Positive Human

I help founders and early marketing teams to get their signups and revenue moving again in two main ways: 

- Growth Punk – a 3 month sprint where I get hands on making lots of high impact growth projects happen around opportunities they haven't found or had time to prioritize. 

👨‍🎤 Typical results: increased revenue through new lifecycle sequences, better conversion from acquisition efforts, improved profitability in affiliate programs, increased retention and expansion revenue rates, increased activation

- Lifecycle Sprints – in 4 weeks I stand up a series of broadcast emails to improve your visibility with your audience and get a prioritized list of your core lifecycle sequences such as onboarding, winbacks, upgrades and expansion sequences written. 

👨‍🎤 Typical results: increase conversion from free to paid, more days above baseline revenue, increased retention, better activation rates

Some clients I've worked with: Arrows, Castos, Plannit and Slides with Friends.

Founder

TinySeed

Helped dozens of TinySeed's portfolio companies to find unlocks for their next growth curve in 1:1 mentoring sessions.

Growth + Marketing Mentor

Podia

Led various lifecycle, growth, and monetization projects at a profitable, fast-moving SaaS company, stepping into marketing leadership during a critical period of growth.

- Rebuilt Podia’s growth strategy after a restructure, returning core signups and plan revenue to growth within 45 days
- Took over as most senior marketer and led GTM efforts through major pricing and plan changes that reignited net revenue growth
- Delivered >$100K in recovered MRR via lifecycle programs including winbacks, upgrades, and annual plan conversions
- Restructured affiliate program, 2xed all time sales revenue and increasing yearly profit by over $100K within 6 months
- Increased paid signups with a new email strategy lifting daily revenue by 9% on send days
- Built and launched Podia’s 1:1 sales model, contributing significant expansion revenue from campaigns like Podia Email and Black Friday
- Created Podia’s first org-wide marketing dashboard, unlocking strategic visibility into revenue, attribution, and channel performance
- Managed key product launches (Podia Email, Podia Blogging, new free trial) and ran betas, positioning, and GTM planning

Growth

Powered by Search

Working with clients between $5M ARR and $75M ARR and delivering strategic demand gen programs for companies like Basecamp, OpenPhone, AdvisorEngine, Rally, Reltio and MyCase

And building predictable and high quality pipeline for one of the world's leading SaaS marketing agencies: 

- Developed and built a podcast strategy that has generated more than 10x ROI
- Increased brand awareness leading to high quality pipeline – 12.94% increase in direct traffic
- Generated millions in pipeline with 44.87% increase in SQLs over a 12 month period

Head of Growth

doopoll

Learned how to be a marketer on hard mode: 

– Build product led go to market strategy
– Grew ﻿organic conversions by 1330% in 12 months 
– Scaled no-touch revenue 17% in six month period

Growth 

Co Founder

Small Joys

Creative Director

Plastik Content

Customer publishing of community based online magazines for clients in the higher education, business services and medical industries.

Publisher

Journal of Plastik

Built Journal of Plastik brand and then ushered it into a more flexible brand under the name of Plastik Magazine (http://plastik.me).

Founding Editor

Monocle

Intern

CM International

Mostly carrying out translation of documents between French and English as well as telephone translation between French and German.

Raising the dead (revenue chart)

I've been a founder. I've been a head of growth. I've worked at Powered by Search (one of the best known SaaS marketing agencies). I've worked at Podia – a mostly bootstrapped startup.

And here's what I've learned:

Between $1-10M ARR SaaS companies often see plateaus and lose the energy from their growth/marketing efforts.

So at Positive Human, I work hands on with founders and marketing teams at SaaS companies to get their growth moving again. I don't just tell people what to do – I get in there and do it for them, so that revenue starts moving fast.

Here's some results I've driven recently:

* Drove $50K in 30 days with a new lifecycle sequence
* 2xed all time revenue from an affiliate program within 6 months
* Closed 20% of all BFCM sales volume with a 1:1 outreach campaign
* Generated $10K with a simple change to a signup flow
* Added additional $10.7K MRR with an improved onboarding flow

Marc Thomas

turns out you can personalize chatgpt now or something?

Some people don’t like competitor comparison content. But...


... when they say this, it usually means that they don’t like unfair comparison content that takes potshots at their competitor

Reframe this though: 

Competitor comparison content helps your ideal buyer to place you in relation to your competitor

No two companies are the same, and in a worst-case theoretical scenario where you are the exact same company as your competitor, being helpful to your ideal buyer by making that comparison clear will likely tip you ahead of your competitor in their buying choice

Good competitor content follows the HDFO framework (which I gave a very unmemorable acronym to!): 

1. Helpful: Don't freak out that they'll buy the competitor. Help them make a choice

2. Deep: Don't just do a feature table with all checkmarks for you and X's for them. Buyers immediately lose trust when you do that

3. Fair: Don't neg competitors or be disingenuous. People will pick up on it with their Spidey sense

4. Opinionated: Tell people what you genuinely think. If you're better for this kind of person and the competitor is better for that kind of person, say so. It will buy you more customers in the long run

I’ve written competitor comparison content for dozens of SaaS companies and followed this framework

One of the hardest things to do is to structure a comparison page effectively.

