some fantastic insights that are really valuable to my current user research strategies. Thanks James!

Benjamin Webster - Co-Founder at Troopl

Pexels

Enrique Hoyos

 

  • Mentor Name: Enrique Hoyos
  • Role: Head of Marketing
  • Website: Pexels.com
  • Product: Free photos and videos you can use everywhere
  • Founded: 2014

How Enrique can help you with your SaaS

Content marketing

In this day an age content it not recommended – it is necessary. Customers don’t wait for you to educate them on your solution, they take the initiate and learn in their own terms even before becoming a lead.

The most important thing to consider when doing content marketing is your potential customer – you need to truly understand them to be able to be relevant. I specialize in using quantitative and qualitative data to understand consumers, and can help you do the same.

PPC strategies

Digital Advertising is one of the most efficient and immediate ways of driving qualified traffic to your website – I specialize in running and optimizing campaigns and landing pages to help you get the most out of them.

I look at things with two very different lenses. The first one is a strategic one – a high level view to understand where you are going and how you plan on getting there. The second one is tactical – zoom into the nitty gritty data to maximize your efforts.

What mentees are saying about Enrique

Was good to get advice/ideas from a seasoned marketer for my SaaS product in marketing. Enrique made some really great comments about customer onboarding and their point of view.

Maruti Agarwal - Principal Data Scientist at Meltwater

Reeview.app

Eithiriel DeMere

 

  • Mentor Name: Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré
  • Role: B2B SaaS Consultant, Go-to-Market Strategist, & Product Marketer, CMO
  • Website: Reeview.app
  • Product: Automated platform that finds, collects and displays authentic user-generated video reviews for e-commerce businesses
  • Founded: 2021

How Nichole can help you with your SaaS

Customer Success

Think of churn as a symptom, not the disease, and it’s usually caused by customers who either don’t have Success Potential or aren’t reaching their Desired Outcomes. And if the churning customers do seem to have success potential, then you’re going to have to dig deep (ie. voice of customer data, surveys, interviews) to find out what these “ideal” customers aren’t getting from you that they need.

Content Marketing

If you ask an inbound marketer, inbound marketing is not only the best thing since sliced bread – it’s the saving grace of marketing in general. Now, I will admit to having some bias towards Inbound. I think it works a helluva lot better for today’s customers who are becoming increasingly resistant to the “hard sell” tactics of outbound marketing. But, it’s not the be-all and end-all, everything-you-need, one-stop-shop for SaaS success.

Product market fit

I will help you get to know your customer really, really well. And that is hard. For any size business. It’s as hard as it is vitally important, because everything you do, from developing your product, to marketing your product, to creating a brand that drives customers to you – it all starts here. So few startups get this right.

What mentees are saying about Nichole

Nichole, was more than amazing. Before our call she asked for my go-to-market- strategy and she had already prepared a document with all kinds of tips and information to help me improve my business. She gave me great actionable advice. She is a great specialist when it comes to B2B SaaS companies. Thank you very much for everything!

Nancy Shenouda - Co-Founder & CEO at Tradesnest

Elasticsearch

Keiko Asakura

 

  • Mentor Name: Keiko Asakura
  • Role: Marketing Director
  • Website: Elastic.co
  • Product: Makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability, and security
  • Founded: 2012

How Keiko can help you with your SaaS

Product market fit

  • Market readiness
  • Japan and APAC market
  • Competitive landscape
  • Sales channel strategy / Partner enablement
  • Positioning
  • Tailored messaging

Content Marketing

  • SEO friendly content development
  • different types of content (blog, video, ebook, webinar, product sheet) and release frequency
  • content calendar
  • integrated campaign

Growth marketing

  • marketing funnel analysis
  • increase net new leads/contacts, inbound inquiries via multiple marketing channels
  • short term and mid term strategy
  • Inside Sales, outbound strategy

What mentees are saying about Keiko

It’s always a pleasure to speak to Keiko. She provides a great environment to bounce ideas off and build a marketing strategy from. She also provides great tips and insight for a starting point in creating a new product or service. Defs recommend anyone who needs help with marketing to reach out to her!

Kenny Yeung

Bonjoro

Casey Hill

 

  • Mentor Name: Casey Hill
  • Role: Head of Growth
  • Website: Bonjoro.com
  • Product: App for sending individual personalised videos
  • Founded: 2017

How Casey can help you with your SaaS

Conversion rate optimisation

I have worked with hundreds of brands to optimize their landing pages, email campaigns, and ads. I have extensive experience in segmentation, analyzing, and A/B testing different approaches to help optimize results.

