Marketers of Technology

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Jordan Gadapee, Chief Marketing Officer at Vida Global, an AI agent platform that enables medium-to-enterprise-scale businesses to white-label and resell AI agents to their own customers. Jordan brings a brand-first background rooted in graphic design and Silicon Valley startups, and shares how Vida Global navigates one of the hardest challenges in B2B tech marketing right now: cutting through AI noise to actually educate buyers and drive qualified pipeline.

Topics Discussed:

• Marketing an AI product in a category where every competitor claims to do the same thing

• Why Vida Global leads with problems, not product features

• How ABM content strategy drives pipeline in highly specialized verticals like telecom

• The consultative sales model and why a 45-minute discovery interview is core to Vida Global's GTM

• Being LLM-agnostic as both a product strategy and a marketing differentiator

• Why the "crawl, walk, run" deployment philosophy reduces churn and builds trust

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Lead with the problem, not the product. In a market where every AI vendor claims to be the most powerful, most flexible, or cheapest option, Vida Global's marketing anchors on specific pain points — missed calls after hours, costly lead falloff, operational bottlenecks — and positions the AI agent as the solution. The goal is to make a prospective buyer say "that's happening to me" before they ever ask what Vida Global actually does.

• Content strategy as a vertical education engine. Rather than broad awareness plays, Vida Global builds content specifically for the verticals they serve — telecom being the clearest example. Jordan and two of Vida Global's co-founders came out of the telephony and messaging space, which gives them deep credibility. Their content strategy exploits that credibility gap: telcos understand copper, VoIP, and telecom compliance, but don't know where to start with AI. Vida Global creates content that fills exactly that gap — PDF guides, web interactives, short-form video — all oriented around education rather than conversion.

• Use a consultative intake process as a marketing asset. Vida Global's 45-minute discovery interview — used to assess how AI should be deployed for each customer — isn't just a sales qualification step. It's also a positioning tool. By building a rigorous intake process, Vida Global signals expertise and filters for customers who are serious about implementation. This reduces bad-fit deals while raising perceived value.

• LLM-agnosticism as a durable differentiator. In a market where model capabilities shift every few weeks, Vida Global made the deliberate product decision to be model-agnostic — customers can switch between OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and others at the click of a button. The pitch isn't which model is best right now; it's about having the right AI for the right task and managing costs accordingly.

• The "crawl, walk, run" framing reduces buyer fear and accelerates deals. Vida Global addresses deployment risk directly in their messaging and sales process: start with low-hanging fruit, prove the value in weeks not months, then scale. This framing creates a natural expansion motion and a proof-of-concept step that shortens time-to-close.

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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 Ishita Jaiswal, Head of Growth at Multimodal, an AI platform helping credit unions and community banks automate their core lending workflows. Selling AI into one of the most regulated, trust-sensitive verticals in existence forced Ishita to throw out most of the B2B SaaS marketing playbook and build something entirely different — a motion grounded in original research, institutional partnerships, and compounding trust rather than product-led growth or demand gen tactics. The result: a content and partnership engine that turned a quarterly research report into a pipeline of 17–18 live credit union trials, multi-year contracts that clients initiated, and a brand now recognized as the go-to AI vendor for community financial institutions.

Topics Discussed:

• Why most B2B SaaS and AI marketing advice is useless in regulated industries

• How a quarterly research report opened the door to the largest credit union think tank in the US

• The ICP focus pivot that tightened Multimodal's marketing and accelerated pipeline results

• Building trust through thought leadership, think tank partnerships, and original research publication

• The cultural and relationship dynamics of selling AI internationally to financial institutions

• Why riding the AI hype cycle is a dead end for most marketing leaders

Lessons for B2B Tech Marketers:

• Let Research Double as a Sales Funnel. Multimodal published a quarterly report on the state of agentic AI in credit unions and, as part of the research process, interviewed the incubation director at Filene Research Institute — the largest credit union think tank in the US. That outreach led to a formal proof-of-value program, which in turn gave them access to roughly two dozen credit unions trialing their platform live. The lesson: original research isn't just content. In trust-driven markets, it's a relationship-opening mechanism that no cold outreach can replicate.

