All mentors

Isabella Rossi

Commercialization & GTM for Early-Stage Founders. Questions? Message me!

Berlin, Germany (+01:00 UTC) English, German, Italian, Spanishfrom Berlin, Germany
Usually responds in 2 days
Free
Price per hour
30 min
Time Blocks Available
5.00
9 reviews / 13 sessions
Mon
12
Next availability

As a startup founder, working with Issabella as both my marketing advisor and mentor has been an amazing experience. She guided me through building a clear, structured, and effective marketing strategy, always providing actionable plans and valuable insights. Beyond her expertise, Issabella is friendly, collaborative, and brings fresh perspectives that strengthen any team. Her guidance has been instrumental in shaping both our marketing strategy and the core of our team. I highly recommend Issabella to any founder looking for a knowledgeable, strategic, and supportive marketing mentor and advisor.

Ala Davoudi

Fantastic chat! Isa came well-prepared going through my brief that helped run the session super efficiently. She is a great listener, understood the context and then was straight to the point with actionable advice for our market validation. I love when mentors cut through the problem and give something tangible in a short span of time: result of years of hands-on experience and understanding of the context. Will definitely book again in the future, highly recommended!

Luca Yesupatham Daniel

I had a great session with Isabella. She was very helpf and I really appreciated the feedback she shared. Her advice was concrete, practical, and immediately useful. Most importantly, she helped me gain more clarity on my priorities and understand where I should focus my efforts next. Thank you, Isabella!

Alessandro Genovese

Bio

👋 Hi, I'm Isa. Most startup programs teach founders how to pitch. I help them get customers. I work with early-stage founders who have built something people care about but are struggling to turn prototypes, grants, accelerator momentum - or simply a great idea-into real market traction. My sweet spot is working with climate and impact ventures, but the commercialization challenges are often the same across industries. Together we tackle questions like: Who is your real customer? What should you test first? How do you get your first paying customer? How do you sell to businesses, governments, or institutions? How do you build a business that reflects your ambitions—not someone else's? My background combines 10+ years in startups and innovation with 3+ years in Sales at Google, where I learned how commercial strategy and customer conversations really drive growth. Today, I work one-on-one with founders and partner with accelerators and university programs to build the commercialization support they're often missing—from founder-led sales and GTM strategy to B2G pathways and post-program traction. I'm probably a good fit if you're: 🚀 Preparing to launch or looking for your first customers 🧪 Validating your market before investing more time and money 🤯 Feeling overwhelmed by conflicting advice 🌱 Building a company with a long-term vision, whether that's impact-driven or simply solving a problem worth solving Outside of work you'll usually find me scuba diving, running or on a stand-up comedy stage - the first one only when I'm on vacation. If you're looking for generic startup advice, I'm probably not your mentor. If you're looking for a practical commercialization partner who will challenge your thinking, simplify the messy middle, and help you get to market faster, let's talk.

Expertise

  • Go to market strategy

    I've led go-to-market strategy for startups and global ventures across education, retail, B2B, and B2C. Today, I help early-stage founders move from product to paying customers by clarifying their ideal customer, refining their positioning, designing market experiments, and building practical GTM strategies. My approach combines commercial thinking with hands-on execution, so founders leave with clear next steps—not just another framework.

  • Pricing strategy

    Pricing is one of the strongest commercialization levers—and one of the most overlooked. I help founders define pricing models, value metrics, packaging, and price points that reflect how customers actually buy, balancing willingness to pay with long-term business viability.

  • Product market fit

    Many founders think they need a perfect product before they can sell. I help them flip that thinking. Together we design small, practical market experiments that generate real customer insights, validate demand, and move steadily toward product-market fit.

  • Sales

    I help founders build a sales process that feels structured, practical, and aligned with how their customers buy. From customer discovery and outreach to founder-led sales and long B2B/B2G cycles, I focus on helping ventures land their first customers and build repeatable commercial momentum.

Toolkit

  • Apollo logo

    Apollo

    I use Apollo to identify ideal customers, research decision-makers, and build targeted prospect lists. Combined with a clear value proposition and outreach strategy, it helps founders start meaningful sales conversations—not just send more emails.

  • Canva logo

    Canva

    I use Canva to quickly bring ideas to life, from workshop materials and GTM canvases to pitch decks, one-pagers, and social content. Clear visuals help founders communicate complex ideas with confidence.

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator logo

    LinkedIn Sales Navigator

    LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of my favorite tools for customer discovery and founder-led sales. I use it to identify the right buyers, understand their context, build warm outreach strategies, and help founders start conversations that lead to commercial opportunities.

