Marketers of Technology

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Taylor Bornstein, Content Director at Bolt.new. Bolt.new is a prompt coding platform built on StackBlitz's WebContainers, which turns any browser into a full IDE running on local compute. The company launched with a tweet in October 2024 and went from nearly shuttering StackBlitz to $20 million in ARR in two months. Taylor joined as the fourth marketer in March and the team is now ten. She sells into two audiences with opposite clock speeds: enterprises deciding where AI build tooling belongs in a governed SDLC, and founders and domain consultants who clear no procurement gate at all.

Topics Discussed:

• Defining Bolt.new as the sandbox enterprises ship from rather than a frontier model competitor
• Pricing against procurement latency instead of arguing against Shadow AI
• Using constrained product scope as a token budget control for enterprise buyers
• Sourcing displacement narratives from domain consultants rather than logo customers
• Running the Sorry, SaaS billboard in New York City and the blog that anchored it
• Expanding the PR spokesperson bench beyond a player-coach CEO

Lessons for B2B Tech Marketers:

• Frame Constrained Scope as Token Budget Control: Bolt.new's enterprise case rests on what the product cannot do. Taylor's example is a 300,000-person company issuing a general-purpose assistant to everyone, where real consumption goes to calendar triage, skincare questions and why the dog ate something. Bolt.new only builds apps, websites and slides, which she describes as herding token spend toward the work being paid for. Where token burn has become a budget line, narrow surface area is the pricing argument.

• Answer the Frontier Model Objection With Workflow Position: Buyers already running Claude and Codex asked why they needed another tool. Taylor's line is "it's the sandbox you ship from." The proof is deliberate non-lock-in: output stays usable outside the Bolt.new environment and teams push through the CLI from Cursor or Claude Code, on the reasoning that trapping enterprise buyers in a proprietary IDE serves neither party.

• Price Against Procurement Latency, Not Shadow AI: Taylor does not argue that employees should stop buying their own tools. Approval to edit a PDF can take three to four months at a large company, so people spend $20 to $25 of their own money to fix what irritates them daily. The pitch is that this happens either way and ungoverned adoption is the version that opens the org to vulnerabilities.

• Source Displacement Stories From Domain Consultants, Not Logos: Taylor's strongest proof point is a trucking solutions architect who customized the EDI-based integration software the industry runs on, where connecting APIs ran an extra $15,000 to $25,000 billed to his clients. He now sells his own suite, ten customers in a little over a year.

• Pair a Provocative Brand Asset With the Argument That Defends It: The Sorry, SaaS billboard came out of a May offsite, borrowing SaaS apocalypse language already in the press. Taylor drafted a paragraph and the designer cut it to two words. It went up in New York City and moved on Twitter. She published The Four Horsemen of the SaaS Apocalypse alongside it, which matters because the billboard overstates her actual position.

// 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 Kevin Allen, Head of Marketing at ValidMind, an AI governance platform built for banks, insurers, and other regulated financial institutions. Kevin explains why ValidMind killed a working AI SDR program, how a regulation-specific campaign shipped in a single afternoon using AI coding tools, and why his team is staffed with people who sat on the buyer's side of the table before writing a line of marketing copy.

Topics Discussed:

• Recruiting marketing hires from the buyer's own industry for instant credibility
• Killing a working AI SDR program over brand risk, not ROI
• Rebuilding pipeline around narrow account lists and owned events after abandoning automation
• Compressing a regulation-specific campaign from a multi-month build to a single afternoon
• Setting a personal sniff test for catching AI-generated copy before it ships
• Staffing a three-person marketing team for range over specialization

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Recruit from your buyer's own former employers. ValidMind's bench includes former JPMorgan Chase, PayPal, American Express, and Discover employees. In a regulated vertical where buyers spot marketing speak instantly, this is a credibility unlock.

• Kill a working channel over brand risk, not ROI. ValidMind's AI SDR program found enough pipeline to justify the spend, but Kevin shut it down anyway: "there was more risk to the brand by putting out something that we didn't feel 100% behind." Most teams only kill channels that underperform. Treating brand exposure as its own kill criterion, separate from pipeline math, is the sharper filter.

• When automation fails, go narrower and physical, not broader. ValidMind rebuilt around accounts most likely to close within 12 months, then created or sponsored events to reach those named accounts in person. Kevin's framing: "the most effective way for us to market our product is for us to get in front of people, physically in front of people, shake their hand, look them in the eye and talk about it."