• Narrow Your ICP Before Your Marketing Breaks You. For the first year-plus, Multimodal tried to market across all of financial services — investment banks, community banks, fintechs, insurance. Ishita is blunt about what happened: it weakened everything. When they made the deliberate decision to focus exclusively on credit unions and smaller community banks serving 144 million Americans, their messaging tightened immediately and they started seeing compounding results within two to three months — fast by enterprise standards in this space.

• Build Trust Infrastructure, Not Just Content. In financial services, trust isn't a brand attribute — it's a sales prerequisite. Multimodal built what Ishita describes as a "trust infrastructure": publishing original research, partnering with think tanks, running their own podcast to surface customer problems, and keeping security and compliance permanently front-of-mind in all communications. They also proactively own any incidents when they occur rather than minimizing them. This approach signals to compliance teams, CROs, and CFOs that Multimodal is a partner, not a vendor.

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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 Trevor Lynn, Head of Marketing at Roboflow, a computer vision platform that gives developers and enterprises the tools to build visual AI on top of images, video, and camera streams. With over a million developers and 16,000 organizations on the platform, Roboflow sits at a unique intersection of infrastructure and application — and Trevor has been navigating the marketing challenge of making a technical, category-defining product legible in the noisiest AI environment in history.

Topics Discussed:

• Marketing a technical, category-defining product in a crowded AI landscape

• Winning mindshare when every enterprise can only absorb so many AI tools at once

• Using AI to synthesize hundreds of sales calls weekly for real-time messaging intelligence

• Building a free tier strategy that converts developers into enterprise customers

• How the physical world — not the screen — represents the largest untapped AI opportunity

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Treat Every Sales Call as a Marketing Intelligence Asset. Roboflow's marketing team pipes hundreds of weekly sales call recordings through AI to surface messaging gaps, recurring objections, and competitive signals — not just for the sales team, but to act on within the same week. Trevor's frame: if your AI isn't connected to your sales motion, you're analyzing last quarter's data to make next quarter's decisions. Real-time market intelligence requires real-time synthesis, and that's now table stakes.

• The Free Tier Is Your Most Powerful Marketing Channel. With over 11,000 published research papers using Roboflow — because researchers could access the platform without a credit card — the free tier has seeded a global developer community that no paid campaign could replicate. Trevor is direct about the advantage: letting the product speak for itself before forcing a sales conversation is a competitive edge most enterprise marketing teams don't have. If your product has a usage-based free tier, building the entire top-of-funnel strategy around it is the right call.

• Build AI Infrastructure for Your Marketing Org Before You Build Campaigns. Trevor's primary piece of advice to other marketing leaders is to stop using AI as a content shortcut and start treating it as a strategic operating system. That means uploading your board-level marketing plan, your company vision, your metrics cadence, and feeding all of it into your LLM of choice — so that every initiative you touch gets evaluated against actual strategic priorities. The payoff: a weekly, unbiased audit of whether your team is executing on strategy or just fighting fires.

• Mindshare Is the Real Competition in Enterprise AI. Roboflow doesn't have many direct product competitors in computer vision, but Trevor frames the competitive landscape differently: every AI vendor is competing for the same enterprise budget cycle, the same internal champion, and the same organizational bandwidth to adopt something new. The marketing job isn't just explaining what you do — it's making the case that your tool deserves to be the one that gets implemented this quarter. That framing changes how you write content, sequence conversations, and build urgency.

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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 Kim Pendergrass, VP of Marketing at Earlytrade, an early payment negotiation platform built for the US construction industry. Earlytrade operates as a two-sided marketplace connecting general contractors and subcontractors, enabling them to negotiate accelerated payment discounts at scale — addressing a systemic problem where subcontractors routinely wait 90 to 120 days for payment. Kim joined as the company's first-in marketing leader during its US expansion and has since led the team through a 7x growth in US footprint, a $25 million Series A close, and the early stages of building brand recognition in a niche, relationship-driven market.

