Matt Lerner

SYSTM

At SYSTM (formerly Startup Core Strengths), our mission is to help early-stage startups find their big growth levers (and pull them). We've noticed that great startups don't waste time on small stuff, so we  focus everyone on the most impactful work.

Founder & CEO

TransferGo

During my part-time interim role, our team more than doubled the YoY growth rate of acquisitions while lowering CPAs and improving retention and revenue per transaction. I also sourced their full-time VP Growth, and hired 4 other diverse and talented marketers to the team.

Interim VP of Growth

500 Startups

I led 500 Startups operations in London, investing in 35 seed-stage companies including Storemaven, SimplyCook, ZenJob, AirSorted, Popsa, Settled, Lexoo, Thriva, CharlieHR, HonestBrew, Fy and Second Nature. I also set up and ran the "Distro Dojo" growth marketing program for our portfolio companies in London and Berlin, which I was able to staff with a handful of the most extraordinary growth marketers in Europe.

Partner, London

PayPal

I led business-to-business marketing for PayPal UK, and oversaw the SMB/SME merchant business as a general manager.

Director, SMB

Created and lead PayPal’s first website marketing team, including conversion specialists, web analysts, developers, designers and writers. With a $3.5M budget, I oversee all business-facing areas of PayPal.com, driving over 85% of PayPal’s small business acquisition. The team boosted conversion (visitors to signups) in 2011 by 28%, generating an extra $67M over three years.

Director, On-Site Marketing

Built and managed a team of direct marketers who oversaw all marketing to PayPal’s existing small business customer base including activation, cross-sell and retention, generating $30M in incremental revenue.
+ Led pricing in North America.
+ Oversaw all marketing for the PayPal Debit Card, a $60M business, accelerating growth from 7% to 20% YoY in 12 months.
+ Deployed a propensity model targeting our most promising new customers with a high-touch “welcome” experience, boosting their value by 34% vs. control. The program generated an extra $11M in revenue in the first year and $55M over three years.

Group Manager, Merchant Engagement Marketing

Promoted within the same role, grew the team to 18. Developed processes & metrics around go-to-market. Oversaw the launch of many of PayPal’s most popular small business products.

Group Manager, Product Marketing

Built PayPal’s first outbound Product Marketing team. We oversaw all outbound B2B product marketing, launched a dozen major products and features.

Sr. Manager, Product Marketing

+ Originally hired to oversee developer marketing
+ Managed partner marketing through our shopping cart partners including GoDaddy and Yahoo!
+ Ran PayPal’s first consumer engagement campaigns
+ Launched Website Payments Pro, which currently generates over $100M revenue/year.

Marketing Manager

Macromedia

Brought Fireworks MX 2004 to market. The launch exceeded sales forecast by 20%. Planned subsequent release including researching and writing the MRD.

Product Manager

Visited 36 countries, wrote a book, climbed two 18,000 ft. Himalayan peaks, dove some of the world's best reefs, and learned to "think globally."

International Traveller

+ Led the successful development and launch of two products and discontinued a third product without alienating valuable customers.
+ Led demand generation among designers and developers for four of Macromedia’s largest launches including the flagship Dreamweaver product. Sales consistently beat forecasts. Tactics included print advertising, online media, direct mail (Harte Hanks) and email (Digital Impact) campaigns.

Product & Marketing Manager

Elemental Software

Poppe Tyson

Led B2B online marketing programs for clients including Novell Inc., Edward Jones Inc. and IDG.

Assistant Account Executive

Startup growth strategist, Ex PayPal, 500 Startups VC, Founder @ SYSTM

I founded SYSTM to help startups find their big growth levers - the small actions that can have the biggest impact on their growth. We’ve worked with over 200 companies and earned a 96% founder “likely to recommend” score.

Before founding SYSTM, I was the London-based Partner of 500 Startups, an early-stage VC fund, where I built and ran an accelerator seed-stage growth program for our portfolio companies.

Prior to joining 500 Startups, I worked for many years building and managing growth teams for three  startups (two disasters, one exit), and later at PayPal. 

I approach my work first as a general manager and then as a marketer, product manager or both, as needed. My lens is quantitative, but rooted in deep customer insights and testing, and based on fast iteration. I’m always learning, and I really enjoy teaching and helping those around me to learn and improve. Skip to the references below, you'll see that I'm regarded as a thought leader in many areas of business, and an inspiring people manager who reliably delivers ahead of expectations.

Founder of StrategyBreakdowns.com

TLDR: Worked in strategy consulting → Joined strategy team at Atlassian → Started writing strategy case studies → People liked them, so I left my job and went full-time

Tom Alder

"IKEA has opened in Brighton, the quintessential British seaside town."

Inside jokes = great marketing.

"Step out your front door, sit on a bench or look out your car window, there are presents left for you everywhere. It’s just part of life that every Brighton local deals with.” 

Wonderful example of what I call "If you know, you know" ("IYKYK") marketing. 

Show you understand your customer by speaking directly to something only they would understand.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the marketing strategies and growth playbooks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Apple, Nike, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

People always ask "How did you decide when to quit your job and go all-in?"

3 months after launching Strategy Breakdowns I told my boss I was leaving.

This was my napkin math:

The business was making just under $3k/mo.
~$2.2k from newsletter sponsorship, rest from affiliate revenue.

→ I was publishing 1 newsletter every 2 weeks
→ If I ran them weekly, that'd 2x sponsorship + 1.5x affiliate revenue

→ I had 1 sponsor per newsletter
→ If I had 2, that'd 2x sponsorship revenue again

→ I had 20k subscribers
→ If I grew to 50k, that'd 2x sponsorship + 1.5x affiliate revenue again

Q: If I quit my job, would the extra 40hrs per week be enough to publish 1 extra newsletter every 2wks, sell 4x as many ads, and speed-run an extra 30k subs by reinvesting all revenue into subscriber growth?

