I specialize in building and scaling GTM functions that accelerate growth.

With over 15 years of experience spanning enterprise software and advisory work, I’ve helped companies—from startups to $800M+ ARR—operationalize their value, align cross-functional teams, and drive measurable outcomes across Sales, Sales Engineering, Marketing, Product and Customer Success.

At Alteryx, I led the Worldwide Customer Advisory organization, a 40-person global team responsible for driving revenue, market share, and strategic customer engagement across commercial and public sector accounts. This included oversight of solution architects, solution engineers, industry strategists, and the value engineering team I built from the ground up. 

I led the development of scalable tools and technologies to equip the field with value messaging and customer insights at every stage of the deal cycle—and paired that with enablement programs to drive global adoption and consistency. Together, my team served as trusted advisors to enterprise customers, helping them navigate digital transformation through advanced analytics and automation. Our work influenced over $800M in ARR and directly contributed to a 2–3x increase in average deal size and double-digit improvements in close rates.

I’ve since co-founded a consulting firm and partnered with over 25 growth-stage SaaS companies to sell outcomes. This includes developing value storytelling playbooks, refining executive messaging, training sales and customer success teams, and supporting the creation of scalable tools and business case frameworks. 

My core strength is building programs that are tightly aligned to the sales motion, work cross-functionally across go-to-market teams, and are designed to drive revenue impact.

🔹 GTM Strategy & Execution
🔹 Cross-Functional Team Alignment
🔹 Value Engineering & Sales Enablement
🔹 Customer Experience Management
🔹 Enterprise Advisory & Strategic Customer Engagement

When I am not working, you can find me exploring the world of the arts. For fun, I completed a floral artistry program and enjoy gathering the freshest blooms and making something beautiful. 

Growing up in Wisconsin, then moving to Florida, my happy place became the sunshine and the beach! I also learned to ski in the beautiful Tetons and am can now claim the title of an intermediate skier. 

I look forward to connecting with you!

April Morley

Max Elster

I’m Max, CEO and co-founder of Minoa—the AI Value Intelligence platform built for enterprise go-to-market teams.

The idea for Minoa emerged from a clear realization: everyone talks about "selling value," but no one had built a system to actually do it at scale. Value was trapped in custom spreadsheets, static decks, and disconnected tools. Teams couldn't consistently show the ROI they promised. 

We decided to change that.

Today, thousands of AEs, SEs, and CSMs at companies like Snowflake, Vanta, Pendo, Cognite, and Personio use Minoa daily to discover, quantify, and deliver clear business outcomes from first pitch to renewal.

Minoa is becoming the central engine for customer value, helping sellers and customers align seamlessly around what matters most: business impact.

If you want to chat about AI and GTM, feel free to reach out.

Co-Founder

Minoa is a collaborative value management platform helping SaaS teams sell value across the whole customer lifecycle. Delivering a better buying experience and elevating every sales rep's performance. 

Built for B2B SaaS companies by B2B SaaS enthusiasts. Backed by 468 Capital, Mischief, AirAngels, Alumni Ventures, Fidi Ventures, Lenny Rachitsky, LiveRamp CTO, Front CEO, DocSend Founder, and many others.

3 years ago, I was a PM at a Swiss Series B company, unable to prove the value we were delivering to customers. So I co-founded Minoa with Richard Einhorn to solve that problem. Here's the story:
 
Richard and I both started companies right after college. He built a fintech AI research company and I co-founded a company using voice and speech-to-text for insurance agents (think Gong for insurance).
 
It worked out commercially, but other factors fell through. So I moved from Germany to Zurich to build 0-to-1 products for a Series B company with hundreds of thousands of users.
 
I became the person sitting between product, sales, solutions engineering, and what we now call value engineering.
 
I was building new products on top of the existing platform and trying to expand existing customers. But the same problems kept surfacing:
 
→ How to articulate the value of something new to existing customers
→ How to connect that to the value the core product already delivered
→ How to help customers see a credible expansion path
 
Every time I tried to find these answers, I'd end up in spreadsheets, relying on internal tribal knowledge, and having one-off conversations that never made it to the next deal.
 
That's when Richard and I started talking seriously about this problem.
 
We decided we needed to validate that the issue was bigger than just us. We talked to 70 pricing and sales leaders to understand what they were facing.
 
Our core thesis: Why does Uber have dynamic pricing based on demand, but B2B companies just... guess?
 
Every answer was essentially some version of, "We need to understand how much value we're delivering to customers before we can even define price."
 
Pricing wasn't the problem. It's that no one actually knows what value they deliver.
 
That's when we decided to start Minoa.
 
Our first slide in the investor deck for the pre-seed showed a massive gap between the customer's willingness to pay and the actual price offered.
 
You either lose revenue from undercharging or overcharging.
 
We initially set out to build infrastructure that makes value quantifiable so pricing could finally be rooted in something real.
 
