Software Engineer turned Founder. I help founders to ship SaaS products faster.

With experience leading engineering teams at multiple early-stage startups, I’ve seen firsthand what it takes to build and scale successful products.

At 19, my entrepreneurial journey began by selling pre-built sales funnels for digital agencies, where I quickly learned the importance of customization in business. Since then, I’ve experimented with various startup ideas, learning valuable lessons at every stage.

I launched Cold Pitch, a tool that personalizes cold emails 9,000% faster than an SDR. My latest product, Commentify, automates LinkedIn comments, turning engagement into conversions.

Through these experiences, I’ve learned that building a profitable business requires access to distribution or capital.

💬 If you’re a founder looking to validate your SaaS idea or launch your MVP faster, let’s work together to get your product to market quickly and efficiently.

Mithun Kumar

Madhav Bhandari

Storylane

My priorities:
1. Create, capture and convert demand using organic search, brand, events, social and micro-communities.
2. Run day-to-day marketing operations
3. Find new growth initiatives and scale them
4. Find marketing team gaps and fill them

On the journey to hit $10M ARR in the next couple of quarters.

Director of Marketing

Early Stage Marketing

I help SaaS companies drive demand to grow from $5M to $15M ARR.

Current and former clients include Hubstaff, Close (YC), Bonsai (YC), Writesonic (YC), Weflow, Continu, TestBox, ProProfs, InsightlyAI, Timeero, ViralTag, Qualaroo and more.

Fractional Demand Gen

Weflow

Helped them grow from pre-revenue stage to their first set of customers.

- Owned the marketing funnel end-to-end, from awareness stage to install/demo
- Experimented with positioning, value propositions, buyer personas etc. to consistently reach our audience
- Crafted compelling, high quality content for our various channels— social media, email and newsletter, gated PDFs, SEO, product launches
- Built a revenue-driven content strategy, content production process and hired a team of freelance writers to build capacity (0 to 5000 visitors/mo in 6 months)
- Optimized website and executed changes to improve conversion rates and user engagement

Founding Marketer

Bonsai (YC W16)

I drove Bonsai's growth by implementing a "less is more" strategy, developed a high-performing marketing team and scalable systems. I handled decisions on expanding our marketing funnel, managing budgets, allocating channel investment, and building execution capacity to drive this growth.

Some of my work that helped 3x our revenue:
1. Scaled our SEO & content strategy
2. Grew the affiliate program
3. Managed our ads strategy & budget (with an agency)
4. Built our marketing team
5. Owned our lifecycle marketing projects

Head Of Marketing

Close

I was the first product marketing hire at Close and worked on several projects that helped us break into 8 figure ARR.

Some of those projects were:
- Led various launches like new features, rolling out our rebrand (Close.io to Close.com) and rolling out new pricing structure (introduce our lowest tier plan + change existing pricing). 
- Improved our new trial email onboarding to increase conversions
- Built our competitor comparison pages
- Launched our partner program
- Ran tests to expand Close to new verticals & international markets

I reported directly to the CEO (Steli Efti).

Senior Marketing Manager

Hubstaff

As Hubstaff's first marketing hire, my job was to test channels, shape our early stage growth strategy and grow our revenue.

Here are some projects that helped us achieve incredible revenue growth:
- Testing 84 marketing tactics across content marketing, SEO, partnerships, social media, email marketing to find our foundational marketing channels
- Developed our foundational marketing channels, primarily SEO, content and partnerships
- Wrote some of our highest converting articles & industry-leading reports (covered by Forbes, CNBC & Entrepreneur)
- Built and managed our content & SEO strategy
- Built scalable SEO processes based on team's performance on individual input & output metrics
- Recruited and managed a team of freelance writers, contractors and content marketers
- Created quarterly/annual marketing plans for SEO, content and partnerships
- Responsible for our team's marketing R&D budget to find our next big growth channel (led projects like building a talent marketplace to get leads, testing outbound sales, new verticals)
- Led vertical expansion projects to expand Hubstaff into a new category (field service companies)

These initiatives helped:
- Contribute 10-15% of our revenue through integration partnerships
- Contribute 60% revenue from SEO
- Grow Hubstaff's revenue from $200k to $5 million+ ARR in 4 years!