  • Miro logo

    Miro

    Founders often come to me with ideas scattered across notebooks, sticky notes, and twenty open tabs. Miro helps us bring everything together. We use it to challenge assumptions, connect the dots, and build clear commercialization strategies through collaborative thinking and practical experiments.

  • Typeform logo

    Typeform

    I use Typeform to design thoughtful surveys, customer interviews, and application forms that uncover meaningful insights—not just collect data. Whether it's validating a new idea, understanding customer needs, or qualifying participants for a program, I focus on asking the right questions to drive better decisions.

  • Attio logo

    Attio

    I use Attio to build customer list and manage customer relationship. I love the flexibility it allows with custom attributes and views - it is very helpful.

  • HubSpot logo

    HubSpot

    I use HubSpot to help founders build simple, effective sales processes. From managing leads and customer conversations to tracking opportunities and refining founder-led sales, it turns commercial activity into measurable progress.

  • Notion logo

    Notion

    I use Notion to turn strategy into execution. From GTM roadmaps and experiment trackers to client workspaces and commercialization plans, I create systems that keep founders focused on what matters most—and moving forward.

  • Perplexity logo

    Perplexity

    I use Perplexity to accelerate market research, competitive analysis, and customer discovery. It helps me quickly synthesize reliable information, validate assumptions, and uncover insights that inform commercialization strategies, workshop design, and founder decision-making.

Industries

  • B2B

    I work with founders selling complex solutions to businesses, governments, and institutions. Together we simplify your commercial strategy, validate your assumptions, and build a repeatable path to your first customers through practical experiments and founder-led sales.

  • Social Entrepreneurship

    I believe founders shouldn't have to choose between creating impact and building a viable business. I help social entrepreneurs develop commercialization strategies that respect both the mission and the human behind it, turning meaningful ideas into sustainable ventures.

  • Sustainability

    I specialize in sustainability, climate, and impact ventures. I help mission-driven founders navigate the journey from grants and prototypes to commercial traction, balancing purpose with practical go-to-market strategies that lead to paying customers.

Experience

  • Fired Up Space

    Founder Coach

    Your idea deserves more than another business plan. If you're thinking about starting a business - or you've already taken the first steps - you've probably discovered that ideas are the easy part. Turning them into something people actually want? That's where things get messy. Through Fired Up, my coaching is 100% funded for registered job seekers in Germany through the Agentur für Arbeit or JobCenter. I work with people who want to build businesses that matter—whether that's in climate, education, health, social impact, or another field they're passionate about. Together, we'll move from "I think this could work" to "I know what to test next." We'll work on things like: • validating your idea with real customers • finding your first target audience • shaping your value proposition • building a practical go-to-market plan • gaining the confidence to take the next step My coaching is practical, structured, and experiment-driven. No 100-page business plans. No pretending you have everything figured out before you begin.Just small steps, honest conversations, and real progress. If you've been waiting until you're "ready," let's start there instead.

  • MaSí

    Go-To-Market and Sales Consultant

    𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗱𝗼. 🐘 At MaSí, we help early-stage founders turn ideas, prototypes, grants, and accelerator momentum into commercial traction. Because building something meaningful is only half the journey. The other half is finding the people who'll actually pay for it. We work with climate and impact founders, and with the accelerators and university programs that support them, to bridge the gap between ecosystem validation and market validation. 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 🐘 Strategic 1:1 support to help you: • find your first customers • validate your market • build a practical go-to-market strategy • navigate B2B and B2G sales • replace conflicting advice with clear next steps 𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 & 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝘀 🌱 Commercialization workshops and mentoring that help founders move beyond pitch decks and demo days to real customer traction. 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 💶 Great coaching shouldn't be out of reach. Depending on your situation, you may be able to work with MaSí using: • accelerator or innovation grant budgets • up to 80% government funding in Germany through BAFA (I'm a certified BAFA consultant) • 100% funded coaching through Fired Up if you're eligible via the Agentur für Arbeit or Jobcenter 🦓 You're the zebra—balancing purpose and profit. 🐘 MaSí is the elephant—your steady, strategic guide through the messy middle between building a product and building a business. Because we believe commercialization shouldn't require founders to abandon either their mission or themselves. Ready to turn momentum into customers? 📩 [email protected]

  • EIT Community New European Bauhaus

    NEB Mentor

    Providing mentorship to innovators and project teams developing solutions aligned with the values of the New European Bauhaus: sustainability, inclusivity, and beauty.