Sales

I have led SaaS sales teams as a sales director and worked to optimize challenges such as:

  • Reducing demo no-show rates
  • Increasing pipeline conversion
  • Building more streamlined CRM/process automation – Optimizing rep performance
  • Teaching consultative selling
  • How to approach everything from SMBs to Enterprise deals

Growth marketing

Casey is a growth veteran, with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast.

Whether it’s garnering millions of views on Quora and Linkedin, or pioneering new growth levers (like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts in 2020), Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break from the mold.

What mentees are saying about Casey

I could easily say I’ve spoken to the king of e-commerce coaches within the Growthmentor-community. I’ve spoken to 97 mentors to-date, and Casey has delivered in ripping our sales funnel apart and offering relevant use-cases which we can take over 1-on-1 and implement it. Expect a barrage of high-relevant tips and tricks that are either directly actionable or at the very least implementable with some expectation of result. Highly recommended!

David Kellerman - Founder at Get Focused

SurveyMonkey

Mike Tatum

 

  • Mentor Name: Mike Tatum
  • Role: Demand Generation Manager
  • Website: Momentive.ai
  • Product: A new type of agile experience management
  • Founded: 1999

How Mike can help you with your SaaS

Email marketing

As a marketing automation nerd I’ve learned a lot about email marketing. I’m equally skilled on the analytical side in terms of scaling open and click rates as well as the more creative side in terms of what should you even write in emails.

Growth marketing

I’ve been a growth marketer for over 6 years and have developed successful growth marketing strategies in some of the most competitive industries in tech.

Marketing automation

I’m a legitimate HubSpot expert (so much so that I’ll actually be running a breakout session at INBOUND 2021). I can help you optimize your marketing and sales operations so that you get the most out of the tool. If you’re using Marketo, Pardot, or Eloqua I’ve also had experience with them and can help advise on strategy.

What mentees are saying about Mike

What can I say, Mike is both knowledgeable and is just an all-around great guy (who like me loves basketball). He helped me in 30 mins about how to get tactical marketing emails to work in Hubspot and also ABM vendor recommendations. If you’re working in demand gen/ABM for enterprise, I’d suggest you book a call with Mike before he gets booked up!

Mark Cann - Head of Growth at Growth Warriors

LiveChat

Marcos Bravos C

 

  • Mentor Name: Marcos Bravo C.
  • Role: Marketing Strategy – Currently LiveChat Brand Ambassador
  • Website: LiveChatinc.com
  • Product: Live chat and chat bot software
  • Founded: 2002

How Marcos can help you with your SaaS

Venting Frustration

Not everyday is a sunny day, but quitting is for…well quitters. As also a fellow entrepreneur I want to help finding the best way to get rid of the frustration and how to see the light in the end of the tunnel. Spoiler: I’ts all about keep driving.

Social Media

Once you have a voice and something to say is time to amplify it and scream at the top of your lungs. Get Social Media right and you will get immediate feedback, interactions and eventually a group of loyal fans ready to spread the word. Learn to listen and how to react on times of crisis.

Mindset Coaching

Understanding and evaluating the priorities in your company is key, knowing how to create a team that will fight next to you is an upmost priority so you don’t have to fight alone. Know how to set up the plan for succeeding in the arena of business.

Content Marketing

How to create a voice for your company, find values and a style that people can relate to. Content is the best way to make people trust in your brand, the next step being buying from you and becoming a loyal customer

Reply.io

Alex Panchuk

 

  • Mentor Name: Alex Panchuk
  • Role: Paid Marketing Manager
  • Website: Reply.io
  • Product: The multichannel sales engagement platform
  • Founded: 2014

How Alex can help you with your SaaS

Growth marketing

PPC being a part of company growth, along with working 4 years in a SaaS company in a super-competitive niche (sales engagement), I’ve tried and succeeded at quite a few growth marketing tactics (not just paid ads). I’ve been a part of a few product launches and helped promote and make them popular on the SaaS field.

Conversion rate optimisation

Without CRO skills you’re just on half of the way to becoming a successful paid media pro. I regularly do landing page checks, analysis, and CRO breakdowns that help the companies that I work with generate more leads at a lower cost. The biggest success I’ve had with CRO to date is helping a SaaS company lower their CPL by 50% (in a highly competitive and expensive niche) by setting up tracking in GTM and feeding Google Ads algorithms with the click data on landing pages.