Here is how I think about it (top to bottom):

– Hero section: Summarize the core argument you're about to make. State the main differences between your products. Give them a CTA

– Key differences: Summarize them in a simple box or truncated table showing only the features that are actually different, not every feature you have.

– Long-form sections: Put across arguments about why each product does things differently and how. Not just how, but why. Tell them why you've made the feature choices you have and how that affects them.

– Tell them who it's for: Finish by describing the ideal buyer for your product.

Finally, some general advice about talking about competitors: 

Don't be afraid to lose. If you win every point, everyone knows you're being disingenuous. Say "We're more expensive" or "They have a more generous free plan" and explain why

Be confident about who you provide value to

You should have a competitor comparison page for the most common competitors that come up in buying choices

You should also have competitor comparison content for solutions that are not software, such as using a spreadsheet, hiring additional people or doing nothing

But if you must prioritise, prioritise your biggest competitors – not only do they have search traffic but they are likely to be the ones that are most front-of-mind for your ideal buyer

About 6 months ago, I did a call with Anthony Pierri

We had been bumping into eachother for months on LinkedIn and in various other work contexts, I'd just finished working with one of Fletch's clients 

But we hadn't ever met so we got onto a call

On that call, Anthony gave me some advice that changed how I see my business:

"You might be really good at what you do but I have no idea what to recommend you for." (paraphrasing) 

Essentially, it doesn't matter how skillful you are, if you don't have a clear 'job' for people to refer you for, getting clients is always going to feel like a struggle 

Wild that he asked me this follow up because it has created an incredible amount of value for me: 

"What do you do for clients that is most effective for them?" 

I thought about it for like 2 seconds before I answered Lifecycle. 

So over the past 6 months, I've been going hard on building my lifecycle sprint product and have helped 9 companies fix their email and lifecycle marketing 

And it is very satisfying for me to now be listed on FletchPMM's Trusted Partner page for that productized service. It's super simple: 

Week 1: Get in Front of Your Buyers
I start by getting you in front of your ideal buyers fast and often.

Based on a one hour interview with you, I'll write and schedule a series of strategic broadcast emails designed to build trust and keep your brand top-of-mind. These aren't just newsletters listing out updates – they’re problem focused, helpful emails. 

Clients typically see above average growth on send days vs non-send days once these are running.
‍
Weeks 2-4: Plug Your Biggest Leaks

Next, I identify and fix your biggest lifecycle gaps. 

Whether it's a welcome sequence that isn't converting, a lack of an annual upgrade path, or missed expansion revenue opportunities, I focus on the holes that are costing you the most money. 

I don't try to fix everything, just plug the most critical leaks to make a significant impact on your revenue.
‍
Deliverables & Pricing
• 27 broadcast emails written and scheduled
• 3 key lifecycle sequences written and uploaded to your ESP
• Implementation in your existing tools—no new platforms required
• 4-week turnaround from start to finish

Costs
Under $1M ARR -> $7,500 (One-time fee)
Over $1M ARR -> $10,000 (One-time fee)

LMK if that sounds like you

Super grateful for that simple getting to know you call and for Anthony's insight. 

P.S. This is your prompt to meet new people just for the enjoyment of meeting people. Who knows what might happen!?

One thing I loved about how we ran marketing at Podia

And I don't know whether it was Len Markidan (Lenny) or Benyamin Elias (Benny) that drove this so hard 

We wanted to make an outsized impact in an industry full of VC money and so the question that we always asked ourself was:

How can every new marketing activity benefit from or add value to something else that we were already doing? 

That simple heuristic changed how I think about marketing and, in retrospect, it seems just so obvious 

Here's some examples: 

– We wanted to send more email. But we also wanted to get more referrals. So we included every user's unique referral link at the bottom of every email. When I left in April of this year, I had never seen a higher ROI program than the refer-a-friend program (the numbers honestly sound fake, but they're real)

– Before I arrived, the team launched a program called The Year of Fellowships. It was effectively an exercise product marketing where every month we'd run a different campaign that asked users to do a task (fill out a form, create a download, submit an idea for xyz). Whenever we launched a significant new feature, we included the year of fellowships as part of our launch plan. It multiplied the value of each month and each new launch

- We had great customer advocates at Podia. When we were thinking of launching an 'influencer' program, rather than going to big, well known accounts, we found people with undervalued niche audiences in our existing user base and asked them to create content about their niche to inspire other people to build a business on Podia. These were 'influencers' no-one else could find because they weren't on any lists of influencers already – just our database 

There are lots of reasons Podia is successful – the quality of the product is the main one! – but I believe that this simple heuristic is one of the core reasons the marketing was so so good: 

How can every new marketing activity benefit from or add value to something else that we were already doing? 