  • Bridge for Billions

    Startup Mentor

    Mentor on Bridge for Billions incubation programs. My first was Conecta, working with migrant and refugee entrepreneurs in Italy, first, second and third generation. They're building businesses that change what the Italian startup landscape looks like. My job was to make those businesses commercially sound. Most of them were building in a second language, inside a system they'd had to learn from the outside. So was I.

    Other

  • Zukunft.Gruenden

    Startup Mentor

    Mentor for the Zukunft.Gründer:innen Acceleration Program 2025, supporting early-stage and growth-phase social entrepreneurs in Germany. I worked with three ventures on traction, business model refinement and sustainable growth. Different sectors, different stages, one question underneath all three: who pays, and why now. I arrived with a lot of frameworks. We used roughly one of them.

  • Miro

    Global Culture and Engagement Manager
    •miro.com/

    My job was to make the culture as collaborative as the product. I advised Miro's C-suite on engagement, experience and culture, and facilitated the sessions where those decisions got made: leadership workshops, strategy sessions, feedback readouts. Online and hybrid, across time zones. I also brought Employee Journey Mapping to Miro, mapping every stage from onboarding to offboarding and running the cross-functional work that redesigned it. It's the same job I do now at MaSí, with founders and program directors instead of executives. Same journey mapping, now on customers. Same work of getting someone to act on what the evidence says.

  • #IAmRemarkable

    #IAmRemarkable Facilitator

    I ran #IamRemarkable workshops for women and people from underrepresented groups, on saying what you've accomplished out loud without apologising for it. Hundreds of participants, across countries, languages and career stages. Where it shows up now: most of the founders I work with are women, many building in a second language in a country that isn't their own. The work on paper is go-to-market. The first blocker is often calling their own traction "nothing much yet." g.co/IamRemarkable

  • Miro

    Hub Community Manager - Europe
    •miro.com/

    I built and facilitated hub communities for Miro employees in Berlin, London, Munich and Paris, as the company came out of hyper-growth with a lot of silos to break. • 70+ events and rituals, 95% satisfaction • The Miro global offsite, 2,000 participants, and the annual hackathon, 75% participation • Stakeholders from C-level to ERG representatives to team leads Where it shows up now: the workshops I run for accelerators and university programs. At 2,000 people the facilitation is all in the design, and once it starts you just hold the frame. Same with a cohort of ten. And it's half of what I tell founders. You can't programme belonging into existence, and you can't funnel your way into a market. Both grow the same way: someone does the unglamorous work of introducing two people who should know each other, then does it again next week.

  • INCO

    Senior Manager - Europe
    •inco-group.co

    INCO is an impact VC fund and global organisation backing a socially and environmentally responsible economy across 50 countries. I ran its European corporate partnerships and funder relationships, including Salesforce.org and Google.org, and owned the full sales cycle for multi-million-euro programs: first conversation to signature with CSR directors at global companies and NGOs, plus the design of what was being sold. Why it matters now: I worked inside an impact fund, next to the people allocating it. When I tell a founder how their case reads to whoever is holding the budget, that isn't a guess.

    Venture CapitalSocial Impact

  • INCO

    European Programs Lead
    •inco-group.co

    I led a team of 8 project managers running INCO's European programs, the delivery arm of the fund. Fully remote, four time zones, as a first-time manager. No big deal. Capacity and community-building across 17 European countries, for 30 educational NGOs and startups, helping 10,000 people gain IT skills and find work in tech. Participating organisations rated the program 4.8/5. I built the funder relationships and the KPI and evaluation systems that reported back to them. A polite way of describing the spreadsheet that decides whether your team exists next year. For program managers: I've been in your shoes. Designing it, delivering it with a small team, and defending it to someone who was never in the room and needs to decide wether to fund it again. P.s. we got 8-digit funding for 2 more years!

    Venture CapitalSocial Impact

  • INCO

    Program Manager - Social Innovation Incubator
    •inco-group.co

    I designed the call for applications and the selection process for the Google CEE Impact Challenge, a €2M fund and incubator for social impact startups across Central and Eastern Europe, and ran the funder relationship with Google.org. I also designed and facilitated two application workshops for 800 entrepreneurs, rated 4.7/5. So I've written a call for applications, which means I know precisely how many founders open one and how many finish it. It's why I don't hand accelerators a generic curriculum. You get very little of a cohort's attention, and it should go on something that moves.