PPC Strategies

Having managed 7 figure budgets in paid media across Google (both search and display), Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and other ad channels for my whole career, I can assist you with an optimal strategy along with specific tactics on each channel.

What mentees are saying about Alex

Alex was a great mentor to help me with YouTube ad campaign performance. He efficiently addressed my pain points and helped me understand what was working and what could be improved, providing actionable recommendations and ideas for experiments. I would recommend him to anyone in need of help with their own YouTube campaigns.

Hollie Youlden - Marketing Manager at EmailOctopus

Twilio

Thomas Lionelli

 

    • Mentor Name: Tommy Lionelli
    • Role: Staff Product Manager
    • Website: Twilio.com
    • Product: Powers the future of business communications. Enabling phones, VoIP, and messaging to be embedded into web, desktop, and mobile software.
    • Founded: 2008

    How Tommy can help you with your SaaS

Customer success

This broad topic is so important for businesses and product managers.

A customer success employee is going to have the keys to your customer. What is the worst part about your product? How can you make it better.

Separately customer success should represent a major area of focus for PMs. Usually happy customers are better converting, higher ROI customers. And if you’re focused on customer success you are building something that will make you say weeee!

Idea validation

There are lots of ways to validate your idea or business. Some are more art than science, some require specific frameworks vs a gut-feel. Let’s see which is right for you.

Product management

I’ve worked at small companies and large, design led vs engineering led, B2B and B2c. I also have a background in sales, advertising, and more.

PM Experience + Range of skills + Empathy/Kindness = Tommy

What mentees are saying about Tommy

What’s great about Tommy is that he provides genuine suggestions without sugarcoating. He made great points about validating some of my ideas and distinguishing between different problems, which really helped to detangle some of my roadblocks. Great stuff!

Francesca Cadhit - Founder & Director, Head Educator and Academic Coach at Top Class Edge Learning

Unbounce

Denny Hollick

  • Mentor Name: Denny Hollick
  • Role: Director of Product @ Unbounce
  • Website: unbounce.com
  • Product: Landing Page Builder & Platform
  • Founded: 2009

How Denny can help you with your SaaS

Building a team

Building highly effective, motivated teams is something I’m really passionate about. I spend most of my days thinking about this specifically. Having managed marketing teams to volunteer groups upwards of 30 people, building teams that are excited about the work they do is what I enjoy most.

Content marketing

Content is something that I love working with others in creating, and I used to run a weekly newspaper as their editor. Creating great content is as simple as a mindset shift away from thinking like a marketer, and more like a newspaper editor.

Email marketing

Having led the customer marketing team for over 2 years at Unbounce, our team was responsible for all of the email communication that went out to our customers to nurture them through activation, increase their engagement, and ultimately drive advocacy while lowering churn.

Go to market strategy

Having launched several new companies, features and products through my career, finding and iterating on go-to-market strategy is something that I’ve built over several successful (and not so successful) launches.

Growth marketing

Growth marketing for me is less of a tactic and more of building a systematic approach to marketing in discovery, prioritizing your work, running experiments, and scaling them.

Idea validation

Using the lean startup, I’ve worked with many founders, innovation labs, and even with my own startup to build a reliable framework to testing new ideas and getting validation quickly.

Marketing automation

I’ve built the marketing stack at several startups – and have found a robust approach that allows both scale, and flexibility while trying to build out marketing automation.

Product market fit

Getting to product-market fit can be challenging. I’ve helped several companies go from their first 50 -> 5000 customers and help them achieve PMF using a systematic approach to discovery, experimentation, and scaling.

Venting frustration

I love helping people solve problems, coaching, or just being a good ear to listen. If you need someone to bounce some issues off of, I’m more than happy to take that on.

What mentees are saying about Denny

Denny was amazing! His suggestions were very actionable and that made this call special. Definitely the most enriching 30 min conversation I’ve had in a while. Thank you Denny.

Devesh Uba - Human Centred Product & Brand Strategist

Census

Trevor Fox

  • Mentor Name: Trevor Fox
  • Role:Head of Growth
  • Website: Getcensus.com
  • Product: Data Operational Analytics
  • Founded: 2018

How Trevor can help you with your SaaS

Product Market Fit

I’m a little bit of a ruthless question asker. I question assumptions and I like to question users. I think doing both is critical to any success online.

Technology and Tools

I’m happy to talk tools. I have been working in tech long enough to tell a good idea from a bad one. I have implemented dozens of analytics implementations and have experience with a range of frontend analytics tools and data warehouse solutions.

