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Advising

I love working with startups to help define their core business, marketing, and growth strategies and build their teams and cultures. I’ve been working primarily with startups in the edtech and digital health spaces, and enjoy working with any mission-driven startups looking to scale. The areas I most commonly advise on include:

Design your marketing strategy: I approach marketing strategy entirely through the lens of what the business needs to accomplish over the next 1-3 years.​

  • Define your top business metrics

  • Define your top marketing metrics

  • Analyze your current metrics

  • Determine what bets you need to make to hit your goals

  • Develop your strategy

Nail product market fit: I’m a big believer in the Lean Product Playbook’s Product Market Fit Sprint process. At Coursera we developed templates to operationalize this for our business and I’ve adapted those templates to be usable by startups of all stages.​

  • Document your hypothesis about your  6 Ps: Persona, Problem, Proposition, Product, Positioning, Promotion

  • Run 4-8 week sprints testing and validating and iterating on these hypotheses

  • Prepare for launch, sprint again on a revised hypothesis, or pivot

Define your brand strategy and messaging: Nailing your positioning, value proposition pillars, and messaging backed by key proof points and testimonials is critical as you prepare to go-to-market

  • Codify your mission, vision, and purpose

  • Define your target audience and their problems

  • Map your competitive positioning

  • Develop your brand positioning statement & value prop pillars

  • Create your externally facing messaging and proof points

  • Create your editorial calendar and campaign strategy

Develop your growth and go-to-market engine: Growth levers are highly dependent on your business model. In order to establish your strategy, we’ll look at:​​

  • Analysis of your current growth model

  • Organic growth opportunities like SEO, content, PR, virality, social, community, and partnerships

  • Marketplace, freemium, or product-led growth opportunities

  • Paid growth opportunities through digital demand generation

Build your team: Hiring the right marketing leader and designing your marketing organization can be a challenge. I can help you:​​​

  • Define what you are looking for in a marketing leader and help you hire

  • Help coach your current VP of marketing to grow into a CMO role

  • Help you think about the structure of your marketing organization

  • Mentor and onboard new leaders or existing team members

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