But those 70 conversations revealed a pattern: only the top 5% of deals got value engineering support. The other 95% were left with spreadsheets and guesswork.
 
Sales couldn't quantify ROI. Champions couldn't defend business cases. CS had no way to prove value was realized.
 
We needed to democratize value engineering across every deal.
 
Today, companies like Vanta, Snowflake, Pendo.io, and Cognite use Minoa to quantify, sell, and prove customer value across the lifecycle. Thousands of sellers, solutions engineers, and CSMs use the platform. In 2025, we grew revenue 800%.
 
And we're just getting started.
 
I'll share what we're learning as we build it. Follow along.

CEO/cofounder @ Minoa, building the AI Value Engineer for software.

Hundreds of Snowflake sellers in a room in Portland.

Global sales kickoff. "Built to Win" on the screen.

And Minoa was right there with them.

Snowflake launched Minoa as their AI value intelligence solution - the system that helps their sellers quantify, communicate, and prove value and ROI across every deal and customer relationship.

That's a new category. And having a company like Snowflake help define it with us is a big deal.

But here's the part that got me.

Before the enablement sessions even started, sellers were already in the product. Using it on live deals. Building value stories. Quantifying ROI for customers.

No instructions needed. It was going viral inside the room.

Snowflake went all in - and their team made it happen. The leadership group that drove this didn't just buy a tool. They saw where the market was heading and decided to get there first. That kind of conviction is rare, and we don't take it for granted.

We've been saying for a while now that we're entering the outcome economy. That the companies who win will treat customer outcomes not as a slide, but as a system that travels across every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Snowflake clearly sees the same thing.

Huge shoutout to the team who made this a reality. Standing in that room watching it all unfold. That's a moment we won't forget.

We're just getting started.

We just launched the Minoa Store - tshirts, hats, even a leather jacket for the GTM community who want to rep the value selling movement. And we're celebrating with a classic: a giveaway!
 
Comment "Value" & you'll be entered to win:
• A premium cotton tee
• A fleece-lined sweater
• A relaxed-fit dad hat
• A ceramic "Your ROI Sucks" mug
• An Uncle Sam "Sell of Value" poster
• A real $1 bill (worst ROI ever)
 
This experiment is something I was super excited about... Seeing it come to life has been incredible.
 
Shoutout to Richard Einhorn for pushing this idea forward.
 
Winners announced via DM on Monday - Good luck!

January was a BIG month for Minoa. We launched MCP, brought on a senior engineer, and ran our best POCs yet. A few details:
 
1.) Our MCP is live
 
We've been building Minoa as a context layer for other agents for months, working directly with customers to make infrastructure built for scale across their workflows (sales, CS, product). Now we're making that capability available to everyone through MCP.
 
2.) We hired Tejas as our new Senior Engineer
 
Tejas was a senior engineer at Expedia, built his own company, and joined another YC company early on. He's exactly the kind of builder we want at Minoa. Having someone who's tech infra build for scale and early stage speed and velocity.
 
3.) We kicked off 5 structured POCs with public and large companies
 
With founder-led sales and GTM support, we've figured out what actually makes POCs work. We got clear on what to test, what success looks like, and how to run 14-day POCs that actually help prospects decide whether to buy Minoa.
 
This shortened our sales cycle and kept us focused on the actual problem they're solving.
 
--
 
The POC learning curve has been incredible in late December and early January. Now we're hiring our first group of sellers (more on that soon).

3 of the hardest lessons I had to learn building Minoa:
 
1. Moving to San Francisco doesn't bring instant success
 
Everyone talks about SF like there's something in the water. And yes, there's energy here that's hard to replicate.
 
But coming from Germany to the capital of technology, the adjustment was significant. The proximity helps, but it's not a shortcut.
 
It took me 6-12 months to acclimate, build the right network, and get a feel for how the city - and the startup ecosystem - operates. SF gives you access. What you do with that access is still on you.
 
2. Go-to-market velocity works like product velocity
 
In product, you test small ideas fast. You collect data points. You iterate.
I thought GTM was different. That you needed big strategic bets.
 
But in the early stages, you don't have enough data to make big bets. You don't know what your ICP actually cares about. You don't know which message lands. So you run small experiments and collect signals. Those small bets give you the data to identify where the bigger bet should be.
 
At $20M, $30M ARR, you have foundations to make strategic bets. In the earlier stages, you are still building the foundation.
 
3. Regular off-sites matter - even for in-person teams
 
This one felt counterintuitive. We're in the office together every day. Why do we need an off-site?
 
As I learned, when you're heads-down in the daily rhythm, you optimize for execution, not reflection. And off-sites create a different environment where everyone can zoom out on the company itself, rather than thinking sprint-to-sprint.
 
Our first two off-sites were chaotic and not particularly productive. But we iterated. The last one in Bend, Oregon, was a turning point for the team.
 