SEO

I’ve worked on SEO at Postmates and with Snapchat and Instagram as a consultant. I love technical SEO and search experience and believe if you can understand the tech and you can understand the experienced SEO becomes a lot easier.

What mentees are saying about Trevor

One of the best chats I’ve had about SEO in a long time – Trevor gave me some actionable things to do straight away to have impact and backed up by real-life examples that I can refer to. Cannot recommend Trevor enough.

Jake Stainer - Head of Growth at Travelperk

Piktochart

Agata Krzysztofic

 

  • Mentor Name: Agata Krzysztofik
  • Role:Head of Marketing
  • Website: PiktoChart.com
  • Product: Easy to use tool to help you make graphics and designs online
  • Founded: 2012

How Agata can help you with your SaaS

Conversion Rate Optimisation

I have developed and executed CRO strategies at several companies, analyzing many websites and onboarding flows and running various experiments. Let’s look at your website together and identify quick wins that will help you improve your conversions!

Technology and Tools

Are you currently evaluating email automation, helpdesk, forum or CRM platforms? I have done that at several companies and would be glad to share with you my platform requirements/evaluation framework that makes the process much more straightforward.

PPC Strategies

I have been part of the Google AdWords team for 6 years collaborating closely with the product, as well as with the best Google AdWords agencies globally. My former team is the one behind the #AdWordsTips video series. I’m happy to help with optimizing your Google AdWords campaigns or with getting you started. I also specialize in paid social (LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora), native advertising, and ABM (account based marketing) campaigns.

Growth Hacking

Independent if it’s improving acquisition, conversions, sales, product adoption or engagement, I will help you identify best opportunities to grow your business. And if you are looking to improve the accountability and focus on results across your company then the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are the way to go! I have experience working with OKRs at Google and I have successfully implemented the framework from scratch at several startups. I would be glad to guide you through the process.

SEO

Through the years of using SEO as the main revenue growth channel at multiple companies, I have developed a successful framework that consists of an SEO and website audit, keyword research, link-building strategy, and content strategy. With my help, we will bring your organic traffic to the next level. Send me your URL before the call. I will identify some low-hanging fruits that you will be able to implement directly after our call.

What mentees are saying about Agata

I am blown away by how helpful Agata was! I reached out to her for help with my SEO strategy and before our call even started, she analyzed my site, compiled a list of recommendations, and helped me prioritize what I needed to do. As a busy business owner, getting a pile of recommendations can feel overwhelming, but Agata left me rock solid action plan that showed me the top three things I needed to take action on. Agata, you’re awesome! Thank so much for your help.

Wes Bush - Founder of Product Led Growth Institute

Wynter

Alexandra Cote

  • Mentor Name: Alexandra Cote
  • Role: Growth Marketing Manager
  • Website: Wynter.com
  • Product: B2B message testing platform
  • Founded: 2020

How Alexandra can help you with your SaaS

Building a team

Building a marketing team? Besides helping you decide what the profile of your next hire should look like, I’ll show you know exactly: – Where to find talent – How to vet your applicants – How to decide what salary and benefits work best – What career growth opportunities you can offer to your marketing team

Content marketing

I believe content is the root of every marketing strategy. Inevitably, you’ll be creating content with any GTM plan you have. But how do you stand out through content alone, when everyone else already knows the secrets of great content?

Conversion rate optimisation

There are millions of things you can test to improve your conversion rate. But how do you prioritize what to test? And more importantly, do you have the right audience to actually get relevant results from a mere A/B test?

Email marketing

Whether you’re looking to create the perfect drip sequence or a newsletter that stands out, drop me a DM with everything that’s already in place before our call. We’ll look into innovative newsletter ideas that will get your ideal customers to sign up and tweak your email automation flows.

Growth marketing

Taking your product from 0 to 10K/month? Looking to scale beyond that? I’ve got all the right strategies and tips for continually learning and applying growth “hacks” that will work with your ideal customer persona.

Link building

Does it work? Does it not? Feel free to ask me anything on how to make correct and safe link-building decisions. Not all links are equal. And no, a link exchange opportunity isn’t a good partnership.

SEO

I’m an on-page and off-page SEO specialist so if you’re looking to grow organically, we MUST discuss what you’re doing on the SEO side. Send me your website before the call so I can run it through a quick audit and point out some must-have changes as well as tiny tweaks that will go a long way.

Venting frustration

Don’t know how to prioritize your marketing efforts? Is going all-in on marketing even the right choice? Don’t have the resources your competitors can afford? You’re struggling to hire the right people or contactors? I’m here to listen and come up with actionable strategies for fixing all of these challenges.