Topics Discussed:

• Marketing in a "paid when paid" industry with 90–120 day payment cycles

• How to position a vitamin product in a market dominated by painkiller urgency

• Building brand awareness with a total addressable market of ~3,000 accounts

• Why direct mail — not email or cold calls — is outperforming digital outreach in construction

• Structuring a two-person marketing team to cover a full go-to-market motion

• How Earlytrade vets and scales ERP partnerships with Trimble and Sage

• Budgeting frameworks when every dollar must tie to revenue impact

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Know Your Product's Category — and Market Accordingly. Kim uses a framework of painkiller, vitamin, or candy to anchor every strategic decision. Earlytrade is a vitamin: it makes businesses better, but nobody will stop operating without it. That classification shapes everything — it explains why inbound doesn't work ("nobody is Googling early payments in construction"), why category education is the primary job, and why the sales cycle requires repeated touchpoints before a prospect is ready to engage.

• Run Repeated Direct Mail Cadences to Cut Through Inbox Noise. With a known universe of roughly 3,000 target accounts, Earlytrade doesn't treat direct mail as a one-shot campaign. They run weekly sends on a rolling cadence so that by the time an SDR connects, the prospect already has context — "are you guys the ones sending me something on my desk every week? Are you the ones who sent the gumball machine?" That ambient presence dramatically lowers the cold-call barrier. The key insight: consistency matters more than creativity in the actual mailer.

• Resist Hyper-Personalization — It Reads as Creepy. In ABM at this scale, the temptation is to over-personalize. Kim draws a hard line: referencing a throwaway comment someone made four years ago on social media is not personalization, it's surveillance. The goal is to be recognizable and consistent, not intimate. This keeps the brand feeling trustworthy rather than intrusive when the sales team eventually makes contact.

• Validate Partnerships Against Joint Customers First. Earlytrade has strong ERP partnerships with Trimble and Sage — but those relationships didn't start with deep integrations. The first question Kim asks before investing in any partnership: do we already have joint customers, and are they asking for this? If the answer is yes, you layer in co-marketing and sales support. If the integration proves out, then you invest in engineering. Skipping that sequence is how companies sink resources into partnerships that never convert.

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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 Thomas (Tom) Butta, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Quantum XChange, a company building post-quantum cryptographic protection for the networks that carry the world's most sensitive data in motion. With presidential executive orders on quantum computing dropping the day before recording, Tom brings the rare perspective of a career-long challenger brand marketer who has spent decades entering nascent, technically complex markets before the mainstream knew it needed them — and turning that early-mover position into a durable content and trust advantage.

Topics Discussed:

• Why inertia from the status quo is the most underestimated competitive force in early-category markets

• The "harvest now, decrypt later" threat making quantum security an urgent problem today, not a future one

• How category leaders win by owning the problem, not marketing the solution

• Building a "trusted guide" go-to-market motion when enterprise buyers are overwhelmed and undertrained

• The difference between Silicon Valley inside-out product marketing and the outside-in, emotion-first approach that actually drives enterprise decisions

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Own the Problem Before You Pitch the Solution: Tom's core content philosophy is that category leaders own the problem, not the product. In a space like post-quantum cryptography, where even sophisticated buyers are still forming their understanding, Quantum XChange invests heavily in educational content — roadmaps, frameworks, threat briefings — with no pitch attached. The goal is to become the lens through which buyers think about the problem, so that by the time they evaluate solutions, you've already earned the selection.

• Treat Inertia as Your Real Competitor: In every early-category market Tom has entered, the most dangerous competitor wasn't another vendor — it was the status quo. Existing encryption methodologies have been in place for 50 years. Security teams are stretched. AI has already consumed every budget conversation. Marketers in emerging categories have to account for this gravitational pull and design campaigns that address it directly rather than simply promoting differentiation against named alternatives.