Happy to have played a walk-on role over there

Just did my Friday update to one of my clients 

The goal here is to make sure that in all the busy-ness of the week, nothing goes unnoticed, no results go unshared and that everyone in the client's team has the info they need when they ask the question: 

"What does Marc do here?" 

I also share everything that I'm planning on working on the next week and a link to the roadmap document. 

Nothing super revolutionary here. Just good communication. 

But here's the thing I'm proud of about these updates: 

While I never guarantee a specific result for a client (because who can do this honestly and in all good conscience?!) 90% of the updates about this week contain actual business level results: improved revenue, more signups, converted free trials. 

I put in so much effort and headspace into client work 

It's so nice to be able to point to that work and go: hey, I did that result! 

Thankful to my clients for trusting me

Some things I’ve changed my mind about recently based on results from client projects:

Quiz funnels can absolutely crush even when selling B2B SaaS — I built one recently that converts 6% of quiz fill outs to paid accounts. That’s cold to paid within the hours.

I did not expect that. 

Running seasonal discount offers works. When I arrived at Podia I was convinced that BFCM discounts were a stupid idea for SaaS. By the time I left, I was convinced that *not doing one* was stupid. I have a client at the moment who I’ve run 4 discount offers for in the last 3 months. Each one has delivered a good amount of revenue

I did not expect that. 

Abandoned cart emails can work in SaaS too. One of the most common failure points in SaaS is not completing an account signup that gets started. And yet almost never do companies have a lifecycle flow setup for that. I recently created one that is quietly converting a bunch of abandoned signups. The flow is simple: send 3 days of reminder emails and then a ‘goodbye’ email before moving them out of the subscriber segment. 

I did not expect that. 

Some things I’m going to be testing next that I feel skeptical about but hope to be proven wrong on:

1. Personalizing landing pages using RightMessage  
2. Using Kit’s creator network to find niche influencers to sponsor 

Will let you know

If you're selling a B2B SaaS product, realize that the people that you sell to probably have budgetary cycles

And those budgets are almost never fully assigned by the point where they need to be

This means that your users *could* increase the amount they give you and might be happy to do that 

This is what I call a Money Moment 

If companies see that departments haven't spent their budgets, they don't assign them the same budget next year

So, at the end of every quarter, you should be sending an email sequence that tries to get people to upgrade on the basis that they need to spend that budget

Some ideas: 

1. Send 2-3 annual upgrade email offers in the 2 weeks before Christmas break 
2. Remind customers of the features they're missing out on from the next tier up 1 month out from the quarter end 
3. Send an offer to people already paying annually offering them a discount on next year's plan if they renew early or renew for a multi year plan 

Give them different ways to spend their budget towards the end of every quarter, and you will see your upgrade rate pay dividends

‘If you want the guide just comment below with the word…’ 🫠

Today, someone asked me whether I'd recommend sending a personalized video during onboarding

And that's when I told them about an experiment I ran at doopoll back in 2020

For about a month, we 50/50 split new freemium signups into one of two cohorts: 

1. People who got a generic onboarding campaign
2. People who got a 30s personalized welcome video from me (the founder!) 

The product was a live survey tool (kind of like Slido) 

Our business model was freemium and focused on getting people to a key conversion event (specifically, getting 10 responses to a survey they’ve created)

Ten responses was usually the point where a doopoll user saw the data they collected from their doopoll surveys as valuable

Once users got to their 10-response limit, they upgraded to see additional responses they'd received

When I included the Loom welcome video, we saw key results in both the number of users who hit the 10-response limit and in the number of users who converted to paid plans

More people sent more surveys, and did so at a faster rate, when I included the welcome Loom video: 

1. Of all users in the test group who received a generic onboarding email, 6.45% hit the 10-response limit within their first seven days, versus 10.71% of people who hit the 10-response limit after receiving a personal welcome video (a 4.26% increase)

2. Of users who received a generic onboarding email, 3.23% chose a paid plan within their first seven days of using doopoll, versus 5.36% of users who converted to paid accounts after receiving a personal video welcome along with their email (a 2.13% increase)

So should you start sending personalized onboarding videos? 

Probably not. 

This was in 2020, AI generated video wasn't commoditized – and getting a personalized welcome video was novel 

But triangulate this with data from a current client: 

Their best performing emails in the onboarding sequences ask a simple question: "Do you need to speak to someone about how you want to use our product?" 