What mentees are saying about Alexandra

Alexandra is amazing. She’s very knowledgeable and experienced. She gave me great feedback and pointers, which I greatly appreciate. I also lover her energy!

Helena Ronis - Co-founder & CEO at AllFactors

MongoDB

Fung-Lin Wu

 

  • Mentor Name: Fung-Lin Wu
  • Role:Director of Retention Marketing
  • Website: Mongodb.com
  • Product: Leading modern, general purpose database platform, designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers
  • Founded: 2007

How Fung-Lin can help you with your SaaS

Venting frustration

I can serve as a mentor for you to listen and find solutions on the challenges that you and your company are facing as it relates to people management, marketing strategies, job search, or personal career development.

Growth marketing

Let’s identify marketing channels to acquire and retain customers, develop retention and lifecycle marketing strategies and metrics, and talk through the challenges your company has.

Marketing automation

Chat about how different marketing automation tool differs (Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot), how you should use it, what’s the right structure to building it out, and how you should roll it out within the company.

Email marketing

I can help with editing your B2B email copy, brainstorming email tests, analyzing email metrics, developing nurture strategy, identifying how to roll out nurtures, and finding areas of opportunities.

What mentees are saying about Fung-Lin

Fung-Lin was friendly and responsive. We had a great discussion and she had a lot of insight into Marketing Automation systems and their functionalities.

Vijay Chakilam - Founding Engineer at Kooper AI

Typeform

Joanna Delaney

 

  • Mentor Name: Joanna Delaney
  • Role:Senior Marketing Strategist
  • Website: Typeform.com
  • Product: Turns average forms & surveys into a powerful brand communication tool
  • Founded: 2012

How Joanna can help you with your SaaS

Sales

I can help you get started using video messaging and interactive video to get higher quality leads and more sales. At the end of the day, we are all human, and the more human and personal you can make your sales interactions, the stronger business relationships you can build. Video is a fantastic way to do this.

Content marketing

In particular video marketing, I can help show you how video can be a key component in your marketing strategy and how to leverage video to exceed your goals.

Mindset Coaching

Mindset is key to success. In business it’s one thing to understand the logical business things like sales, marketing, advertising, etc, but another key element is mindset. And it is this element which is the key to success.

Social media

There’s a huge opportunity in social right now due to the attention and time people give this channel. I can help you to use organic social media to substantially grow and nurture your community and then monetise them. An always-on approach, with fantastic copywriting and content is key to winning here.

PPC strategies

I have experience managing global multi-million ad spend budgets across different verticals and channels. Including Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, Apple Search, DV360, Criteo, YouTube, Spotify and more. I also have experience using FB management platforms such as Smartly.

With years of experience running ads with high budgets, it’s safe to say I have tried and tested everything. I can help you to optimise your paid campaigns and improve your return on investment.

What mentees are saying about Joanna

Joanna was a fantastic help with Facebook Ads and iOS 14. She gave good advice and would definitely talk to her again in the future. 100% recommended.

Alex Marco - Performance Marketing Specialist at Wagestream

Shopify

Kevin Indig

 

  • Mentor Name: Kevin Indig
  • Role:Director of SEO
  • Website: Shopify.com
  • Product: A leading global commerce company
  • Founded: 2006

How Kevin can help you with your SaaS

Building a team

I build large teams at G2 (30+ people) and Shopify (20+ people), managed, hired, fired, and restructured organizations. I can assist with employee development, building a healthy team culture, and driving a team to more sustainable output.

SEO

I have over ten years of experience in technical, large-scale, and on-page SEO. I would count link building more as Content Marketing, but that, of course, can also be considered SEO.

I was able to gain fundamental leadership experience in leading teams of over 30 people in my career, work with the C-suite, and on several international SEO strategies. Part of that is structuring teams, evangelizing SEO throughout the organization, and aligning with important stakeholders.

Content marketing

I’ve been in content marketing for as long as I’ve been in SEO, which is about 10 years, and helped all sorts of companies in B2B and B2C with strategy and implementation.

The most notable ones are Atlassian’s microsites: www.atlassian.com/jira or www.atlassian.com/git and four others.

What mentees are saying about Kevin

Kevin helped get our marketing sprint strategy completely unstuck. We were up against some stiff SEO competition with our original keyword plan, which was making the content planning process tough. Kevin walked me through several possible strategies that we hadn’t even considered. A week later, our new strategy has been approved and I’m developing our content briefs to start sending out to writers. Definitely recommend if you need a fresh perspective on SEO!

