Celebrating a Mutiny
Making future marketing more effective
By: Aileen Lee
In the summer of 2018, John Waldmann, CEO & Co-Founder of Homebase, sent me an email, “Interested in an intro to Jaleh? She was the Head of Marketing at Gusto. Very sharp.”
I am grateful for the intro and very glad Jaleh and I met a few days later in front of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, in the beehive of activity that many remember from in-person YC demo days. Jaleh and her Co-Founder Nikhil had a long line of folks who wanted to speak with them, as they had built exceptional reputations as former Gusto colleagues.
Jaleh shared her personal story as an immigrant, and as a former marketer at companies like VMware and Gusto. She joined VMware pre-public, where she helped launch their SMB freemium business and tailored the product, messaging, and education for that segment. At Gusto, she and the team were on the front lines of driving impressive product-led growth with no playbooks or software. She helped build a bespoke, dedicated full-stack team of engineering, data science, product management, marketing, design, and copywriting capabilities to achieve outstanding customer conversion results.
“I looked for software to help me accomplish my goals and nothing existed. So I left to build this company — we are building a software platform powered by data to help marketers achieve great results, without laborious manual personalization or a full-stack team,” she shared with me.
As a marketer earlier in my career, I could relate to the pain of wanting to test, learn, and iterate without dedicated resources. I had a desk drawer full of treats and small gifts to give my friends in engineering and creative roles as a thank you for helping me out with work on any marketing things we wanted to try or change — work they had to squeeze in between other stuff.
She continued… “this is the other half of the market after Facebook and Google. They drive lots of leads to the doorstep, but there is no software platform to help take unqualified leads and improve conversion all the way down the funnel. That is at least half the battle, unaddressed.” Wow. At the time, Facebook and Google were generating $55Bn and $116Bn in ad revenue, respectively. There was, and is, a huge unmet need taking the handoff from the mass tonnage of top of funnel (aka ToFu) to taking customers through a personalized journey and closing them. If we could help make it happen with modern data-driven, learning-loop SaaS, sign us up!
We quickly did references with potential customers and folks who had worked with Jaleh and Nikhil before.
One of Jaleh’s references was Bogomil Balkansky who had been Jaleh’s boss at VMware and then moved to be a VP at Google Cloud. He shared, “she is one of those exceptional people you rarely come across in your career. An exceptionally smart mixture of being very analytical and data-driven, with great creativity and a talent for thinking about and solving problems.”
Flash forward to today. Mutiny has shared with the world what they have been building for the past few years, largely under the radar. Mutiny’s platform automates all product and engineering work for marketers — enabling companies like Carta, Segment, Brex, and Notion to grow and learn what works without needing a dedicated growth team.
The Mutiny platform offers AI-driven playbooks that customers can easily deploy in a no-code way, across any channel. Marketers see value “out of the gate” — and the value of Mutiny grows over time as the software learns from feedback data coming from each customer’s results. It truly is a magical user experience.
And — in not so much of a coincidence — we are thrilled to welcome Bogomil and his colleagues at Sequoia (who led our recent series A) to team Mutiny. And, we welcome companies who are looking to rapidly test, learn and improve on their conversion funnel to come check us out. You can even see what your personalized website would look with a free demo through the website.
There is a big opportunity for marketing teams around the globe to improve conversion rates at all stages of the funnel, using data and no-code software instead of custom code. That’s the mission we’re on at Mutiny, and we hope you’ll check us out.
PS Mutiny is also hiring across the board. Check out our open reqs for GTM, engineering, talent, and more here!