(We even cold-reached a former VP Product at Netflix who lived there. He came to our Airbnb and spent 45 minutes with the team. Sometimes just showing up in a city and asking is enough.)
 
--
 
This was the setup of our first office. As you can see, lots of design and interior inspiration for any other team here.

Companies using a business case before stage 2 of the sales funnel accelerate their sales cycle by up to 40-50%. Yet I still see teams save it for the close.
 
For a long time, the business case was treated as a closing tool. Something you pulled out late in the deal to help get it over the line.
 
But think about what actually happens when a business case shows up at stage 4 or 5.
 
Your champion already spent weeks trying to build internal momentum - without a coherent story, without numbers tied to outcomes, without anything that can travel across the org to the people who actually approve things.
 
By the time the business case lands, it's doing damage control rather than building conviction.
 
The sooner you get a champion familiar with the business case storyline and the narrative, the more bought in they become.
 
And the more invested they are, the quicker that story can travel internally as a way to measure the outcomes of what you're selling.
 
ROI matters early. Give your champion the tools to prove it.

AI and value engineers aren’t in competition. The AI unlocks tribal knowledge while the human turns it into a strategy that wins deals.
 
I talked to a sales leader recently who said that he didn't want his sellers taking an Amazon case study and handing it to a small business owner in Detroit. A restaurant owner doesn't care what Amazon did with your product. They care about someone similar to them.
 
That personalization is only possible when tribal knowledge becomes accessible. Right now, all the insight about why customers buy - which value they realized, what made a CFO commit, etc. - sits scattered across different people and systems, almost impossible to assemble at scale.
 
AI can and should convert that into something searchable and usable for every future deal. But someone has to own the strategy behind it.
 
The VE then becomes the orchestrator around customer outcome data. They're connecting product telemetry, CRM data, and conversational intelligence into a narrative that moves buying decisions.
 
The leaders measuring throughput on models shipped are building the case for their own outsourcing. The ones who become strategists around customer outcome data are already indispensable.

CFOs are now way more involved in buying decisions compared to a year ago. Because now we're in the outcome economy. And buying criteria finally moved into their domain of rational analysis.
 
10 years ago, the vendor with the most functionality won the deal. Vendors threw engineers at problems, buyers ran checklist comparisons, and CFOs stayed out of it. They delegated to technical teams because, "Does this have SSO?" isn't a CFO question.
 
Then, 5 years ago, UX/UI became the differentiator. Notion and Slack won because they were so easy to use. But "intuitive interface" still wasn't something a CFO could put on a spreadsheet. Still not their domain.
 
Now, since 2025, we've been in the outcome economy.
 
AI commoditized features. Every vendor can build fast and design well. So what separates winners from losers? Proof of outcomes. And CFO's love outcomes because they're quantifiable, comparable, and mathematical.
 
If 2 vendors both promise efficiency gains and one shows 30% time savings backed by usage data while the other shows a demo, the CFO knows exactly which one to pick.
 
This is the first era where the core buying criterion - can you prove the outcome? - actually requires CFO-level thinking. Comparing projected ROI across competing solutions. Evaluating risk-adjusted returns. Running the math on payback periods.
 
That's why they're in the room now.
 
The constraint shifted from "Can you build it?" to "Can you prove it?" And proving it is a finance problem, not an engineering problem.
 
If your sales motion still centers on feature demos and slick UX, you're speaking the wrong language to the person who controls the budget.
 
This is good news for vendors who deliver real outcomes. You finally have a direct line to the economic buyer. Prove the value, win the deal.

Most B2B companies have 1-2 Value Engineers on staff who support maybe 5% of deals. The other 95%? Sellers are on their own with spreadsheets and generic ROI claims. Here's how we built Minoa to fix that.
 
Step 1: Codify Your Value Framework
 
We map your use cases to the personas, industries, and specific outcomes you deliver. This becomes the foundation every person in the GTM team can build from.
 
Step 2: Pre-Sales
 
When a seller needs a business case, they don’t open a spreadsheet. They open Minoa.
 
Within minutes, they get:
→ A talk track tailored to the prospect
→ Financial models with metrics and benchmarks
→ Business case data that aligns with the industry and the persona the team is selling to
 
And the business case is collaborative. The seller co-builds it with their champion. The more the champion owns the numbers, the better it travels to their CFO.
 
Step 3: Post-Sales
 
When it's time for renewal or expansion, Minoa connects product usage back to the original business case. The CSM can show: "Here's the value you were promised. Here's what you actually realized."
 
The AI Value Engineer shapes the story and helps the seller present it effectively to different stakeholders. And it runs natively in our app or inside tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini via Minoa MCP.
 
--
 
What used to take hours now takes minutes.
What used to happen on 5% of deals now happens on 100%.
 
If that sounds like something you'd be curious about, send me a message.

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