I think what really matters is not the medium but the message: 

We're here to help and we're happy to do a call

Companies that treat people like humans will do so much better than those that see them as numbers in a funnel

Couple of productized service ideas that I had in the last couple of days that I wish someone would do: 

1. Feature launches – Have personally done dozens of feature launches and product launches. There are some special things about each one, but the majority of the work in launching a feature or a product is about planning and executing on a small number of tasks. Might not get someone to 100% but will get them to 80%. 

2. Lifecycle health – Lifecycle work depends on having a really strong concept of what's going on in the whole lifecycle. After doing lifecycle work for a while, you end up with a good number of sequences that intersect with each other. Refactoring and clarifying and building a strong, clear map of what's going on in the lifecycle is a big opportunity. 

3. Posthog dashboard setup – I love PostHog. It makes product analytics so much easier for people who are not product-focused 100% of the time (like in-house marketers!) But getting set up and getting our set of reliable dashboards is still a really, really big challenge. Imagine being able to offer somebody a single source of truth for their company, even if it's not 100% accurate in terms of attribution, etc. (a true chimera!) 

4. SaaS website jump start – There are so many common SaaS website problems that you see all the time if you work across multiple companies. Basic stuff, such as setting up core pages on a website to actually be performant. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time to get started or even to get to a place that's halfway good. A lot of this is simply knowing what needs to be on the page and then knowing how to say it. That could easily be productized. 

5. Analyst as a Service – This may exist to a certain degree. When I worked at Podia, one of the absolute best things that was in place was having an in-house analyst who was genuinely a joy to work with. (Shout out Shaheen Essabhoy). I wish that I could hire someone like Shaheen to do a single project for me where I tell them what I want from my data, and they help me build the query and the dashboard that I can look at and say: I'm pretty confident that's a good chart. 

Some people are going to disagree with this, and that's fine. 

But these are five ideas that you could get a good amount of money each month with very little reinventing of the wheel every time. 

If you do them, let me know – I come across all of these!

Just scheduled an email for 2026.



Considering my own mortality. 



Might just knock off for the weekend tbh.

graphical user interface, text, application, email

Something I said to a lifecycle client on a call today: 

When you start thinking about all the email sequences you need, you realize how many gaps there are in your sequences

The key thing is not to get paralyzed by choosing what to do, but just to start doing it 

You will never come up with the perfect roadmap and actually a lot of the time, clients hire me when they've overthought it and need to get moving

So instead, I said, just start chipping away at it 

Write an email or a sequence and just launch

You're going to get many opportunities to improve it 

But you can't improve what doesn't exist because you were too overwhelmed by the opportunity to create it 

And the great news is that every time you fill a gap around a Money Moment, you actually improve the performance of the whole lifecycle around it: work you've already done, work you're yet to do 

Just start

--- 

I run lifecycle sprints where in 4 weeks I find and write 3 key lifecycle sequences for your SaaS company and also line up 27 broadcast emails to make sure you're appearing in front of the right people at the right time. Fee is $7.5K/mo for companies under $1M ARR, or $10K/mo for companies over $1M ARR. 

If that sounds interesting, DM me or go to my website and book a call

Don't get stuck!

Maxim Poulsen

I Help Founders Build Efficient Go-To-Market Engines | Growth & Automation Nerd | Leading growth @getcontrast.io

Hi, welcome to my LinkedIn profile. 👋

I love everything related to Growth, Product, and Operations:
→ Automation
→ Analytics & tracking
→ Data science & engineering
→ Growth experimentations
→ Product-led growth

Do you work in Growth or Operations?
I'd love to have a virtual coffee.

I also love to play the piano.

Follow me for posts on productivity, growth, operations, data and more.

Get in touch 👉 maxim@getcontrast.io

Growth Manager

Studies show video is going to be the next big way companies will level up their marketing.

We are building a tool to help companies master this new channel.

Contrast is a full-stack video engagement platform, giving businesses video superpowers.

→ Create TV-quality live or recorded video
→ Clip, edit and repurpose your content
→ Host, measure and analyze in a Netflix-like experience

HubSpot Marketing Events just got a HUGE update.

Now you can use them to build this 👇

On Wednesday, Ryan Gunn (my favorite HubSpot expert) & I are going live to show you exactly how to build this dashboard in HubSpot.

But also:
— What are Marketing Events & where to find them
— Attributing event participation to your revenue
— Lead scoring using Marketing Event data
— Building hyper-personalized follow-ups
— ... and much, much more!

If you're running events (online or in-person) and you're not using Marketing Events, you need to see this.

Join us to see how to do all of this live.
(And of course ask all your questions)

Register here: https://lnkd.in/dYERAibv

GTM stuff @Contrast | #1 webinar platform for HubSpot | Growth & Automation Nerd

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