Marketers of Technology

Sam Ancliff is Head of Marketing at i-nexus and author of Building Tall, a marketing playbook he originally wrote as an internal guide for his team. i-nexus is strategy software that helps organizations align people and projects to their goals. Sam came to marketing by accident, starting his career in the British Army, then moving into recruitment, before discovering that what he loved was building his own brand.

In a recent episode of The Marketers of Technology, Andres sat down with Sam to learn how he rebuilt the marketing function at i-nexus, identified a precise ICP inside a massive and largely undiscovered market, and developed a system for scaling demand without adding headcount.

Topics Discussed:

• How Sam went from British Army linguist to accidental marketer
• Why Sam wrote Building Tall as an internal playbook before it became a book
• How i-nexus identified German manufacturing companies as its primary ICP
• Why Sam cut from 50 SQLs per month to 10 to fix a 7% conversion rate
• How i-nexus is using a partner-first model to scale in Germany without growing headcount
• Why Sam believes most organizations in their market are still running strategy on Excel spreadsheets
• How i-nexus plans to turn its website into an AI chatbot
• Sam's goal: automate as much of his marketing job as possible by end of 2026

GTM & Marketing Lessons:

• Start with the data before you pick the market: Sam did not guess which customers to go after. He pulled every data point he could access and looked for patterns across conversion rates, deployment ease, and customer growth. German manufacturing companies won on every measure. That became the ICP.

• Cutting volume is not failure if conversion was the problem: Sam went from sending sales 50 SQLs per month to around 10. On the surface that sounds like a step backward. But the prior conversion rate was 7%. Those 50 leads were costing the sales team 50 hours of discovery calls that went nowhere. The smaller number represented a genuine signal.

• Build one pillar before starting the next: The Building Tall system is about getting exceptional at one thing before adding adjacent efforts. Once i-nexus had the German manufacturing motion working, including content, campaigns, and partners, the US expansion became largely a translation exercise.

• Use partners to scale what headcount cannot: With a total company of about 25 people and a marketing team of 7, i-nexus cannot hire its way into new markets. The partner model in Germany lets i-nexus reach customers, handle referrals, and manage implementation without proportionally growing the team.

• Match the website experience to the product experience: Sam is rebuilding the i-nexus website as an AI chatbot because the product now surfaces data through AI insights. If the product is agentic, the marketing surface should introduce that way of working from the first interaction. Sam said people who bounce off the AI front page probably were not going to use the product anyway.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

SafetyWing is building a social safety net for people who live, work, and travel across borders — covering health insurance, income protection, disability, and life insurance that follows you around the world. The company was founded in 2017 and has insured over 400,000 people through its consumer products. Its Trustpilot rating sits at 4.3 stars. Its NPS score is 10x the insurance industry average.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Joey Flores, Head of Marketing at SafetyWing, to learn how a nine-year-old company built category leadership in global health insurance by rejecting fear-based marketing and betting on an aspirational brand identity.

Topics Discussed:

• How SafetyWing builds trust across a product category where customers hope they never need the product
• Why SafetyWing uses cartoon birds instead of the fear-based visual language that defines traditional insurance
• How "create, don't copy" shapes every marketing and brand decision at SafetyWing
• Why the company launched a US-specific team health plan after years of global-first products
• How SafetyWing is using AI to compress the time between claim submission and resolution
• The ambassador program featuring extreme adventurers and what it reveals about SafetyWing's brand strategy
• How the brand's distinctiveness shortens the customer recognition path in a crowded market

GTM and Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Brand distinctiveness as adoption infrastructure: Joey said the cartoon birds create a shortcut. "the birds are just so damn memorable, like, you don't expect it from an insurance company."

• Aspirational branding in a fear-driven category: Traditional insurance marketing creates urgency through fear of loss. SafetyWing chose the opposite. Joey explained: "We don't think of ourselves as an insurance company.

• Trust has to be rebuilt with each new product: SafetyWing's 4.3 Trustpilot score and 10x industry NPS are earned on existing products. But when the company launched income protection, Joey noted: "when we, when we roll out new products, for example, there's a bit of like doing that again, right? Like, okay, I trust you with my health. But like, you know, our newest product has income protection.