Micah McGuire - B2B Marketing Manager at ProWritingAid

PandaDoc

Nataly Onkina

  • Mentor Name: Nataly Onkina
  • Role: Senior Product Manager
  • Website: PandaDoc.com
  • Product: Create, manage and e-Sign docs with ease
  • Founded: 2011

How Nataly can help you with your SaaS

Building a team

I have experience in building teams from the scratch – marketing teams, operations teams, success/support/sales teams. At Preply I faced a team growth from 5 people to 60. At Calmerry, from 10 to 60 in one year. I can share my experience of building and motivating teams. My team says I am a good leader, mentor, and teacher. I always help my subordinates to grow professionally and personally.

Mindset coaching

I truly believe that to build a great product you need to have a product mindset. In 2016 I decided to switch from marketing to product role and I made it, not without difficulties. I can share the lessons I learned.

Product management

Need help thinking through what to build next, how to work with different stakeholders, how to motivate your team, or how to build a product strategy? I can help you! I’ve held product roles across 3 very different companies (B2B2C, B2B, B2C) and worked with many different types of teams. Product management is my passion, so I am here to help you.

Product market fit

I was working in product research and development a lot. In B2B and B2C. In Edu-tech and Med-tech. I’m excited to dive into your product-market fit challenges and share what I’ve learned along with the way and brainstorm ideas with you. Let’s set up your go-to-market strategy.

User research

Building a great product is always about resolving user needs. How to understand their pains and how to find a better solution than competitors? Ask clients in surveys (quantitative research) or during cust dev calls (qualitative research), structure feedbacks, and find deep insights. I may help you with setting it up.

What mentees are saying about Nataly

Nataly is an extremely empathetic and friendly mentor. First, she fully understood my problem by asking good questions. Then she helped me to solve it. She provided expert examples so I can think about my problem from several different angles. I would recommend Nataly for everyone who needs help with Product Management in EdTech.

Gregory Boch - Co-Founder at Mooji

SurferSEO

Michał Suski

  • Mentor Name: Michał Suski
  • Role: Co-Founder
  • Website: SurferSEO
  • Product: Modern SEO tool to optimize your content for first page rankings
  • Founded: 2017

How Michał can help you with your SaaS

Bootstrapping

We bootstrapped Surfer and experience profitability from almost the very beginning. I am happy to help you kick off your project. Finding a product-market fit is crucial and I know how to do it.

SEO

Former Head of SEO in the agency, working with clients and on in-house projects. SEO tool founder and speaker at conferences like SEO Rockstars, SEO Mastery Summit or CMC.

What mentees are saying about Michał

Such a great session! Michal is such an amazing mentor, he really took his time and efforts to help me with my questions and I learned so much in these 30 minutes. I’ll definitely be scheduling a call with him again soon!
Tamara Drazic - SEO Manager at Cliverse Media

SEMrush

Margarita Loktionova

  • Mentor Name: Margarita Loktionova
  • Role: Content Marketing Lead
  • Website: SEMrush.com
  • Product: SEO tool to grow organic traffic
  • Founded: 2012

How Margarita can help you with your SaaS

Content marketing

Content marketing is my super power. With experience in B2B and B2C companies, I can help you launch and grow your content marketing strategy and dive deeper into tactics to make sure your content resonates with your buyer personas and their stage of the buyer journey, converts and drives organic traffic. Details: content marketing strategy, buyer personas, storytelling, lead gen, production (gated content, podcasts, video, blogs), and promotion.

Conversion rate optimisation

Please feel free to reach out to discuss the best strategies for optimizing your landing pages. ads, emails, and tactics for using the optimization tools (Google Optimize, Optimizely, etc.)

Email marketing

Looking to deliver your content and product in the most efficient way and grow your email list? Let’s talk email marketing, which remains one of the most efficient owned communication channels – especially in B2B! Details: Email optimization, B2B email marketing, nurture workflows, A/B tests

Link building

I have over 5 years of experience driving backlinks for B2B and B2C companies and will be thrilled to help you create an effective strategy for getting high-quality links to your website.