• Find the People Who Get It and Arm Them: Not every stakeholder in a target account is ready for the message. Tom's approach is to identify the individuals inside organizations who already see the threat clearly — often lone voices surrounded by colleagues with other priorities — and equip them with the content, data, and frameworks to make the internal case. Those people become de facto ambassadors, extending the company's reach through channels no ad budget can buy.

• Build the Playbook When One Doesn't Exist: When Tom joins a new category, his first question is who has the winning playbook — and his consistent finding is that no one does. His response is to create one: a structured value roadmap that maps the opportunity, outlines critical requirements, defines strategies, and helps customers size and measure their investment. Giving this away freely positions the company as the category's intellectual authority long before a procurement process begins.

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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 Rachel Sterling, CMO of Identity Digital, the world's largest domain registry operating nearly 300 top-level domains. Rachel comes to this role with deep roots in Big Tech — including a long tenure at Google and a stint at YouTube managing GDPR compliance — but now occupies a deliberately invisible corner of the internet: the infrastructure layer that makes online identity possible. What makes this conversation so compelling is how Rachel translates the abstract (domain registries, ICANN, agentic search) into a concrete, evolving marketing playbook. In an era where AI is flooding content discovery channels and eroding the click-based performance model marketers have relied on for a decade, Rachel is building a new framework — one centered on multi-audience content architecture, domain relevancy as an AI discoverability signal, and the embedded commerce opportunity now unfolding inside vibe-coding platforms and website builders.

Topics Discussed:

• Why domains are becoming the trust anchor for online identity in an AI-saturated world

• How the .IO and .AI country code story reveals the gap between perceived and actual internet infrastructure

• What the ICANN "Next Round" (opened April 30th) means for the domain registry business

• The B2B2C content architecture Identity Digital uses to reach registrars, channel partners, and end users simultaneously

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Rethink what your domain signals in the age of AI search. Rachel's core thesis is that when generative AI surfaces a blurb about your company in search results, the user may never actually visit your site. That means your domain now has to do a heavier branding lift than ever before. Choosing a top-level domain that extracts relevancy from both sides of the dot — the name and the extension — improves discoverability in agentic search results, not just in traditional SEO. For B2B companies, this is a positioning decision hiding in plain sight.

• Build content architecture for multiple distinct audiences, not one monolithic funnel. Identity Digital doesn't sell directly to end users — they sell to registrars, who sell to customers. Rachel's content strategy reflects that explicitly: one content layer for channel partners like Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Namecheap to activate their TLDs; a second layer for the registrars themselves as B2B partners; a third for direct customer merchandising through Name.com. Most B2B marketers treat their content as a single funnel. Rachel structures it as three separate, audience-specific programs running in parallel.

• Find your embedded distribution channel before competitors do. Rachel identified a behavioral shift that most domain registries missed: customers no longer search for "how do I buy a domain?" — they search for "how do I build a website?" and expect a domain to be available inside that workflow. Identity Digital's response is an API at name.com that lets vibe-coding platforms and website builders offer domain purchases natively, removing the DNS friction that historically killed conversions. The analogy to embedded fintech is exact — and the window to own this channel is now.

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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 George Kapellos, Global Marketing and Communications Director at Nyobolt, a Cambridge-based deep tech company pioneering high-power, fast-charging energy storage solutions for power-demanding industries including AI data centers, warehouse automation robots, electric vehicles, and humanoids. George runs marketing as a one-man team inside a 120-person organization — no department, no agency, just him, Claude, and a relentless inquisitiveness. He shares how he's building brand awareness for a product category that didn't exist five years ago, how he's tracking LLM rankings as a core marketing KPI, and why being the sole marketer in a deep tech company is one of the most interesting jobs in B2B.