• Build the readiness-assessment-to-scored-quiz funnel yourself, on regulation day. When Canada's E23 regulation hit, Kevin used AI coding tools to build a readiness assessment, checklist, and scored quiz with a CTA to talk strategy, released sequentially as the "E23 bulletin." At IBM, the same asset needed a roughly five-day sell-through, a two-week engineering commitment, and two to three weeks of content work. Kevin built and tested the full sequence in one afternoon: regulation-driven campaigns can now ship inside the same news cycle that creates buyer urgency.

• Draw a hard line between AI-draftable copy and copy that needs your hand. Press releases and formulaic copy get an AI first draft, edited into brand voice. Technical blogs and product docs don't. His filter for catching AI output before it ships: spot reflexive not-this-but-that hedging, then cut it.

• Staff a lean team for range, not narrow specialists. With one product marketer, one integrated marketing specialist, and a fractional CMO as sounding board, ValidMind can't afford someone who only does SEO or only demand gen. At this headcount, cross-functional range is structural, not philosophy.

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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

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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

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In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Shoshana Browne, Director of Marketing and Strategic Operations at enSights, a B2B SaaS platform helping solar and storage asset owners manage distributed energy portfolios as revenue-generating businesses. Running enSights marketing as a team of one, Shoshana explains how the company answers the build-it-ourselves objection, rebuilt sales enablement content to move specific funnel stages, and tied content engagement directly to pipeline ahead of a Series B.

Topics Discussed:

• Handling the build-vs-buy objection when prospects consider building on tools like Salesforce and Claude
• Reframing product positioning from monitoring software to business management
• Regulatory and compliance data gaps that cause missed availability guarantees on energy assets
• Rebuilding sales enablement content to lift conversion at specific funnel stages
• Connecting LinkedIn engagement data to pipeline attribution through a digital agency partnership
• Shifting from demand generation to pipeline progression as a long sales cycle matures

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Handle the build-it-ourselves objection with cost structure, not defensiveness: when prospects say they will build the equivalent on Salesforce and Claude, enSights doesn't argue the initial build. The differentiator is what happens after: normalizing data across manufacturers with different interfaces, then integrating that layer into ticketing and maintenance workflows, work in-house teams underweight for years.
• Reposition around the business outcome, not the software category: enSights shifted from monitoring and performance software to business management, treating each energy asset as a revenue-generating business. Missing the regulatory and contract data tied to an asset can mean missing availability guarantees, a prioritization failure, not a technical one.
• Rebuild sales enablement content as a conversion lever: rebuilding demos and content for sales enablement improved one funnel stage by 11 points and another by 50%. A single rebuild, targeted at a known drop-off point, can outperform broader top-of-funnel spend.
• Expect differentiation language to get copied within months, and plan around it: after enSights rolled out new positioning, competitors used near-identical language within two months. The team keeps prospect-facing specifics under NDA while building trust through partnerships and thought leadership, since public language alone is not defensible.
• Attribute pipeline to content, don't just track engagement: working with agency Cleantech Growth Lab, enSights connects LinkedIn engagement into HubSpot to identify which accounts engaged before converting. Roughly 60% of SQLs and booked meetings had engaged with content beforehand, precise enough to reframe conversations with leadership.
• Shift from demand generation to pipeline progression once the year's bookable revenue is already in-system: with a longer sales cycle, most of what closes this year was already in pipeline by mid-year. Focus shifts to progressing existing deals through intimate formats like roundtables and webinars, worth naming for teams assuming H2 should still be led by top-of-funnel volume.

 // 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 Elliot King, Vice President of Marketing at Turtl, the AI-first revenue content platform for account-based marketing and B2B revenue teams. Elliot joined a legacy SaaS brand mid-transformation and rebuilt its go-to-market motion with two proprietary frameworks: the Spicy Five for strategic sequencing and the Spicy Box for tactical execution. Results: a 750% pipeline increase, three straight quarters of 75% revenue retention growth, and average deal size moving from under $10K to $180K.