• Create, don't copy as a design constraint: When redesigning the homepage, the team came in with a standard three-plan pricing layout. A founder pushed back. Joey said: "every landing page I've ever been on has three plans next to each other. And the goal is always that you pick. The consumer will pick the middle plan... I was like, this is just like, I'm so tired of seeing this. It's like, can we do something else?" The principle is not novelty for its own sake. It is the recognition that best practices are defaults, and defaults are opportunities for differentiation.

• Ambassador programs as brand proof: Sponsoring Ria G., who is running 20,000 km from China to Portugal, completing her 66th consecutive ultra marathon at the time of recording, is not a traditional brand awareness play. It is a live demonstration of what SafetyWing makes possible.

• AI for claims process improvement: SafetyWing deployed AI to flag missing claim documents at the point of submission rather than days later after human review. Joey described the practical impact: "it doesn't just shorten it by the two days it took a human to review it, it may shorten it by the two weeks that they would have waited to sit down again and do it."

• US expansion as a distinct product bet: The global team health plan has been running for years. The US plan launched at the start of 2026 because US healthcare operates in a different regulatory and pricing environment.

// Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Aiode is a deep tech AI and music AI company that has built proprietary models enabling professional music creators to produce ethically sourced, performable music. The platform operates as a professional DAW-like environment - with knobs, timelines, and model configurations - rather than a text-based interface. Aiode's three core models include single musician models (virtual representations of real artists built with consent), a synergy model for production fills, and the Sample Remaker, which adapts any sample to the tempo and feel of a current project. Every model on the platform was trained on proprietary, licensed, or owned data, and musicians receive revenue share payments each time their model is used. The company is partnered with Abbey Road Studios and has passed 100,000 users.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Varda Caspi, Vice President Marketing of Aiode, to learn how she built the company's brand from zero - no brand, just a name - and positioned it as the ethical alternative in an AI music market that often treats data as a resource to be scraped.

Topics covered:

• How Aiode's proprietary training approach gives users full ownership of everything they create on the platform
• The "prosumer" target market - professional consumers who evaluate tools with B2B scrutiny but behave like B2C on retail habits
• Why Aiode set its three-year positioning before releasing the initial alpha
• How a community-first strategy (Discord, thousands of one-on-one calls in year one) generated 100,000 users on a low budget
• The Abbey Road partnership and how third-party credibility anchors trust in a crowded AI market
• Why Aiode's platform produces only performable music and why that matters to professional producers

GTM and marketing takeaways:

• Set positioning before you launch: Varda built Aiode's three-year brand framework before the alpha was released
• Flank the market leader: rather than competing head-on for the mass B2C market, Aiode targeted the prosumer - a segment that buys like a consumer but vets like a B2B buyer
• Engage critics directly: Aiode's community strategy included going to Discord and inviting skeptics, including people who opened with "music AI needs to die"
• Trust through association: the Abbey Road partnership gave Aiode immediate credibility with the professional audience it was targeting
• Let the business model prove the message: paying musicians revenue share on every model use made the "ethical AI" positioning verifiable, not just verbal

WindBorne Systems builds a network of autonomous weather balloons that stay aloft for 12 to 15 days and collect 30 to 50 times more data than traditional weather balloons, which are latex balloons that go up and pop after 90 minutes. The company sells weather data to the government and has partnerships with the Gates Foundation. WindBorne is the only in-situ weather data provider for the global forecasting system, meaning that when you check your phone for the weather, you are getting data from their balloon network.

In a recent episode, we sat down with ⁠Ellie Yoon⁠, Head of Communications at ⁠WindBorne Systems⁠, to learn how a one-person comms team is building brand awareness, earning media coverage, and turning an entire company into a marketing function without a conventional marketing budget.

Topics Discussed:

• How Ellie structures marketing when the product is weather data sold to governments and the company does not run conventional ads
• Why she set a goal to get WindBorne balloons placed in science museums across the country
• How WindBorne earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2025 through relationship-building, not a PR campaign
• Why she sent a company-wide message declaring that every employee is part of the marketing team
• The "Let's talk about the weather" hats and how they became a network of walking billboards
• How WindBorne's Met Gala-themed event at SF Climate Week built community without a big marketing budget
• The dinner table framework: how Ellie thinks about reaching three different audiences with three completely different reasons to care about better weather forecasting
• The goal of putting 10,000 balloons in the air and what a 30-day weather forecast could mean for everyday decisions
• Why WindBorne's R&D balloon "The Elder" stayed up for 345 days and set the world record for longest stratospheric balloon flight