Once I laid out all the inputs, it became an easy 'yes'.

I could probably hit $10k/mo within a month or 2, even factoring some contingency if I couldn't sell 100% of my ad inventory.

Then if I kept growing the newsletter, and added new ways to monetise, I figured it wouldn't be too much drama to get to $20k/mo.

Quitting a high-paying tech job for a $3k/mo newsletter = crazy, risky, scary
Quitting a high-paying tech job for a (soon-to-be) $20k/mo newsletter = makes sense

Same business. 
Different frame.

Don't be afraid to math it out.
Goes a long way in building up conviction.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

Valve makes $50 million per employee.

Microsoft? $18 million.
Apple? $2.4 million.
Meta? $1.9 million.

How does a 350-person gaming company eclipse every tech giant on the planet?

→ They built a 30% tax on PC gaming.

Every game sold on Steam. Every microtransaction. Every indie hit and AAA blockbuster. If it's sold on their platform, Valve takes 30%.

They do develop games themselves, but vast majority of their revenue comes from infrastructure, maintenance, and collecting.

What makes it even more remarkable:

Zero traditional management mechanisms.

Valve operates with a completely flat hierarchy. No managers assigning work. No executives approving projects.

Instead they pioneered several radical workplace practices like choose-your-own team, and peer-reviewed bonuses.

Your colleagues (not your boss) determine your compensation based on your contributions. The entire company votes on your impact.

The result:
336 employees shared $444 million in total compensation in 2021. That's an average of $1.3 million per person.

And the company is on track for $17 billion in revenue in 2025.

They proved something most large corporations forget:
You don't need more people. You need the right structure (business model + organisational model).

—

📖 If you liked this post, you’ll definitely enjoy my newsletter article Why Valve has no managers!

Take a look here: https://lnkd.in/gyDPxJQ5

AI NEWS: Fyxer AI ($1→25m ARR in 12mo) just dropped the biggest upgrade to their core product since launch.

Here's everything you need to know:

Fyxer's core product "Drafts" lives inside Gmail/Outlook, and it auto-drafts email replies in your voice for you to review, edit (if needed), and send.

They just released "Drafts 2.0" with a wall-to-wall revamp of product improvements:
→ better context searching (remembers past conversations to reply how you would)
→ dynamic tone detection (adapts to who you're emailing - client, manager, colleague etc)
→ smarter call scheduling (handles time zones automatically and finds times that suit everyone)

The result: users are now sending *twice* as many email drafts without edits.

Check out the draft it wrote below.

For anyone spending an hour+ on email: this is one of the apps that actually saves me tangible time + focus on a daily basis. 


For the product-led-growth nerds - onboarding is slick too. Starts working in 30 seconds with Gmail or Outlook signup. Automatically learns your voice. Zero setup or learning curve.

I love startups like this - simple idea with perfect execution.


Oh and I convinced the Fyxer team to give my readers a special signup offer https://lnkd.in/gsuYEPQP (Partner link)

Productivity is the new flex.

This viral campaign just capitalised on it perfectly.

Fyxer's '2025 Unboxed' campaign = Spotify Wrapped for email.

It shows users how many hours they saved this year using their AI email drafter, and assigns them an 'email persona' like "Inbox Ringmaster" or "Clock Whisperer"

My favourite part - every organic share isn't just "look at my quirky email habits" it's "look how much time this tool gave me back".

They embedded their value prop into the flex itself.

Textbook virality design: make the shareable moment social proof for the product benefit.

Think sending a Loom, booking via a Calendly link, or accessing a Notion template. 

The result: every user who shares their "Fyxer unboxed" is running an ad that says "this tool gave me back [X] hours".

Genius.

Full data roundup here - pretty interesting: https://lnkd.in/dpuZPrwW

5 unconventional tactics I learned at Atlassian (your company should copy these):

1. Everyone reads customer feedback (literally everyone)

Every week, every employee gets an automated email with 3 randomly selected verbatim quotes from customers. Bug reports, success stories, feature requests.

Over time you start spotting patterns. You develop intuition for customer sentiment. When you're proposing something, you can back it up with qualitative data you rememeber reading.

2. No PowerPoint allowed, only memos

Good writing is good thinking. You can disguise terrible ideas with pretty slides.

Every idea, every meeting, every project, every roadmap lives as a Confluence page. Writing out your ideas forces you to get specific about what you actually want to say (and why it matters). 

3. Every team has visible KPIs

Based on your team and role, you always knew exactly what metric mattered most. OKRs aren't perfect, but they create MASSIVE clarity of direction.

You also always knew what your KPI was driving at the division or company level (ie. what it "rolled up" to). Month commentary from owners explaining movements makes it easy to tell what matters to teams across the whole company. 

4. Open by default

Jira boards and Confluence pages have full organisational sharing permissions toggled on by default. This is a small but hugely significant product design choice.

Unless you actively close it off, everyone in the company can find, read, and comment on your work. Google Docs and Word don't do this – which means every new doc feels "yours" instead of "ours." 

5. Roll out to employees first

When I worked there, Atlassian had over 10,000 employees. That's a pretty sizable testing ground, and every mature product team would roll out changes to Atlassians first (who were using these tools every day).

This lets you catch bugs and bulletproofs ideas before paying customers see them, and creates a friendly space for candid feedback.

The pattern: make transparency and feedback the default (not the exception) for every product, decision, and idea.

Happy building.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

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