Marketing automation

I’m here to help you create automated nurture workflows to design a holistic experience that will move your leads from point A to point B. Details: HubSpot, Eloqua – nurture workflows

SEO

Content marketing and SEO go together. Let’s discuss the way you can create content and content hubs to drive organic traffic. I can help you with the following: SEO strategy, keyword research, on-page and off-page SEO, link building, SEO content hubs

What mentees are saying about Margarita

Margarita rules! I really enjoyed the call. I set a personal goal to book one call per week with a mentor as a sort of “curiosity call”, with the point being to have an open-ended chat…
Alex Wagner - Freelance Web3 Strategist

Plesk

Lukas Hertig

 

  • Mentor Name: Lukas Hertig
  • Role:SVP Bizdev @ Plesk
  • Website: Plesk.com
  • Product: Control panel software for servers/hosting
  • Founded: 2005

How Lukas can help you with your SaaS

Product Management

Having managed, launched and even killed multiple products in my life, I’m happy to share my experience on how to do it. And how to avoid making the same mistakes again and again.

Growth Hacking

I seen growth hacking not only using some online tricks but also by building partnerships with super large companies and attach yourself to their brands. The combination of both is usually the secret sauce for success. 🙂

Mindset Coaching

I have run through multiple challenges in my life from almost burnout to having had multiple mentors and coaches. Happy to share my experience and help you to avoid making the same mistakes.

Product Market Fit

I have created, analyzed and managed many projects and new value propositions over the years. Happy to support you how you can think big, start small and scale fast.

Advice on Funding

I have a strong network of contacts to introduce you to both, other advisors as well as investors. Also happy to review pitch decks and give feedback based on my experience with both, the corporate as well as the startup world.

Technology and Tools

Have implemented and tested many of the available tools on the market (and continue to do so). For both, b2b content marketing based approaches or complete online sales funnels.

What mentees are saying about Lukas

Super session! super mentor ! I’m working on my company growth strategy and Lukas helps me a lot with key next mailstones. I strongly recommend to talk with Lukas for everyone who wonna make boost for their company in such areas like marketing and sales

Dima Gurucan

Appsumo

David Kelly

 

  • Mentor Name: David Kelly
  • Role:General Manager
  • Website: Appsumo.com
  • Product: Email marketing for content creators
  • Founded: 2010

How David can help you with your SaaS

Mindset Coaching

Growing a startup can be so challenging… why do we do this to ourselves?! I’ve been there. As recently as last year. Grinding and trying to grow a startup when we had no money to spend on advertising or marketing. But we found a way to grow to 7-figures, and a big part of it is mindset. I’ll share what I know.

Email Marketing

I’m an email marketing NERD. I was the Email Marketing Lead for Student Loan Hero, and helped email marketing become a seven-figure revenue channel for them before being sold to LendingTree. I’ve also helped lead email marketing for Sumo.com (which has a list of over 1 million subscribers), plus consulted for brands like Degree 33 Surfboards.

Growth Hacking

I’m the GM of SendFox, which we built from $0 to $1,000,000+ in 18 months… with a small three-person team and a zero-dollar marketing and ads budget. Good times! Before that, I was employee #11 and the Email Marketing Lead for Student Loan Hero — which sold to LendingTree for $60 million.

What mentees are saying about David

David is very knowledgeable and was also well-prepared for the call. He looks at things from a broader perspective and gave us at least two specific ideas to get more B2B leads, along with many ready-to-implement tips to increase our conversions across the different channels. He also took a position on which channels whe should invest in first.

Stefan Debois - Founder at Survey Anyplace

Databox

Borja Prieto

  • Mentor Name: Borja Prieto
  • Role: Senior Growth Marketing Manager
  • Website: Databox.com
  • Product: Business Analytics Platform & KPI Dashboards
  • Founded: 2011

How Borja can help you with your SaaS

Building a team

I built and managed growth and marketing teams for up to 15 people throughout my career. I can advise you on building your team with the right processes and systems in place. Also, we can chat about how to manage your team, sharing feedback and ways you can empower your team members to become better versions of themselves, both personally and professionally.

Content marketing

In the last few years, I helped several B2B SaaS companies take their content marketing strategy to the next level by – 1. Adopting a product-led approach to its content, 2. Master content repurposing and distribution, 3. Optimizing the content to increase signups and demo requests. At Databox, I helped them increase Call-to-Actions CTR by +500% on the blog after making all CTAs contextually relevant for website visitors consuming the content.

Conversion rate optimisation

I coined my own framework when it comes to CRO. I call it “Test, Win, & Scale Growth Framework” – It follows a simple 6-step methodology: 1. Opportunity Identification 2. Hypothesis Building 3. Hypothesis Validation 4. Experiment Design 5. Hypothesis Success 6. Scaling the Hypothesis – I helped companies like Databox increase signups by +20% in my first 6 months working with them.

