Neal O'Grady 🍉

Demand Curve

Demand Curve (YC S19) creates courses, content, and events to teach founders and marketers how to grow companies. Our weekly newsletter goes out to over 97,000 founders and marketers.

Co-Founder

GrowthPair

We've partnered up to help startups hire top-tier growth talent that fits into their budget.

Advisor

Bell Curve

Bell Curve is a paid marketing agency explicitly built for startups. 

We've worked with companies like Invoice2Go, Pilot, Segment, Microsoft, Framer, Perfect Keto, Feedly, Stacker, Techcrunch, 1build, and Ancestry.

UNIGNORABLE

People wanna buy from people—not faceless brands. Un-ignorable is a 4-week group challenge designed to help you build an audience of future buyers.

Founder + Instructor

Segment

Demand Curve and Segment had a deep partnership. We collaborated on projects where our intersection of growth and tracking expertise can help companies grow revenue.

Growth Advisor

Webflow, Inc.

- Ideated blog post topics on topics most relevant and interesting to web designers 
- Produced high-quality blog posts each week that were engaging, educational, and got people excited about web design and Webflow 
- Sourced images and supplementary material and references - Work with the founders, CMO, designer, and editor

Copywriter/Content Marketer

Lighthouse Labs

The job of a TA at a early-stage web development bootcamp was 3 main things:

1. Developing curriculum.
2. Helping students with their coding challenges.
3. Providing emotional support to extremely stressed students wondering if they've made a horrible decision dropping $10k on a career change.

Demand Curve | 93,000 founders get 3 startup growth tactics in their inbox each week. Join the Growth Newsletter below.

I'm 34 years old. I've never had a full-time job.

Not once.

No, I did not grow up rich without needing to.

My dad passed when I was 13, my mom made $26,000 CAD, and he left her with an invalid life insurance policy. He had changed it to void unless he was 65 years old or older

He did that 2 days before local laws changed where your spouse needed to approve life insurance policy changes. 

He also left her with tons of debt on credit cards she didn't know about.

So she was forced to file for bankruptcy.

We were real poor.

I managed to go to university only because she moved to Vancouver with me.

And I paid for it by aggressively applying for scholarships. 75% of it was covered.

Yet, I've never used that degree.

Since then I've:

- Taught myself programming
- Worked as a freelance developer
- Worked as a freelance copywriter
- Lived out of a backpack for 3.5 years as a digital nomad
- Started two 7-figure revenue businesses in the marketing industry

At no point was I hungry, broke, or homeless.

People think that forging your own path is risky.

What I think is risky is taking out a mortgage based on a full-time job that can be taken away from you at any moment

As a freelancer, you have numerous income streams—losing one isn't existential.

As a business owner, your job can't be taken from you. You make more if you find a way to provide more value to people at scale.

This is why I've dedicated my life to helping people start, build, and grow companies. 

My ads agency, Bell Curve (www.bellcurve.com), helps startups grow through ads—the most scalable channel there is.

Demand Curve (www.demandcurve.com) teaches founders and marketers to grow their companies and passion projects. We were accepted into Y Combinator's summer of 2019 batch.

My goal is to make entrepreneurship easier and more approachable. Because we all benefit when we each build the future we want.

Demand Curve (YC S19) creates courses, content, and events to teach founders and marketers how to grow companies. Our weekly newsletter goes out to over 60,000 founders and marketers.

Oak Arbor Marketing

Oak Arbor Marketing helped organizations clarify their branding and reach the right audiences with content marketing. Oak Arbor Marketing offered content marketing, content creation, and personal branding services. 
 
Below are a few accomplishments while running Oak Arbor Marketing: 

-Launched marketing business in a new geographical market in 2021; created content and guided social media and go-to-market strategies for over 25 companies coast-to-coast, ranging from Fortune 500 to startups
-Built and executed robust go-to-market strategy for Oak Arbor Marketing, including voice-of-customer and market research, value proposition development, pricing strategy, and marketing/sales plan implementation 
-Implemented a data-driven sales process using Hubspot and Apollo to track email open rates and responses, resulting in a 150% increase in revenue by the second year of business
-Established company partnerships with complimentary businesses, resulting in joint cross-promotional events and referrals; synchronized efforts with other marketing vendors to maximize client results.
-Produced video content for a Fortune 500 energy company to support Pacific Northwest marketing initiatives
-Achieved a 500% ROI for a client through the creation of a sales promotional video.
-Built an engaged TikTok following of 30,000 in a year, driving email list growth to sell digital products.
-Developed blog in the digital marketing niche, creating SEO-optimized posts that generated over 4,400 clicks and 502k impressions in the last 12 months. Collaborated with external writers to expand content reach.
-Participated in the 2023 6-month Bunker Labs Cohort, a business incubator for veteran and military spouse-owned businesses.