Topics Discussed:

• The Spicy Five framework for sequencing brand transformation and growth

• Why AI has lowered the floor on B2B content without raising the ceiling for differentiation

• The Spicy Box framework for creative work that cannot be ignored

• Diversifying go-to-market motion from inbound-only into ABM, channel and cross-sell

• Building an outcome-based case study library instead of a features-based one

• An anonymized competitor audit that diagnoses category sameness

Lessons For B2B Marketers:

• Sequence transformation with a repeatable framework, not instinct. The Spicy Five runs in order: fall in love with the problem, add indisputable value, embrace difference at every level, become known for solving that problem, then scale the revenue engine. Differentiation happens before scale, since a distinct identity makes a diversified GTM motion legible instead of more noise.

• AI has changed the differentiation math. Elliot's sharpest point: AI hasn't raised the ceiling on B2B content, it's lowered the floor. Anyone can produce competent copy and design now, so "fine" is the new baseline, not an edge. Budget once spent chasing competence should shift toward manufacturing distinctiveness.

• Diagnose category sameness before designing a brand response. Elliot pulled nine competitor logos, anonymized them, and placed them beside Turtl's own. None were identifiable. If a brand can't survive an anonymized lineup test, no campaign spend builds recall. It's a cheap, repeatable audit worth running before any rebrand.

• Build differentiation as an operating system, using the Spicy Box: map the status quo, define its opposite, then choose the emotion the audience should feel. Applied to the Glass Slipper campaign at B2B Ignite, EMEA's largest B2B conference, the standard banner-and-notepad booth became the status quo to invert. The resulting activation (fairy godmother costume, custom Crocs, golden throne) mapped directly to the customer pain addressed: intent data purchased but never activated. The spectacle served a named frustration, not attention alone.

• Replace product metrics with an outcome-based evidence library. Turtl's case studies tie to client business outcomes: a $5.5M pipeline increase and $1M revenue improvement for 8x8, and $1.3M in influenced revenue for OneAdvanced. That evidence is the foundation creative work stands on.

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Jessica Maria, CMO of RapidScale. RapidScale is a managed cloud services and professional services provider that advises, consults, and operates as an extension of clients' technical teams across public, private, and hybrid clouds, working primarily with regulated industries and companies carrying significant intellectual property. Since stepping into the CMO role, Jessica has led a brand evolution away from RapidScale's old "we help you navigate the chaos" positioning toward a partner-first identity built on trust, clarity, and humanity, a shift she validated through third-party client research rather than internal assumption. She unpacks how she thinks about brand as market conditioning, where AI belongs and where it never should in the content process, why the old SEO playbook is giving way to writing for AEO and GEO, and where RapidScale is putting its demand-gen dollars for 2026 and beyond.

Topics Discussed:

• Reframing brand as market conditioning rather than a design exercise 

• Evolving RapidScale's positioning from "we manage your complexity" to "we are your partner"

• Using third-party client research to validate brand claims instead of assuming them

• Setting hard rules for where AI belongs, and does not belong, in content creation

• Shifting from traditional SEO toward writing for AEO and GEO

• Matching production value to message so authenticity does not read as performance

• Investing 2026 demand-gen budget in hyperpersonalization and thought leadership

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Define Brand as Market Conditioning, Not Design: Jessica pushes back on the idea that brand is logos, colors, or fonts. She defines it as how people think about a company when it is not in the room, and market conditioning as the ongoing work of reinforcing that perception at every touchpoint so a seller walks into what she calls a warm room with a prospect. For marketers still treating brand as a visual identity project, this reframes it as an operational discipline that has to show up consistently across every interaction, not just in a style guide.

• Let Third-Party Research Validate Your Positioning, Don't Assume It: When RapidScale worked with Cunningham Collective on brand research in 2025, client surveys and questionnaires came back with a consistent, unprompted result: clients called RapidScale their partner, not their vendor or supplier. Jessica treats that finding as the anchor for the entire brand shift, because it came from clients describing the relationship in their own words rather than from an internal brainstorm about what the company wanted to claim. The lesson for marketers is to test brand language against how customers actually talk before building a campaign around it.

• Draw a Hard Line on What AI Can and Cannot Touch: Jessica's rule is direct: if a company uses AI to find its point of view, it has already failed, because prospects can run that same search themselves in seconds. Where she does deploy AI is in understanding a market segment's pain points at depth, and in market or competitive intelligence, work that informs the point of view without generating it. The point of view itself, and the founder-facing content built on it, stays human.

