Marketing, Growth and Outbound Sales Advisor | Head of Demand Gen @ Storylane
Marketing has many colours to it! Should I start with Product Marketing? When does it make sense to invest in ads? What about social media - how should we build a presence there? I surely need to get on the LLM SEO bandwagon, right? Is influencer marketing right for me - how do I pick the right ones? Tons of questions. Many right answers. Few relevant. Fewer applicable. I have been through these questions over and over again in my career — at the start of every year, every quarter and every new budget allocation exercise. And each one of those trials brought in new learnings and curiosity, that lead to both failures and successes. At this point, I have decent know-how on what brand of marketing could make sense for you, given the phase of your startup's journey and I'd love to help you figure it out. And if needed, help you build it from scratch or bring a proper shape to it (if it already exists).
As the head of demand generation at Storylane, I manage a yearly marketing budget of $1M+ across Paid Ads, Content + SEO, Product Marketing and Outbound. And given that I've been a part of multiple 0 - 1 and 1 - 10 journeys, I'd love to be a sounding board to you on the channels that'd make sense at the current stage of your company, how little or how much you should start your marketing with and how to know what's working.
I look at GTM strategies as more of that opening awareness initiative for a new product/ feature than an acquisition initiative. It's your final and the best chance to check for the stickiness of your product's messaging and positioning, and get feedback. You do that well and acquisition/ adoption will follow. As someone designing GTM strategies since my early product marketing days, this is one of my strongest areas that I can help you with.
If you've a PLG product (or you're thinking about going PLG), I'd love to help you unlock value from your existing users and create growth loops for new signups. At Storylane, we've seen 15%+ free to paid conversion rate and 30%+ team upgrade rate. This would of course require tweaking systems around product, pricing, lifecycle and payments.
Storylane works with 15+ influencers who generate 150k+ impressions/ month at a CPM of $70 (much cheaper than ads actually!). Irrespective of how early you are, if you've found PMF with customers raving about your product, then influencer marketing should be one of your first marketing channels. I can brainstorm with you to help you design your IIP (Ideal Influencer Profile) and set up the program with checks and balances for each step (scouting, fitment, funnel, content, reporting).
While I've experience with both Google and LinkedIn ads, my strength lies in the latter. My strategy is usually centered around thought leadership and retargeting ads, and I have a good grasp of all areas of LinkedIn ads right from campaign setup, budgeting, creatives to reporting, audience building, and everything in between.
During my time as a product marketer, I've launched multiple products across different industries, across different tiers. While you need a different strategy (more like channels) for each tier, the measuring criteria should remain the same. I've talked more about it in an article linked to my profile (added at the bottom of the page).
Have been a product marketer most of my working life and have gained deep expertise in various disciplines under product marketing. I've talked more about it in an article linked to my profile (added at the bottom of the page).
While I won't say I've a lot figured out when it comes to LLM SEO, we've seen promising results with a few things we've been trying. In the last few months, I've evaluated 7-8 LLM SEO tools and have a fair bit of an idea on the directions to take. And even without any tool, during this time, have seen our brand visibility soar to 85%+ so very much up for discussing things that could work for you.
Today if you've a niche, low-lift product and want to build a brand fuelled by word of mouth and product innovation, then social media is the best place to do that. While there have been companies with brand as their moat, I still feel it's an underutilized channel and not many early stage companies are paying attention to it. If you want to talk about building a strong brand on social media, I can help!
I've been managing and growing G2 accounts for the companies I've worked at, since a few years now. In fact, at Storylane, we've scaled our G2 profile to 1k+ reviews with a 4.8 rating in just 3+ years. This involves, - Building the right buyer intent audience sets for LinkedIn ads targeting and running outbound campaigns - Being strategic about who to invite and at what stage of their customer journey, to build the brand advocacy here - Running referral programs for a parallel revenue channel
Been using both Ahrefs & Semrush since my very early career days and very well versed in both tools. In fact, in 2024, I stumbled across a SEO growth initiative marrying interactive demos (Storylane) with how-to articles, we called demo-led SEO (feel free to google). As a result, in 9 months, we were able to grow our website traffic by 10X from 25k/ month to 250k/ month.
I use ChatGPT a lot today - almost like every day, in my day-to-day work as well as personal life. It acts mostly as my brainstorming buddy and a sounding board for giving shape to my thoughts or actions when I'm working on some initiatives, trying to create email copies/ Linkedin posts as well as just learning about something. Today, it has become my go-to source for finding new information.
Courtesy of my company Claude account, I use it for deeper research and analysis and have built a couple of projects to help me and my team members with small tasks. For example, an FAQs generator to help my content writer create FAQs for blogs for LLM SEO, and a sentiment analysis for my SDR to get info on some companies or industries while doing her outbound.
My favorite tool these days for any kind of list building or data enrichment. As the person responsible for both outbound and ads, I frequently find myself building audience lists, and Clay has been amazing for that. It lets you be as creative as possible, and it's really easy to use.
I've been a very active Hubspot user since a few years now and very comfortable managing every aspect of it. Majority of my time inside Hubspot is spent on just understanding data, creating attribution reports, building lists, designing workflows and enabling my teams with the right data visibility.
I'm well versed with LinkedIn ads, managing an annual budget of over $700k for my company. My strategy is usually centered around thought leadership and retargeting ads, and I have a good grasp of all areas of LinkedIn ads right from campaign setup, budgeting, creatives to reporting, audience building, and everything in between.
My go-to tool for any kind of lookalike list building today. I think the data quality is unmatched and given I often use different reference points to build outreach lists for outbound, Ocean has been instrumental with both contact and company list building.
Although I started my career in B2C, after spending ~8 years in B2B SaaS, today I'm more comfortable with B2B SaaS. Although my working years have been spent marketing and selling marketing automation, HrTech and sales software, I'm very comfortable with any product category/ persona in B2B SaaS.
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Joined Storylane early (~$700K ARR) and helped scale it to $10M+ ARR by Q3 ’25. With 95%+ inbound driven revenue, marketing was at the center of that scale. I started in Product Marketing, now lead Demand Gen + Outbound while owning key parts of Growth, Partnerships, and Ops.
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Advising Askable on all things Marketing and Outbound.
Joined in the 0-1 stage of the company as the 18th employee and the 2nd marketing hire. Lead Product Marketing and also important aspects of Product Growth and Sales Enablement to take the company to north of $5M and raise $11M in its Series A funding round. Left the company soon after to join Storylane and got to know of its recent acquisition by Netchex.
Only non-startup role of my career and my first stint in both B2B SaaS as well as Product Marketing. The company was setting up its first product marketing function and I joined as the first product marketing manager, due to my content marketing background.