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• When your product is invisible, make your hardware tangible: WindBorne sells data, but the balloons are physical and visible. Ellie recognized that "the moat is the very thing that brought me from New York to San Francisco, which is we have tangible hardware." Getting people to see a balloon go up in person changes how they understand the technology.
• Turn your employees into a distributed ambassador network: With limited budget and no billboard, Ellie created a hat that says "Let's talk about the weather" and built it into a credentialing system. Employees who speak at conferences or attend events get the hat.
• Build toward channels where your buyer is already present: When asked to drive inbound, Ellie chose science museums. The reasoning was specific. She needed name recognition before LinkedIn ads could work. Parents taking kids to SF Bay Area science museums are statistically likely to work in tech.
• Maintain media relationships, not just lists: The TIME Best Inventions 2025 recognition came from a reporter who had previously interviewed CEO John. Ellie keeps her media list updated weekly, tracks the last time she spoke with each reporter, and preps journalists for how fast John speaks.
• Declare accountability before assuming it exists: Ellie sent an internal message telling every WindBorne employee they were part of the marketing team. She said it changed people's behavior. The announcement created accountability for how employees pitch the company and represent it externally.

• Budget constraints as a forcing function: The limited marketing budget pushed Ellie toward approaches that turned out to be more durable than paid channels. The scarcity kept her oriented toward earned media, community events, and in-person presence.

// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Doktar Technologies is an Istanbul-based agri-intelligence company that builds AI-powered tools and programs to transform agriculture. The company's platform combines proprietary IoT hardware devices - deployed directly in agricultural fields - with integrated AI models that process field data and translate it into actionable insights. Doktar serves two main segments: large farmers and farming communities (B2C), and major corporate agribusiness clients including Nestle, Coca-Cola, Danone, Microsoft, and Cargill (B2B). The company measures its impact across five pillars: water management, soil health, biodiversity preservation, farmer livelihoods, and carbon reduction and removal.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Bengi Yeniaydin, Head of Marketing at Doktar Technologies, to learn how she rebuilt a leaderless marketing team from scratch, constructed a unified data-backed brand narrative for a complex AI and IoT platform, and why the most important thing a marketer can do in an AI-saturated content environment is stay calm and filter the noise.

Topics Covered:

• How Doktar's platform combines IoT field devices with AI models to deliver measurable agricultural outcomes for farmers and corporate clients
• The challenge of building a complete, data-backed brand narrative where previously only fragmented product-level stories existed
• Why Bengi's industrial engineering background drove a systematic, process-first approach to restructuring the marketing function after nearly two years without a leader
• Managing a multidisciplinary six-person team across brand, content, growth, product marketing, events, and corporate communications
• How Doktar avoids AI-generated content sameness by combining AI tools with mandatory whole-team review before any content is published
• Doktar's 2026 priorities: deepening data-backed storytelling, localizing the global narrative, and expanding presence across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa

GTM Takeaways:

• Sell outcomes, not features. Customers - whether individual farmers or Fortune 500 procurement teams - care about measurable impact, not product specifications or data accuracy claims. Bengi made this shift the foundation of Doktar's new brand narrative.
• Fix the process before fixing the messaging. Bengi's first moves at Doktar were structural: rebuilding tone guides, reassigning roles, reactivating stalled projects, and mapping the internal collaboration breakdown that was limiting external clarity.
• A global narrative needs local roots. Doktar's storytelling approach builds one cohesive impact story at the global level, then localizes it through farmer case studies and country-specific content for each new market.
• Resist AI content inflation. Bengi's team uses AI tools actively, but every piece of content goes through collective team review before publication. The goal is to preserve the company's voice and value proposition in a landscape where most AI-generated content sounds identical.
• Internal alignment drives external clarity. Breaking out of the marketing silo and working closely with sales, sustainability, and business development is what makes consistent, credible messaging possible for a small team covering multiple markets.

Lauren Esposito spent 13 years at Salesforce leading some of the company's most complex brand integration work -- helping more than 20 acquired companies come into the Salesforce ecosystem, building the first global brand marketing organization, and working on the launch of Agentforce. When she joined Asymbl as CMO, she walked into a different kind of challenge: a full repositioning of a Salesforce partner into an AI workforce orchestration company, with a team of three and four months to get it done.

The answer was the company's own philosophy. Asymbl does not deploy AI as a set of tools. It hires AI as a workforce - with names, job descriptions, KPIs, and a human manager responsible for coaching each digital worker week over week. The rebrand was built by running that philosophy on the rebrand itself.