    Venture CapitalSocial Impact

  • Google

    Digital Growth Manager - GTM, International Growth
    •google.com

    I advised mid-market companies and Italy's top media agencies on growing outside their home market: where the demand actually was, what to change in the offer, what to test first. Same question I work on with founders now, with smaller budgets and higher stakes. I ran 20+ trainings for customers and partners, and represented Google at 30+ conferences and round tables, where I learned that an audience will forgive almost anything except slides read out loud.

  • Google

    Account Strategist
    •google.com

    600 Italian small and mid-sized businesses, sold to through meetings, workshops and events with the owners themselves, sustaining double-digit growth in their spend. I also worked with specialists and engineers on new Google Ads features. Alongside it I ran three 20% projects: reading the pulse of the Southern Europe teams for senior leadership, rebuilding how Google Dublin ran employee giving (80% participation, up from 20%, and #1 worldwide among big sites), and advising Greenpeace, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders on marketing strategy. This is where I was trained in consultative selling, the Google way: qualify before you pitch, diagnose before you prescribe, and never put a number in front of a business owner they can't tie back to their own revenue. That training is what sits underneath the founder-led sales workshops I run now. Most technical founders have never been taught to sell anything by anyone. I was taught by people who did it for a living.

  • TortugaEcon

    Co-founder and Project Manager

    Tortuga is Italy's first youth-led economic policy think tank. I co-founded it and helped take it from writing articles to running paid consulting projects for policymakers, growing from 5 to 50+ fellows in three years: 30+ projects delivered, two policy-making hackathons with 150+ participants, and €30k raised from sponsors and media partners. What I learned: how to sell to government. Public buyers don't buy the way companies do. Different timelines, different people in the room, and a process that punishes anyone treating it like a normal sales cycle. B2G is now one of the few things I teach that almost nobody else in the impact ecosystem covers. And that a policy-making hackathon sounds like a contradiction right up until 150 economists show up on a Saturday.

  • Accenture

    Business Analyst | Consulting
    •accenture.com

    As an intern, I supported two of the largest energy companies through change programs. • Wrote the manuals for 8 team members, cutting training time by 30%. • Designed and delivered 3 workshop series for executives, average NPS 85, about 60 points above the industry average Second week, they put me in front of a room of executives to train them on software I had never used. I learned I can hold a room I have no business holding. I turned down the offer to stay. Consulting is good training, but I wanted the work to add up to something.

  • Mastercard

    Business Analyst | Digital Strategy
    •mastercard.com/

    I worked with a team of five on a blue-ocean strategy for Mastercard's response to digital trends and regulation in payments: blockchain, AI, the lot. We presented it to the management team. What I learned: scenario analysis, which I still run with founders today. And how to build a genuinely beautiful 100-page deck. I haven't made one since, and I now tell founders not to make one either.

    Information Technology

  • Ashinaga Foundation

    Marketing and Fundraising | Access to Education

    Ashinaga is an international development NGO working on equal access to education. • Evaluated 7 EU markets for charitable giving and pitched a go-to-market strategy for Germany to the executive board. Donations from that market went up. • Built an entrepreneurship course with colleagues in Uganda and Senegal for the Ashinaga African Leaders program, voted best course two years running. I was living in Japan at the time. I learned to work across Japanese, African and European ways of doing business from inside them. which is a straight line to my work today with Climate KIC and JETRO, supporting Japanese climate tech founders entering Europe. I also learned that NGOs and I have quite different relationships with the word "urgent".

  • INPS

    Analyst | Research and Policy

    • Analysed the outlook of the Italian labour market in a team of six, using SPSS and Excel • Presented the report and our own findings, from a database of 170,000 firms, to the Italian Parliament I learned to work with real data at scale, that SPSS and I were never going to be close, and that I wanted to be nearer the point where something actually changes than policy research let me get.

  • Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale

    Research Trainee - Italian Embassy to Germany

    Back then I was going to be a diplomat. I bought a blazer for it and everything. What I actually learned: a lot about European migration policy, and that most reports are never read by a single human being. I think about that every time a founder tells me about the document they're still perfecting. My boss took me into every room going, including ones containing Merkel and Steinmeier. I mostly stood very still and tried to look like I belonged there. Still grateful.

  • European Commission

    In-Company Trainee
    •ec.europa.eu/easme/en/eic-accelerator

    Inside the European institutions: the Commission, Parliament, Council and NATO, through workshops, panels and Q&A sessions with people at every level. This is where the diplomat plan started. One week in Brussels and I was completely sold. I never became a diplomat. But I work with European programs, from the New European Bauhaus to Climate KIC, so the version of me in that room got roughly what she wanted. Through a door nobody mentioned on the tour.

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