How I became an unintentional Product Marketer
A glimpse into an unconventional path
A year and half ago I was hired on by an AdTech company to take their self service email product to market. My job was to grow from 100 customers to thousands; from sub $1K revenue to millions. I thought I was coming on board to be the domain expert; to be the face of the product to sales and help guide the product based on market needs. I didn’t know it at the time but within a month our Product Marketer would leave and I would be the defacto Product Marketer. What was clear was that our team needed help and our product needed to scale.
The first 8 months after our product launch was a whirlwind. Within our first month of launch a core team of us decided to reprice our product. It was a necessary step to gain traction. By our second month we started to gain momentum, and to accelerate growth, I created competitive cards that laid out the landscape. By the end of our first quarter we had enough feedback to refine our sales pitch and positioning; and became especially curious about testing. We launched (and tested) free trials and discovered that we had over an 80% graduation rate to paid plans. Around our forth month customers slowly started to churn, and digging into the data we identified a single cohort of users causing 90% of this churn. Throughout the process we used different mediums to test our marketing; (TL;DR: Appcues and Emails were especially effective and media buys were not). Through this process we learned that emails from certain names elicited better responses. We A/B tested email sent from my name vs those sent from my co-workers Brendan’s. It was a year process of gathering feedback non-stop, generating ideas, and iterating.
Fast forward to over a year later and I can say that our email marketing product has been launched and scaled to over 16K customers. Going into this process I wasn’t clear on exactly what a Product Marketer role entailed. Since then I’ve read Product Marketing job descriptions, talked to Product Marketers, read blog articles on Product Marketing, and gone on to launch another product. Although I unintentionally became a Product Marketer, I now feel a part of an elite group of people who are uniquely skilled with soft skills, curiosity, passion, and creativity.
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