In this episode, Lauren breaks down how the work got done, what the AI org chart at Asymbl actually looks like, what she is looking for in AI-fluent hires, and why she believes the biggest rebrand mistakes come from projecting too far ahead rather than staying grounded in what is true right now.

Key topics covered:

• Why Asymbl repositioned from a tools-focused AI narrative to treating AI as digital workers with human managers
• How Lauren executed a four-month rebrand with a team of three and a 60-day budget, using AI to cover the execution gap
• The internal AI org chart: Casey (digital content guardian), Sim (mascot turned generative asset), the inbound prospecting worker, service workers tracking project risks, and a Slack-based digital worker made up of 50 agents
• AI fluency in hiring: the new role type Asymbl is building - people who coach and manage AI rather than just use it
• The governance reality: skills that get built and then locked down, integrations that go offline, and why mitigation planning is not optional
• Build vs. buy vs. borrow: why the question is not just "can we build this?" but "should we?"
• Community sharing -- an internal Slack channel where employees share what they have built -- as the fastest driver of adoption
• Rebrand advice: authenticity over tactics, and staying grounded in what is factually true rather than chasing trends

GTM Takeaways:

• Repositioning requires a "why" before a look. Lauren's first step was not naming a design agency. It was answering why the rebrand was necessary. The answer - Asymbl had developed a genuinely distinct philosophy around AI as a workforce - became the foundation for every brand decision that followed.

• Apply your own product to your own work. The only way a team of three could execute a four-month rebrand was to use the same AI workforce approach Asymbl sells to clients.

• Name your digital workers. Asymbl gives every AI worker a name and a place on the org chart. Lauren found that naming accelerates adoption: "when you kind of name these digital workers, it's the same thing as naming your mascot. All of a sudden you can assign it a role, a mental model in your head how to work with it, how to collaborate with it. And that adoption, right, just kind of sinks in almost naturally."

• Every AI worker needs a human manager. At Asymbl, every digital worker has a human manager responsible for coaching them week over week. This is not cosmetic structure - it is the accountability mechanism that keeps AI outputs aligned with business needs.

• Start with what you dread. The most practical advice Lauren offered for AI adoption: find the task that costs you the most energy and figure out how to offload parts of it first.

• Community beats mandates. An internal Slack channel where employees post what they have built drove more AI adoption at Asymbl than any structured program.

• Governance is a present problem, not a future one. Skills Lauren built got locked down. Her Claude-Slack integration went offline. She learned directly that over-reliance on AI systems carries real operational risk and that mitigation strategies need to exist before something breaks - because it will.

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Alex Yakubov, VP of Marketing at Terra Security, a continuous offensive security company that maps and tests an attack surface spanning websites, AI systems, cloud, and networks. Yakubov explains why cybersecurity marketing is in complete flux, how Terra rebuilt its brand around terrain and earth imagery instead of the shields and AI-star visuals the category defaults to, and how she is rethinking demand gen, event strategy, and the marketing-sales relationship in a market where old playbooks stop working almost as fast as they start.

Topics Discussed:

• The state of cybersecurity marketing amid constant AI-driven change

• Why Terra Security rebranded around terrain and earth imagery instead of shields

• Rethinking demand gen around experience rather than volume

• Comparing the ROI of a trade show booth against an off-floor activation

• Structuring a healthy relationship between sales and marketing

Lessons For Cybersecurity Marketers:

Design your brand around your actual differentiation, not category convention: Terra moved away from the shields and AI-star visuals that dominate cybersecurity branding and built its identity around terrain instead, mapping directly to a product built on an attack surface that never stops shifting. "Every grain of sand is a part of your attack surface." The rebrand also avoided fear-based imagery, using clean landscape photography to convey scale without leaning on FUD.

Treat demand gen as an experience problem before a volume problem: Yakubov is wary of outsourced vendors that scrape or buy contact lists without a real relationship to the person on the other end. Her filter for any vendor or event is the experience it creates for the prospect and whether that experience earns the right to ask for five minutes of conversation. Gated white papers and webinars carry less weight now that buyers get their information from short LinkedIn clips, podcasts, and long-form video instead.