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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

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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 Betsy McKibbin, Head of Marketing at Yoodli, an AI roleplay and coaching platform that helps revenue teams practice and scale conversations. Betsy explains how she turned Yoodli's own product into her team's internal enablement engine, building an AI version of herself that pushes new releases straight into a practice session instead of a written brief. She also breaks down the guerrilla marketing behind Yoodli's recent growth, the line she draws on what marketing owns as every function generates its own content with AI, and why she treats AI roleplay as a category that has to be sold before the product can be.

Topics Discussed:

• Building an internal AI persona that turns release notes into a live practice session

• Why agent workflows fail when they just add another summarization layer

• Expanding AI roleplay from sales enablement into retail, healthcare, legal, and finance

• Scaling training consistency for teams from a handful of reps to 50,000 and up

• Drawing a hard boundary on what marketing owns as AI content generation spreads org-wide

• Educating a market on a category with no existing buying playbook

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Collapse the release-to-practice gap instead of writing another brief: Betsy's team built Betsy AI, a persona inside Yoodli that scans Asana, Slack, and GitHub for what shipped, then delivers it to reps as a live roleplay they can immediately practice. The old cadence was a periodic brief handed to sales. The new cadence has to be constant, since releases ship daily and reps who last practiced last week are already behind. The shift is not the AI summary. It is that the update and the practice happen in one session, with no handoff between them.

• Kill the agent chain before it multiplies your content problem: Betsy's first version had agents generating a weekly report, which then got fed into other people's agents for further summarizing, adding a layer of content without closing any gap. She got value once she stopped optimizing for more content and used AI to compress the distance between a release shipping and a rep being able to speak to it correctly.

• Build enablement as an expanding funnel, not a one-time rollout: internal enablement was the first problem Yoodli solved. The next target is extending that instant-update-plus-practice loop to resellers and partners, and eventually customers, treating enablement as a distribution channel rather than a training checkbox.

• Move faster than your approval chain when news creates a free window: when a national broadcast crew set up two blocks from Yoodli's office, a marketer on the job two weeks grabbed a cardboard sign and got the company name into a live shot with no planning cycle. The lesson is not newsjacking. It is that the marketer had standing authority to act without sign-off, and speed turned a coincidence into a real spike in site visitors.

• Sell the category before you sell the platform: AI roleplay has no established evaluation process the way HR tech or project management software does, so Yoodli built resources to help buyers navigate the category itself. The bet is that earning trust as the guide to an unfamiliar space converts better long-term than leading with product features.

// 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 Leah Clark, Vice President of Marketing at Arize AI, an AI observability and evals platform for teams shipping agents and LLM applications. Leah breaks down how she measures offline channels with the same rigor as digital, why technical fluency is a marketing requirement rather than a nice to have, and how AI has compressed the marketing ops feedback loop from weeks to seconds.

Topics Discussed:

• Why brand differentiation has to live outside the product roadmap

• Measuring billboard and offline lift with the same rigor as a digital campaign

• Segmenting a business spanning open source downloads to Fortune 500 contracts

• Why marketers should be as technically fluent as the engineers they support

• How AI tooling has changed the marketing ops feedback loop

• What career flexibility signals when you're hiring marketers

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Root Differentiation in Founder DNA, Not the Roadmap: Arize's technical co-founders are obsessive about education and bringing non-experts along, and Leah built brand principles around that trait rather than features, since competitors eventually close any feature gap. When a market moves fast, resist mirroring competitor launches — audit what's true about your founders that competitors structurally cannot copy.

• Sell the Outcome, Not the Eval Dashboard: A former manager's line stuck with Leah: you don't sell car parts, you sell the car. Applied to observability, that means leading with the confidence to ship agents without silent failure, not the tracing features themselves — because the feature set is a moving target and the underlying problem is not.

• Segment by Usage Depth, Not Logo Size: Phoenix, Arize's open source layer, has millions of downloads and doubles as an acquisition channel, feeding a consumption-priced SaaS motion from small teams to Fortune 500s. Expansion revenue inside an account is a more useful north star than net new logos when pricing rewards usage growth.

• Make Product Fluency a Requirement, Not a Perk: Arize's co-founder and CEO personally onboarded Leah on the product early on, since marketing cannot position what it does not understand. Push for direct engineering access before accepting a technical marketing role, not after.