Go to market strategy

From early stage to scale-up, I can help you outline your GTM strategy based on your current company stage, funding, and goals, including how to define your ICP and different market segments.

Growth marketing

I have over 10 years of experience in the Growth field, managing and overseeing several initiatives from all marketing channels and with various tools and tech stacks. With a particular focus on the Activation and Retention stages of a digital product. I also helped startups to improve the relationship between Product and Marketing teams. Because Growth doesn’t end at the Acquisition stage 🙂

Product marketing

Product marketing is the foundation of any growth strategy for any B2B SaaS. I can advise you on how to improve – 1. Product positioning, 2. Product messaging, 3. Customer/User Research, 4. Product Content Marketing, 5. Reduce churn by improving Activation/Retention rates.

SEO

I helped dozens of tech startups build their SEO Play. From top of the funnel content to bottom of the funnel content. I can help you with advice on – 1. How to produce content to both generate NEW demand and CAPTURE existing market demand, 2. How you should organize the content on your website (following the Hub-and-Spoke model), 3. How to approach your link building and PR strategy, 4. Technical advice on how to optimize your website in terms of speed and performance.

Technology and tools

I have vast experience working with hundreds of different tools depending on the company’s needs. I can advise which tools are the most recommended or are the best fit considering your current startup’s stage.

What mentees are saying about Borja

Borja was awesome and everything you could possibly want with a mentor. I needed SEO help from him and he quickly summarized the things I need to focus on.
Farzad Khosravi - Sales and Growth Consultant

Userpilot

Emilia Korczynska

 

  • Mentor Name: Aazar Emilia Korczynska
  • Role: Head of Marketing
  • Website: Userpilot.com
  • Product: Product onboarding SaaS tool
  • Founded: 2018

How Emilia can help you with your SaaS

Link building

I can help you come up with a link-building strategy to bolster your SEO efforts and improve your visibility. I can help you decide which content to build links to, what on-page optimizations are required before launching a link building campaign, how to do outreach and what backlink building tactics you should choose.

Building a team

If you want to build a performance marketing team on a budget and are wondering about its organization – I’m here to help. I can help you with the prioritization and organizational chart for your content/marketing team.

Content Marketing

I’ve worked in B2B SaaS Content marketing for well over 5 years. I can help you with content strategy, keyword research and tools, outline building, content processes, backlink building, scaling your content ops and building your team.

What mentees are saying about Emilia

Emilia is very knowledgeable in digital Marketing. I’m a founder with technical background and I got great input from her on where to start with Marketing for our SaaS product. I have a clearer idea now on what channels to focus on first and what kind of profile to search and hire for Marketing in the early stage. She even provided me concrete feedback on some Content Marketing assets. Amazing session!

Lukas Gotter - Founder & CEO at Meetical

Web4Realty

Kostas Panagoulias

 

  • Mentor Name: Kosta Panagoulias
  • Role: Co-Founder
  • Website: Web4Realty.com
  • Product: Site builder for real estate agency websites
  • Founded: 2011

How Kosta can help you with your SaaS

Outbound marketing

Most people I speak to nowadays get too fancy when it comes to sales. They automatically jump into paid ads and running campaigns, only to see their money go down the drain with no new sales. Old school outbound sales still work. I personally closed the first 700-1000 customers for my company through cold calling and outbound email marketing. Outbound works!

Mindset Coaching

Often times, the only thing stopping you from growing, are your own limitations in your head. Getting someone with an unfiltered view to brainstorm with, usually leads to some big “AHA” moments. These small conversations can help change the trajectory of your business.

Customer Success

The most important yet overlooked department in a company, is customer support. Similarly, the most important metric in the longevity of a SaaS business is churn. Some of the best ways to improve churn is to fine-tine your customer success processes. I have spent several years testing and fine-tuning several strategies that improve customer success, keep clients happy, and help keep churn low.

Bootstrapping

My company is 100% revenue-financed, meaning we’ve never taken a single dime from anyone. Maintaining a lean and disciplined ideology is what helped our company become profitable and cash flow positive, very early on. Keeping organized and accurate books and financial metrics is vital in any business, especially a startup.

What mentees are saying about Kosta

Kosta was a great listener and able to zero in on exactly what I need to work on to achieve my long-term business goals. He is also personable and I felt comfortable speaking with him. I highly recommend him as a mentor, especially for SaaS bootstrapping!

Chris Tsongas - Founder & CEO at OnboardList

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