Hubstaff has now grown into the world's leading time tracking software with annual revenue of over $20 million.

Marketing Manager

ClinchPad

As a part of the founding team, I handled all customer-facing channels - marketing, sales & support. My work:
- Get early traction with quick marketing experiments, software partnerships & sales
- Plan & execute our content marketing strategy to generate MQLs
- Do product demos to MQLs
- Own customer support & refine product roadmap based on feedback

Grew our annual revenue from $0 to $100k ARR in 1 year.

Growth Lead

I'm a B2B technology marketer with 10+ years experience. I've helped many B2B tech companies drive millions in traffic, signups and ARR.

Some results:
- As Hubstaff's first marketer, grew revenue from $200K to $5M ARR (now $15M) in 4 years.
- As Bonsai's Head of Marketing, tripled ARR in 2 years.
- As Close.io's marketer, broke through revenue plateau.

Here's a snapshot of my background:

1.  B2B experience: 10+ years in B2B SaaS & working 100% remotely.

2.  Proven Track Record: Grew ARR for 9 companies, including 3 to $5M+ ARR and 2 to $15M+ ARR.

3.  Strategy & Execution: I make plans and I convert them into action - no matter the resources.

4.  Bootstrapped + VC-backed startup background: I bring the best of both to the table.

I have a deep expertise in demand capture and broad experience across demand creation and conversion. My go-to growth strategy is focused on SEO, complemented by content, affiliates, and ads for growth.

I consult with companies like ProProfs, Writesonic, Weflow, Continu, TestBox and Timeero, helping them overcome specific demand gen challenges on their journey from $500k to $5M ARR.

Head of Marketing

Internally, the Chief Content Officer at Storylane.

My goal is to drive demand for Storylane using content-led initiatives such as video, social, organic search, brand and partnerships. 

Navigating the $1M to $10M ARR journey over the next couple of quarters.

I went completely OOO for the last couple of weeks for some personal reasons.

I’m back now, and I’m grateful in a way that hits different.

Grateful for family who stepped in without being asked - from handling our toddler to daily logistics to emotional support.

Grateful for doctors, modern medicine, and routine blood tests that genuinely save lives.

Grateful to the universe for handing us a best-case scenario, a few real miracles, and more luck than many people ever get.

Grateful for my Storylane team for running marketing end-to-end without missing a beat - right decisions, right campaigns, right priorities, full momentum, and zero need for me to step in.

Grateful for Nalin, who told me to shut work down completely for as long as I needed, no timelines, no pressure.

And most importantly - grateful for my partner, for being exactly that.

This phase reset my priorities.

Health isn’t “important.”

It’s the only thing that matters.

Please take your annual full-body health checks seriously. 🏥

Head of Marketing @ Storylane | Toddler Dad

I’ve been rethinking how we allocate Storylane's $1.2M ad budget for 2026, and one idea keeps getting louder in my head: we lean way too heavily on the “safe” channels.

LinkedIn and Google feel comfortable because the targeting is good and the ICP accuracy is high. But they’re also the most expensive places to run ads, and the minute you try to scale there, the CAC math falls apart fast.

And the more I look at my own behavior, the more ridiculous this feels. I’m the ICP for Storylane, and LinkedIn is maybe ten percent of my internet diet. The rest of the day I’m on Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, WhatsApp, Facebook, and whatever Meta feels like showing me. Every B2B marketer I know is the same. 

So this whole belief that “B2C channels don’t work for B2B” is probably the biggest myth we’ve all accepted without asking why. If anything, that’s where we might have a big untapped opportunity.

If we want to stretch our $1.2M ads budget, the play isn’t to go deeper into a single expensive channel. It’s bringing LinkedIn-level persona precision into the cheaper channels our buyers already live in.

The blocker has always been identity. These channels were never built to understand B2B signals. Upload a work-email list into Meta or YouTube and the platform barely matches anyone because it maps off personal emails, phone numbers, device IDs, household signals. A work email gives the system nothing to latch onto. Match rates fall to single digits and the whole idea collapses before you even start.

This is the silent bottleneck nobody talks about.

But once you enrich your ICP list with the consumer identifiers these platforms actually understand using a tool like Primer - match rates climb. The algorithm finally knows who you’re trying to reach. And the minute it has that clarity, these channels stop being “experimental” and start behaving like real B2B distribution at a far better cost.