Rethink event ROI beyond the size of the booth: For RSA, Terra skipped a show-floor booth and put its budget into an off-floor lunch activation, spending 80,000 dollars total, plus a separate 10,000 dollar CISO dinner co-hosted with an AWS security executive. Yakubov estimates the traditional booth-and-conference route would have cost roughly 150,000 dollars. A packed small booth can read as high demand, while a large booth with few visitors signals the opposite.

Define sales and marketing roles like positions on a baseball field: Yakubov describes marketing, sales, and SDR functions as different positions that need to respect what the others can and cannot see. "I can't have the outfielder trying to play catcher." She keeps SDR functions reporting into sales rather than marketing, arguing the bandwidth required to manage SDRs properly belongs with sales leadership while marketing stays close on enablement and messaging. She frames the real competition in cybersecurity as the adversaries the industry defends against, not the other vendors in the space.

—

Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

—

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire. Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Sançar Sahin, Cofounder & CMO of readywhen. Readywhen acts as a chief of staff for small business owners: it connects to their tools, tracks commitments, and pushes back on priorities the way a senior employee would. Sançar's team assumed readywhen would sell to the same venture-backed ICP as his other company, Oli, but beta signups revealed a different buyer entirely: solo operators and small teams built around a single craft, from event planners to plumbers. That mismatch forced a rebuild of positioning, acquisition, and the answer to the objection every AI product now faces: why not just use Claude or ChatGPT?

Topics Discussed:

• Finding your real ICP from behavioral signup patterns instead of firmographics
• Reframing the "why not just use Claude" objection as a category argument
• Building product defensibility through domain-specific modeling, not just retrieval
• Using expensive acquisition channels to buy branded search lift
• Positioning a vertical AI as judgment, not just automation

Lessons For B2B Marketers:

• Segment signups by behavior, not firmographics, to find your real ICP: readywhen's team expected the same venture-backed ICP as Oli. Beta data showed 99% of signups coming from one to five person businesses instead, sharing no industry but one trait: each was built around a single craft, whether events, plumbing, or stargazing tours. The lesson isn't "check your data." It's segmenting by what people do with the product, not who they are on paper, once your assumed ICP stops converting.

• Reframe "why not just use Claude" as a category argument, not a feature fight: rather than listing features Claude lacks, readywhen positions horizontal AI as a team of capable interns that execute instructions well but don't own outcomes, and itself as the senior hire that has an opinion about what happens next. That's a category claim, not a comparison chart, and it sidesteps a fight readywhen can't win on raw model capability.

• Prove the category difference with a paired scenario, not a claim: Sançar's billboard example is the clearest sales asset in the episode. Ask a horizontal AI to brainstorm a billboard campaign and it generates ideas. Ask readywhen and it surfaces three unanswered high-value inquiries and a client satisfaction trend first. Building one paired scenario like this does more convincing than any positioning deck, because it's falsifiable and specific.

• Build defensibility through a model of "what matters," not a bigger retrieval layer: readywhen's product lead is a computational neuroscientist, and the team built what Sançar calls a knowledge graph of a business: which commitments are load-bearing versus offhand, who a founder leans in or out with, tone of voice by context. That's a harder moat than connecting to more tools, because retrieval over Slack and Gmail answers "what happened" without judging "what matters."

• Treat expensive CPA channels as a branded-search bet, not a failed test: a month of LinkedIn influencer spend produced a higher cost per signup than other channels, but also a measurable lift in branded organic search. Readywhen counted that lift as the real return, since it's a harder metric to fake than signup volume and compounds after the campaign ends.

//

Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

//

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.

Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

//

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Sharif Ismail, Vice President of Marketing and GTM Strategy at Spread AI, a Berlin based Series B company building AI native product lifecycle management software for automotive, aerospace, and defense. Sharif spent four years as an electrical engineer, then five years in product marketing at semiconductor equipment maker KLA, before joining Spread AI, where a single customer program can carry twenty to forty thousand tracked requirements. He breaks down field GTM when your buyer universe fits on two hands, the rule he repeats most about never taking a customer request at face value, and why he treats product marketing as earning Oracle status with both sides.

Topics discussed:

• Why technical fluency compresses the cycle in requirements-heavy industries
• Running field GTM when your buyer universe is a handful of companies
• Where marketing, sales, and business development stop being separate
• The mechanics behind never doing exactly what a customer asks for
• Becoming the Oracle that product and customer both trust on the spot

Lessons for B2B marketers:

• Technical fluency only pays off where complexity is the actual bottleneck. At Spread AI, a single program can run twenty to forty thousand requirements across engineering, manufacturing, and regulatory teams. In that setting, a marketer who understands the product as well as an engineer can answer a customer on the spot instead of "having to involve three, four, five people." That is the specific condition under which technical depth becomes a GTM advantage, not a rule for every category.