Topics Discussed:

• Marketing a new product category where customers don't yet know they need your product

• Running B2B marketing solo inside a 120-person deep tech company

• Using AI (specifically Claude) to operate at B2C speed as a one-man marketing team

• Building LLM visibility as a measurable, managed marketing channel

• Growing a corporate LinkedIn from 11,000 to 15,000 followers in a year for a B2B hardware company

• Why the Cambridge tech ecosystem deserves more attention from marketers

• The 50/50 traffic split between word-of-mouth/network and owned marketing channels

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Build LLM Rankings Into Your Measurement Stack Now: George monitors Nyobolt's position in AI-generated search results across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity every week using a structured prompt — "which are the top 10 companies in the world that produce this product" — and tracks their placement. Nyobolt consistently ranks #1-3. The mechanism: press releases generate news coverage, LLMs ingest that coverage, and the company surfaces in responses. This isn't accidental — it's a deliberate content and PR strategy built around how LLMs retrieve and rank companies. For any B2B marketer still treating LLM visibility as a vague future concern, George's playbook is a concrete starting point.

• When You're Marketing a New Category, Education IS the Pipeline: Nyobolt spent a year and a half in conversations with a major customer who kept saying they didn't need the product. Three weeks ago, that same customer came back looking to place an order with seven zeros. The lesson: in new product categories, the sales cycle is really an education cycle. George's job isn't just generating MQLs — it's systematically closing the gap between "we don't understand why we need this" and "we need as much as you can give us." Every press release, LinkedIn post, and event appearance is building the knowledge base that makes that conversion eventually inevitable.

• Operate at B2C Cadence Inside a B2B Company: George describes deliberately moving at a pace that his peers in B2B hardware would consider unusual — constant LinkedIn output, daily content, aggressive event presence. His logic: B2B buyers have to understand they need your product before they'll buy it, and that understanding only comes from sustained exposure. If you go quiet, you lose the education momentum. In 2025 alone, he's driven 24-25 MQL form submissions — significant volume for a hardware company selling units that cost thousands of dollars and take two years to close.

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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 Rebekah Bastian, CMO at mpathic, a company working with foundational AI model builders and enterprise AI application developers to prevent harmful or unwanted model behaviors. Rebekah's path to CMO came through product leadership — including 15 years at Zillow from the founding team — before taking on her first official marketing title at a 3D printing hardware company and then joining mpathic about seven months ago. At a company where the founding team is composed of psychologists, clinicians, and machine learning researchers producing genuinely novel work, her marketing challenge is precise: no deal should ever be lost because a qualified buyer hadn't heard of them yet.

Topics Discussed:

• Why long-cycle enterprise deals with foundational model companies require awareness-first marketing rather than direct conversion

• How the mPACT benchmark series works — testing leading foundational models across suicide-related conversations, eating disorder conversations, and misinformation susceptibility

• Why clinically-trained human annotators working through long-form, multi-turn conversations produce fundamentally different benchmark results than automated AI-driven evaluation

• The Zillow playbook: building a dominant brand for years without an ad budget by becoming the most cited data source in every housing news story — and why that same approach is harder to execute now

• Running a three-person marketing team by treating subject-matter experts across the company as the editorial engine

• A strict internal rule for AI in content production: one stage only per piece — and why violating that rule is exactly where AI slop comes from

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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 Maggie Pote, Head of Marketing and Community at Sandstone, an AI platform built to connect in-house legal teams with the broader business. Sandstone launched publicly in January 2026, and Maggie has spent the first five months building a brand in one of the most crowded, VC-saturated spaces in tech — legal AI. Rather than compete on features, she's taken a fundamentally different bet: build a brand the in-house counsel community actually wants to be part of.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Maggie structured Sandstone's entire marketing motion around serving the community rather than selling the product

• How out-of-home advertising (billboards, transit, airports) drove organic brand affinity in the first five months post-launch

• The three-bucket marketing framework: performance marketing, community, and content

• Why monthly continuing legal education webinars — completely product-agnostic — became a core demand gen vehicle

• How Sandstone designs in-person events to break the awkward name-tag happy hour mold

• The case for going to market like a DTC brand even in B2B SaaS

• Why brand is the last defensible moat in a world where anyone can vibe-code a feature in a weekend

• Maggie's 2026 north star: building a brand the in-house community trusts, whether or not they ever become a customer

Lessons for B2B Marketers:

• Frame the community problem, not the product problem. Maggie's insight that in-house counsel is an isolating job — where colleagues don't necessarily want to be close friends with the general counsel — became the organizing principle for Sandstone's entire marketing strategy. When you understand the emotional texture of your buyer's daily experience, you can build a brand that fills a real gap. That's a fundamentally different starting point than leading with product capabilities.