That’s the path I’m exploring now. Carry the precision. Use the cheaper channels. Keep the ICP quality intact. And stretch the same budget across a much wider surface area which most B2B companies are ignoring.

If you’ve already been doing this at scale - taking high-fidelity persona targeting into Meta, YouTube, Reddit, or Display - I’d love to learn from what you’ve seen.

Brand partnership • Head of Marketing @ Storylane | Toddler Dad

Our demo-led SEO strategy is absolutely ripping in AI search right now.

I pulled our data in Ahrefs Brand Radar to see how our demo-led pages are showing up across Google’s AI results, and about 12% of our demo-led SEO pages are already surfacing prominently in AI search - which is where the majority of AI search traffic is coming from today.

That’s 787 Storylane demo pages ranking directly in AI-driven queries.

For context, last year we ran a pretty unconventional experiment.

Instead of doing SEO the “normal” way with walls of text and screenshots, we published interactive demos as the primary content on our pages and basically asked the question: does Google actually need text to rank?

The answer turned out to be no.

That single experiment took our organic traffic from ~20k visits a month to ~250k a month in about six months.

Still one of the wildest growth bets we’ve made.

What’s interesting is that after that surge, growth on those demo-led pages leveled off a bit - even though we increased total page count by about 50% and now sit at ~7,000 pages live.

With Google and AI search changing so quickly earlier this year, we went into wait-and-watch mode and paused publishing more pages altogether.

Strangely enough, signups kept climbing anyway.

Fast forward to now, and it's become clear why demo-led SEO keeps working inside AI search:

1/ AI can generate unlimited text, images, and videos that describe products, but it still can’t replicate the experience of real software - logging into tools, navigating workflows, or reacting to real UI states. Storylane demos let people experience the product itself, creating a moat AI can’t copy.

2/ Demos drastically reduce time-to-value. Instead of reading long pages or watching videos just to decide if something’s relevant, one click immediately shows buyers whether the product fits their needs.

3/ Demos shift research from passive consumption to active intent. Reading and watching is passive. Clicking through a demo pulls people into the product earlier, warms them up, and helps serious buyers self-qualify while casual visitors self-filter.

4/ AI has made traditional content cheap and noisy. When everyone can generate “good enough” blogs and videos at scale, real product experiences stand out even more. Add the pure “show, not tell” factor - people see the product without signing up - and it naturally moves them closer to conversion.

It's really cool that Brand Radar allows us to see such AI visibility data in depth (I've relied on Ahrefs data for 10+ years) https://lnkd.in/eG4dbDDr

Honestly, the way our demo-led pages are surfacing inside AI search has made me more confident than ever in going all-in on demo-led SEO again.

A couple weeks ago Oana Manolache asked me a simple question: what’s one mistake you made this year?

I didn’t even have to think about it. 

I have a really hard time letting go. As Storylane's marketing team has grown, I’ve stayed way too deep in quality checks and reviews because I still want everything to be “right” in my eyes. That kept me stuck in the weeds instead of spending time on actual growth, and it also slowed the team down because everything had to move through me.

Around the same time I read Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell and one line hit me hard: “70% done by someone else is 100% great for you.” Not 70% quality - just 70% from my personal point of view. That reframed a lot for me. 

I wouldn’t say I’ve solved this yet. I’m very much in the transition phase. Letting go isn’t a single big shift. It’s a steady practice of choosing not to jump in, not to rewrite things, not to tighten every screw. It shows up in tiny decisions every week where you either slow everything down chasing perfect or you keep momentum moving and trust the team to figure it out.

What’s surprised me is that when I step back, the quality doesn’t drop. If anything, the team often does better work than I would have done alone. It may not look exactly the way I imagined it, but more things get shipped, people take more ownership, and confidence across the team grows.

The real proof for me was taking two weeks off in September. I came back to some of our biggest launches happening smoothly without any issues at all. That was the first moment I genuinely thought, okay, maybe I don’t have to be in the middle of everything for things to go well.

I’m still figuring this out. I’m still learning how to let go in real time. But I finally see the mistake clearly - holding on tight feels like control, but it actually caps how much the team, and the company, can grow.

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The Battle

Mithun Kumar

Madhav Bhandari

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