What I’d love to do next.
As I’ve started to tell a few people about my hope to find a new role, I’ve realized I don’t have a great answer for what that would look like. So, writing a few thoughts down here.
1. Marketing for Niche SaaS
I love smaller teams and markets and I have a skill set that does really well in those constraints. Even better would be a legacy platform that does great stuff but hasn’t had much marketing leadership for a while and is looking to grow. Some combination of the following would be even more awesome:
- ~50 employees (or fewer)
- Niche martech or CRM / CDP
- Enterprise would be even more awesome
A few examples might be:
- https://amptab.com/
- https://www.attentive.com/
- https://buildshop.com/
- https://moonclerk.com/
- https://www.bayou.energy/
2. Sales Supporting Role
My career and performance in a sales-driven organization has changed for the better over the last 3-5 years as I’ve shifted my mindset from marketing as a separate thing toward marketing that supports the sales team. Less marketing driven by my needs, more driven by sales needs as they work to close deals. I’d love to continue that thread through a more specialized role at a larger company like:
- Field Marketing
- Product Marketing
- Sales Enablement
- Revenue Marketing
3. Developer Marketing
I’ve never worked as a formal developer in a dev team, but I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and really enjoy it. I’d love to lean into that skillset more by being a marketer for an API-based SaaS platform where I can tell stories that get developers excited about the possibilities of building on a set of endpoints like Twilio, Beefree, Merge, etc.. These titles seem to be things like:
- Developer Relations
- Developer Marketing
- Technical Product Marketing
4. Marketing Tools Maker
This may be a less specific thing and harder to find, but it would be super fun if I could find it. The gist is the growing trend of SaaS companies pulling out little pieces of their tech as free tools that can be used as marketing. For example, Adobe is doing a lot of this with free PDF / image related tools that rank well but also pave a really clean path between that entry point and a new user. It’s also something I’ve seen a lot of success with for SendView. For example, companies like:
- Adobe (see “merge PDFs online“)
- Customer.io (see “placeholder image generator“)
- ActiveCampaign (see “subject line generator“)
That’s where my head is at right now, but part of the fun is just exploring what is out there that would allow me to specialize in something at a level I haven’t been able to do before.