• Make the content completely product-agnostic. Sandstone publishes three blog posts per week on how to run a better legal department — with no Sandstone pitch attached. The same logic applies to their monthly continuing legal education webinars, which help attorneys earn required CLE credits while demystifying AI. The bet is that being a genuine resource for the community creates trust that converts on a longer timeline than any MQL nurture sequence.

• Go to market like a DTC brand. Maggie explicitly frames her target audience as consumers first, B2B buyers second. Five months into launch, Sandstone was running out-of-home campaigns across airports, transit, and billboards — and getting unsolicited photos from customers and prospects who felt compelled to share. That kind of earned excitement doesn't come from a white paper. It comes from a brand that people feel ownership over.

• Design events around the attendee experience, not your brand. Sandstone's Chicago happy hour featured a rooftop venue and an architecture expert giving a talk on the city's buildings — because Chicago's architecture is genuinely interesting and gives people something to engage with beyond the standard networking awkwardness. The brand stays in the background. The experience stays in the foreground. Attendees bring friends because they want to, not because they were asked to.

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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 Brady Nagel, Head of Marketing at Pact Labs, an on-chain infrastructure platform connecting stablecoins to fintechs and legacy financial institutions across the globe. Operating in one of the most trust-sensitive categories in B2B tech — Web3 and tokenized finance — Brady has had to build a marketing playbook that makes abstract, unfamiliar infrastructure legible to a skeptical enterprise audience. With nearly $2 billion in loans facilitated on-chain and active partnerships with players like Tether/USDT and blockchain networks Aptos and Celo, Pact is competing on credibility as much as capability. Brady shares how he's approached narrative construction, social proof architecture, and multi-channel presence in a space where trust is the product.

Topics Discussed:

• Building credibility and trust in the Web3 and on-chain finance space

• Using on-chain transparency as a marketing and trust asset

• Crafting a clear narrative when your company sits at the intersection of multiple emerging categories

• The "empowerer vs. savior" positioning distinction and why it matters

• How thought leadership on X/Twitter functions as a top-of-funnel trust signal for enterprise buyers

• Why narrative consistency across channels is a prerequisite for enterprise sales

• Targeting emerging markets — Africa and Latin America — where on-chain finance adoption is highest

Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:

• Use Public Data as a Trust Asset, Not Just a Metric: In crypto, everything on-chain is publicly verifiable. Brady's team leans into this directly — pointing prospective clients to third-party data aggregation sites where Pact's loan volume is visible in real time. For B2B marketers operating in trust-deficit categories, this is a replicable framework: identify the third-party proof sources your buyers already consult and make it frictionless for them to find your numbers there, before the sales conversation even starts.

• Narrative Clarity is a Prerequisite for Channel Efficiency: Brady frames narrative construction not as a brand exercise but as a revenue lever. When Pact's message was still being refined, every conference appearance, press mention, and podcast was an undersell. Once the narrative locked — "we're the on-chain plumbers retrofitting legacy finance" — the same outbound activities started compounding. The insight: if you can't walk into a podcast or a press moment with a single clear line of who you are, you're leaving those distribution moments on the table.

• Position Around Empowerment, Not Rescue: Brady describes a deliberate positioning choice — Pact is the "empowerer," not the savior. The distinction isn't semantic. Fintechs and banks aren't coming to Pact because they're broken; they're coming because they want to stay relevant as tokenized finance accelerates. Framing the category conversation around "don't get left behind" rather than "you need fixing" changes the buyer's posture entirely — it's a choice, not a concession.

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