• Map the room before you walk in, then commit to one person. Sharif's rule is to "focus ideally only one person in the room," usually the most senior stakeholder present, rather than spreading attention evenly. He avoids naming competitors directly in the room while still tracking exactly what system the customer already runs, so credibility comes from fluency, not direct comparison.

• In concentrated markets, relationship density beats acquisition scale. At KLA, semiconductor equipment had roughly ten to fifteen buyers worldwide, including TSMC, Samsung, and Micron, so "you can count your customers at two hands." At that scale, marketing's job shifts from lead generation to sitting in the room for product feedback, while sales runs the close on a separate, shorter timeline.

• Never say yes on the spot, and never say no on the spot either. Sharif's standing advice to junior marketers: do not do what the customer tells you to do, do what the customer actually wants. That means going back to the team, weighing three or four alternatives, and returning a day later with a specific counter-proposal. Done well, he says this gets you "credibility boosted by a factor two to three" versus simply agreeing on the spot.

• Earn Oracle status, it is not a title you are given. Product marketing sits between product and market, answering the customer's question on the spot and the product team's question about the customer without looping back to research it. Sharif is explicit this only comes after four to six months of direct customer contact and heavy personal use of the product, not a briefing document.

//

Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

//

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.

Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

//

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Brett Li, Head of Marketing at Crossmint, a developer platform that lets fintechs, neo banks, and remittance providers deploy stablecoin rails through one API instead of assembling on-ramps, wallets, orchestration, and off-ramps themselves. Brett breaks down how Crossmint powers MoneyGram's US to Colombia remittance corridor, why MiCA licensing is shaping its market sequence, and how his thinking on category creation has reversed.

Topics Discussed: 

• The on-ramp, wallet, orchestration, off-ramp stack Crossmint consolidates into one API

• Powering MoneyGram's US to Colombia corridor with a wallet that fully abstracts the stablecoin

• Card tokenization for consumer-facing agent payments versus stablecoins for agent-to-agent payments

• MiCA licensing and founder geography dictating an EU, Latam, US, Africa, Asia expansion sequence

• Competing against Stripe's portfolio approach versus point solutions in wallets and on-ramps

• Reversing a career-long belief in manufacturing new market categories

Lessons for B2B fintech marketers:

• Abstract the mechanism, not just the friction. Crossmint's MoneyGram deployment lets a person in the US send dollars that land as pesos in a relative's Colombia account, on-ramped, wallet-held, off-ramped, without either party seeing a stablecoin at any point. The takeaway isn't "simplify the UX," it's that the message and the architecture are the same decision: every layer of the stack is a point where you choose to expose or hide the rail, and each choice is positioning, not just engineering.

• Let regulatory scarcity set your GTM sequence. Crossmint is one of a small number of MiCA-licensed providers in the EU, which is why Europe leads its rollout order, ahead of Latam, the US, Africa, and Asia. Once stablecoins move into money movement, they also fall under adjacent frameworks like PSD2. Licensing status isn't a compliance footnote, it's a scarcity-based moat that should determine which markets you lead with, since unlicensed competitors can't follow you in on the same timeline.

• Split your agent-payment thesis into two rails. Consumer-facing agents, like an AI shopping assistant buying on a person's behalf, route through card networks already tokenizing cards for agent use. Agent-to-agent and service-level payments, high-frequency, low-value, real-time, are where stablecoins fit. If you're marketing in agentic commerce, this is the segmentation logic to use, not "agents will use crypto" as a blanket claim.

• Retire the acronym-first playbook. Brett described an almost complete reversal from earlier roles, where the default move was inventing a category term and pushing the market to adopt it. His current position: ground messaging in language customers already use, rather than manufacturing vocabulary you then have to spend budget teaching the market.

• Know when your job shifts from persuasion to proof. Brett was direct that Crossmint isn't trying to convince the market stablecoins are worth exploring, since demand already exists. Marketing's job at this stage moves to demonstrating product quality well enough that one customer's results bring the next ten, and those ten bring the next hundred, a flywheel that only works once persuasion stops being the bottleneck.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co //

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.

Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

//