The challenge
Founder-led company, six engineers, no marketing function. First revenue conversations happening. The question wasn't "can we grow." It was "can we build the infrastructure to grow before we blow up the cap table on ads that don't work?"
What we built
I came in as fractional Head of Performance with a 14-week mandate to stand up the entire GTM surface. We didn't start with ads. We started with events, HubSpot, and a warehouse so we'd know what was actually happening. Then we shipped.
- Full attribution stack: HubSpot + PostHog + BigQuery, server-side events, opp-level tracking
- Content engine: Claude-powered article generator scored against search-intent, human-edited before publish
- AI outbound: Clay-driven account enrichment, LLM-generated first-line personalization, sequenced in HubSpot
- Paid launch: LinkedIn + Reddit, developer-focused, with tight feedback loops back to the founding team
- Weekly "revenue council" with engineering, sales, and founders. Decisions, not dashboards.
What happened
First SQL in nine days. A top-20 enterprise QA buyer who found us through a single Reddit post we'd targeted via community participation, not ads. By week six, the content engine was producing two well-edited articles a week, each attributed to a named pipeline opp. By week fourteen, $4.2M in sourced pipeline, all instrumented back to first-touch.
What stuck
The founders hired a full-time marketing lead in month five. They inherited a running machine that was instrumented, documented, and already compounding. They didn't have to build from scratch. That's what "zero-to-one" should feel like.