• Measure Offline Like Any Paid Channel: Arize ran billboards in San Francisco and New York and validated them by comparing homepage traffic, signups, and search volume in-market before and after launch — the same test-and-control logic you'd apply to paid social. Treat offline as testable, not a brand exercise you take on faith.

• AI Has Compressed the Ops Feedback Loop: Getting a data pull used to mean a multi week wait on data or marketing ops. Leah now queries an AI tool wired directly into Arize's analytics stack and gets the answer immediately — changing how fast a team can test and iterate on messaging.

• What "Has Tried Everything" Signals in a Hire: When a mid or senior candidate names a function they tried and ruled out — events, PMM, whatever it is — Leah reads that as self-awareness and range, not indecision. Worth borrowing as an interview probe: ask what they tried and ruled out, not just what they're good at.

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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

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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I HireSenior 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 Wolfram Wege, Chief Marketing Officer at OpenTAS, and Grant Price, Head of Narrative at Brandigans. OpenTAS builds digitalized business process solutions for the midstream to downstream supply chain of energy and chemicals, and its newest terminal management platform needed a category of its own in a market crowded with legacy systems. Wolfram and Grant walk through how a rebrand built around the slogan "complexity removed" let OpenTAS step away from the language of incremental software updates and instead pitch a wholesale replacement for the patchwork of tools terminal operators had stacked on top of each other for decades. From a board pitch modeled on Apple's 1984 ad to a print campaign built around a single flower breaking through concrete, they detail how a technical, orthodox industry responded to a marketing approach built on vision rather than feature lists.

Topics Discussed:

• Defining a new category inside a saturated terminal management market

• Building a rebrand around one bold slogan instead of a features list

• Using the Apple 1984 ad as a framing device to pitch a risky rebrand to the board

• Distilling four customer value propositions from original industry research

• Translating a technical product into a cinematic visual campaign

• Presenting the new brand at industry expos in Rotterdam and the US 

• Sustaining a creative partnership that has lasted over two decades

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Define a Category Instead of Competing on Features: Rather than positioning against other terminal management solutions on functionality, OpenTAS created a new category, terminal management platform, built around removing legacy systems entirely instead of adding another one on top. The internal framing was a Gordian knot that could only be resolved by cutting it, not untangling it piece by piece.

• Hold the Line on Bold Language: When OpenTAS's product team suggested softening the slogan "complexity removed" to "complexity managed," Wolfram pushed back because the softer version stripped out the conviction that made the message land. Bold positioning loses its power the moment it gets hedged into safety.

• Borrow a Cultural Reference to De-Risk an Internal Pitch: Before presenting the new rebrand to the board, Wolfram opened with Apple's 1984 ad to prime the room for a disruptive move. Referencing a familiar, high-stakes creative risk made the board more receptive to taking one of their own.

• Ground the Creative Vision in Original Research: The four value propositions used across the entire campaign (including efficiency, simplicity, time saved, and security) came directly from a research paper identifying the most vulnerable pain points for terminal operators, not from an internal brainstorm. The research gave the creative team a defensible foundation before a single asset was built.

• Build a Visual Metaphor Strong Enough to Carry the Category: The campaign visualized the old, fragmented system as a disconnected high-rise building and the new platform as a single gold surface everything else sits on. That same contrast, plus a print ad built around a flower breaking through concrete, gave a traditionally dull industry something worth stopping to look at.

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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

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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 The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Sarah Monette, Head of Marketing at Cosine, a UK-based AI coding agent built for highly regulated industries. Sarah joined Cosine three and a half months ago after stints at NetSuite, Nexthink, and Vertice, and walked in as a generalist marketer with zero ML background — now running all marketing functions at a 30-person, five-days-a-week in-office company. The conversation covers how she's building credibility in a space dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI, why in-person dinners are her highest-ROI channel in the age of AI-generated everything, and how she built a "GTM brain" that feeds her weekly strategic direction.