NetApp

-Launched field marketing campaign to support pre-sales and promote upsell of services, including launch of bi-weekly newsletter and video program
-Served as team lead for cross-functional video initiative launched by Services Portfolio team and liaison to Creative Services and Video teams; Managed budget for video equipment orders
-Closed B2B software storage deal worth $25k in revenue during first three months of employment
-Influenced and secured buy-in from stakeholders and revamped NetApp Professional Services product messaging and market positioning to provide unified content experience for online customer engagement with NetApp

Solution Principal

Professional Services Associate

North Carolina State University

Full Scholarship Recipient
Tech Entrepreneurship & Marketing
Entrepreneurship Club President
JenkinsTV Founder

MBA Candidate

Lowe's Companies, Inc.

-Improved the Lowes.com search experience by leveraging customer insights to identify zero-result search queries and led a revamp of search result pages with enhanced navigation, suggestions, and search bars
-Executed product management process through cross-functional collaboration with SEO and Product Page stakeholders to validate the search result page concepts
-Created mockups with the UX team and developed a user story to measure success through click-through rate, bounce rate, and purchase metrics after two development sprints

Associate Product Management Intern

RTI International

-Developed digital marketing strategy for launch of two commercialization efforts including a new software, resulting in an engaged audience on LinkedIn and ten product demos within one month
-Enhanced reach of RTI’s public policy initiative by developing targeted email marketing campaigns using Pardot
-Worked with external agency to optimize website content and design for public policy initiative and managed marketing budget
-Launched a pay-per-click Google AdWords campaign to support demand generation efforts and used analytics to assess 50% Cost Per Click reduction while increasing sales leads by 10%

Marketing Specialist

Red Hat

-Led high-performing team of 5 to develop a global B2B customer success and sales enablement program; created over 200 internal case studies showcasing Red Hat Consulting's full sales cycle, driving an estimated ~$1 million in revenue growth over 3 years while filling Red Hat’s customer reference pipeline
-Orchestrated three-year webcast series with Vice President of Global Services to share customer stories; contributing to 20% YoY revenue growth in the Asia-Pacific region, 17% YoY revenue growth each in North and Latin America, and 15% YoY revenue growth in Europe, Middle East & Africa
-Worked cross-functionally with global marketing and design teams to increase visibility of the program through inclusion in global Red Hat initiatives
-Planned Red Hat Consulting marketing presence at two Red Hat Summit conferences
-Created technical marketing content to support Red Hat Consulting sales efforts, including whitepapers, pitch decks, and datasheets

Marketing Specialist, Consulting Services

Integrated Technical Services

-Researched and created content to share on Linkedin, Facebook & Twitter
-Developed social media strategy to increase outreach and brand awareness
-Managed company blog 
-Developed digital marketing strategy to increase social media and website conversions
-Researched potential clients
-Planned first-ever company charity event

Business operations skills include:
-Maintain vendor relationships by contacting them for quote information, making quotes and sending them to customers
-Organizing invoices & putting together order packets
-Modified operations processes to increase efficiency

Business Development & Marketing Coordinator

The Platinum School

At the platinum school I developed ideas for and executed a variety of marketing tasks.  These included:
-Managing content for the Platinum School Website
-Researching and writing content for the blog
-Wrote several news releases, 
-Developed a written plan for future fundraising events
-Crafted a variety of fundraising materials which include a letter of inquiry, a parent letter, a case statement and a direct mail letter.
-Designed marketing materials which include a newsletter and website images

Marketing Intern

Brand One

Communications Specialist

PRSSA

Member

I am a tech marketer who loves to build brands and market interesting products and services.

I’ve held roles in marketing, product management, sales, and entrepreneurship - all of which have strengthened my skills as a marketer. Throughout my career, here’s what I’ve learned about myself:

I thoroughly enjoy voice-of-customer research and go-to-market strategy:
Mastering customer research was one of my favorite aspects of my MBA education because it taught me that everything in business should start with the customer. My time as a content marketing agency founder heavily relied on collecting voice-of-customer research as well as building and executing go-to-market strategies (this ended up being my favorite part of the experience!).

I learned the importance of creating customer-centric content:
While working at Red Hat, I built a global sales enablement program with over 200 customer engagement reports. I interviewed the sales and delivery team for each customer engagement. We highlighted the lessons learned in each of our reports (along with other information), and the reports were then circulated as a sales enablement effort. This customer-centric content ultimately helped our sales teams win deals that resulted in over $.3 million in revenue growth YoY for three years.

I’ve learned that leveraging data in marketing is key to success:
I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles throughout my career, each focusing on different ways to measure data. While at Red Hat and NetApp, the number of deals closed as a result of marketing/sales efforts were key KPIs. While at Lowe’s, we heavily relied on data to understand poor search performance on Lowes.com and I developed a user story to test clickthrough rate, bounce rate, and purchases.

My time as an entrepreneur allowed me to test everything that I learned with each of these roles, ranging from building and executing go-to-market strategies and sales plans, improving website analytics, and creating customer-centric content for my clients. I am excited for my next opportunity in marketing and plan to make a big impact.

Outside of work, you can find me spending time with my family, traveling, and flying my drone.

taplio

The Battle

Neal O'Grady 🍉

Morgan K. Johnston, MBA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?