Topics Discussed:

• Building trust at a deep-tech AI startup selling into defense and healthcare

• How UK AI sovereignty became Cosine's category-defining narrative

• Landing a UK government sovereign AI grant — and what the process actually looked like

• Why partnerships, not outbound, are the primary GTM motion for regulated enterprise

• The "Built for Engineers with Taste" campaign and the strategic value of divisive messaging

• Running channel experiments across X, LinkedIn, and Reddit to find where enterprise buyers actually live

• How a developer-led head of growth uses unbranded micro-experiments to validate products before launch

• Building and operating a GTM brain: a running AI system fed weekly with news, product updates, and customer signals

• Using Cosine itself to audit the website, evaluate click paths, and rewrite marketing narrative

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Use Partnership-Led Trust to Break Into Regulated Enterprise When you're selling into defense or healthcare, you're not winning deals with content or cold outreach. Sarah's primary GTM motion at Cosine is building one or two deep partner relationships with consultancies or government-adjacent organizations that already hold the trust of her target accounts. Those partners then co-host dinners and facilitate warm introductions. The trust is transferred, not manufactured from scratch. The unlock was recognizing that the partner's credibility is the product in early enterprise sales.

• Turn a Macro Narrative Into a GTM Wedge Cosine operates at the intersection of AI sovereignty, UK national infrastructure, and regulated software engineering. When the US government restricted access to Fable 5, that geopolitical moment validated Cosine's entire positioning. Sarah didn't create that narrative — she made sure Cosine was already there when it mattered. The takeaway: identify the macro forces your product is aligned with and stay close to those conversations so you can move fast when the moment breaks.

• Run Divisive Campaigns on Purpose The first campaign Sarah ran at Cosine was "Built for Engineers with Taste" — messaging explicitly designed not to appeal to everyone. It was built around who the product is not for (including herself), which made it land harder with the people it was made for. As she put it: "If you're trying to please everyone, you're going to please no one." For early-stage B2B products with a narrow ICP, the cost of vague, inclusive messaging is invisibility. The cost of specific, polarizing messaging is just a smaller audience that converts at a higher rate.

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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

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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 The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Mahesh Babu, CMO of Kodem. Kodem was founded by former members of the NSO Group, the team behind Pegasus, the first exploit ever used to hack the iPhone, and the company has built its entire go-to-market motion around that origin story without ever being able to say so publicly. In a security market crowded with venture-backed startups all fighting for the same ASPM budget, Mahesh built a three-pillar marketing framework, engineered a "backroom briefing" model to control exactly where and how the founder story gets told, and made a deliberate call to anchor the company to an incumbent category instead of trying to create a new one. This conversation is a masterclass in founder-led marketing under real constraints: how to sell trust instead of product, how to turn a story you can't publish into your best top-of-funnel asset, and how to hire for domain expertise over functional pedigree when the old marketing and sales playbooks stop working.

Topics Discussed:

• Why security is a trust sale, not a product sale, and what that means for positioning

• Building a founder story around Kodem's Pegasus/NSO Group origins that can't be told on the website

• Using invite-only "backroom briefings" to control where a polarizing story gets shared

• The three-pillar marketing framework: known team, trusted intelligence, educated prospects

• Why Kodem refused to brand itself ASPM despite 18 competitors racing into the category

• Anchoring to an incumbent category (code scanners) instead of paying to create a new one

• The "attack chaining" insight from Pegasus that became Kodem's core product narrative

• Hiring SDRs and product marketers with domain expertise instead of traditional marketing backgrounds

Lessons For Security Marketers:

• Treat a Polarizing Story as a Controlled Asset, Not a Liability. Kodem's founders built Pegasus, the exploit behind the first iPhone hack, a story with real reputational risk. Rather than avoid it or overexpose it, Mahesh drew a hard line between what appears publicly (nothing) and what gets shared once a prospect is in the room. That constraint became a feature: the mystery pulls people into events, and the story only fully lands face to face, which drives Kodem's entire events and outbound strategy.

• Build a Three-Pillar Framework Instead of Chasing Tactics. Kodem's marketing runs on three pillars: known team and trusted intelligence for top-of-funnel credibility, educated prospects and evangelist customers to shorten sales conversations, and repeat sales by non-experts as the ultimate test of product-market fit. Mahesh uses that last pillar as a literal metric, when the sales team closes deals without him or the founders on the call, that is proof the market message is fully baked.

• Anchor to an Incumbent Category Instead of Paying to Create One. With roughly 18 competitors all raising capital and calling themselves ASPM at the same time, Mahesh made the call to reject the buzzword entirely. Kodem anchors its pitch to code scanners and SCA/SAST, the tools prospects already own and understand, then uses the demo to show what those incumbent tools miss. Category creation was a deliberate line item Mahesh chose not to fund, treating a defined market as a distribution shortcut rather than a compromise.

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