Tristan Gillen

Founder at Growth Division | Growth Squared >>> Applications for our 12-week growth programme NOW OPEN

I fulfill several key roles at Growth Division. I am a co-founder, new business generator, CRM expert, martech whizz, drum n bass track recommender and Southern European correspondent from my current base in Lisbon. 

After Uni, I joined Europe’s largest tech distribution firm in their Business Intelligence unit. There I learned just about everything there is to learn about CRM, automation and analytics. 

Eventually, I partnered with Tom Dewhurst to work on Ordoo (an ordering F&B app), where we navigated the mad world of London startups and eventually got taken over by an investor. 

From there, I became a freelance CRM strategist and worked with 25 startups over the course of 18 months helping them get their customer journeys, automations and Spotify gym playlists right. 

A few years later, Tom and I joined our forces again and started Growth Division to help other startups overcome one of the biggest challenges Ordoo faced: finding and validating channels to market. 

We've so far helped 100+ startups globally find scalable channels to market. 

Beyond the day job I am a coffee obsessive, and avid adventurer wandering from London to Lisbon, Paris to New York.

Just got promoted to 'Dad' too, learning to juggle bottles and business! 

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Want to scale your startup/scaleup? Let's chat!

Founder

We scale seed-stage startups by building expert Growth Marketing teams.

We've helped scale the likes of Weavr, Startups.com, Unlock, Makers, Addland, Greenomy, Kitt, Retain, Libeo, Surreal, Ted's Health and many more of the fasted growing startups. 

Founders and marketing generalists don’t have the expertise to effectively validate potential channels to market. Growth Division uses the Bullseye Framework, the Lean Startup methodology and growth hacking techniques to find a scalable, profitable route to market.

I’ve been working on something a little different recently.

A collection of moments from Lisbon, in images and words for a book we’re calling A Life in Lisbon.

All of the photos have been taken in and around Lisbon, within an hour of the city centre, by the incredibly talented Will Bremridge. 

Alongside them are short snippets I’ve written here in Lisbon: thoughts, philosophies, small observations and fragments of daily life.

It’s designed as a coffee table book. Something you can pick up at random, open, read a page, pause, put down, and come back to later.

There are over 220 photographs across 220 pages of premium gloss paper, wrapped in a beautifully embossed hard cover. We’ve printed just 250 limited first editions, and they are both made and printed in Lisbon.

If you’d like to learn more or secure a copy, you can here: https://lnkd.in/dbDkVJ2W

Founder at Growth Division | GrowthEX - Scaling startups with expert growth marketers + our AI Growth Platform

Bootstrapping is usually the obvious first choice, but it’s not always the right final one.

We bootstrapped Growth Division for six years by growing it slowly and profitably, and that worked because it was a service business where Tom and I could do the execution ourselves early on.

With GrowthEX, we started the same way. We bootstrapped, focused on fundamentals, and proved there was real demand before pushing anything aggressively.

But what changed was traction. Over the last couple of months, the speed at which GrowthEX has started to move made it clear that this is a different kind of business with the potential to scale much faster.

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PS. I’m leaning more into video this year. If video is on your radar too and you’re not sure where to start, feel free to reach out.

The martech landscape is more fragmented than ever. 

There are already thousands of martech tools, most of them built around a single channel. 

AI is only accelerating that trend, with new tools launching constantly and adding even more layers of disconnected data across outreach, paid, content, email, and CRM systems.

The problem is that AI doesn’t work well in silos. To be genuinely useful, it needs context across all channels. One of the biggest challenges for growth teams now is finding ways to aggregate fragmented data into something an AI can actually learn from and guide strategy with.

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Video is big this year. If you’re like me and want to start posting your own videos but aren’t sure where to begin, we can help. Drop me a message.

Your AI tool is missing half the picture.

It can see campaign data, it can analyse data, it can analyse trends, it can optimise against publicly available signals, but it can’t see the experiment you ran behind it.

That context lives in your head (or in a messy doc somewhere). 

That’s why we built GrowthEX.

To connect experiment documentation with live performance data, so AI isn’t operating on guesswork, and it’s working within the context of what you’re actually trying to prove.

If you want your experimentation process to be structured, searchable, and actually compounding over time, check out GrowthEX here:

https://www.growthex.ai/

One of the biggest lessons Tom Dewhurst and I learned at Ordoo was that trying to run growth channels you’re not an expert in slows everything down.

We spent a lot of time testing ideas, making progress, but never really knowing whether a channel was working or whether we were the bottleneck. The moment we brought in true channel experts, everything changed. 

Learning accelerated, decisions became clearer, and we could confidently double down on what was actually driving growth. 

That experience is what led us to build Growth Division the way we did: surrounding founders with deep, channel-specific expertise so growth becomes something you can validate quickly.

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PS. I’m leaning more into video this year. If video is on your radar too and you’re not sure where to start, feel free to reach out.

“Do we have a demand problem… or a positioning problem?”

In my experience, especially at the very early stages, it’s usually positioning.

When things aren’t landing, founders often jump straight to running more campaigns, adding channels, or increasing spend. But if you haven’t been extremely specific about who you’re targeting and what problem you’re solving for them, no amount of distribution will fix that.

The first test should be conversations.

Before you put any marketing live, you should be able to validate your messaging by speaking directly to as many prospective or current customers as possible. You can learn an enormous amount just by hearing how people respond to your problem framing and language.

If that doesn’t resonate in a conversation, it won’t magically work at scale.

Once you do go live, the key is to be very specific and treat it like an experiment: “I’m targeting this exact ICP, with this exact message, and I expect this outcome.”

That’s how you start to separate signal from noise.

You have 20 possible marketing channels, and need to start by testing just 3-6. Lots of them have potential. So, how do you shortlist them? 

Having been through this process for over 130 clients, I like to think I’ve got a good system in place for narrowing down potential channels. 

It looks something like:

Two calls with the founder or head of marketing 
→ I learn about their objectives, their unit economics, customer journey, etc. 

Channel-specific research
→ I have 54 questions I ask myself across 20 channels (and also look at what the startup has tried before now). 

Considering the overall mix 
→ I think about balancing long-term and short-term plays, consider which channels work best together, and throw in a low-budget curveball option if I think it’s right. 

If you’re going through the process of choosing your own channel mix to test, or you’re looking to understand more about what goes into your Growth Division proposal, I wrote up my whole process (including those 54 questions and my go-to tools). 

Here’s the link if you’d like to check it out: https://lnkd.in/dUbtAbWq

Most founders are looking for that one big breakthrough moment.

In reality, growth is built on hundreds of small, structured tests.

If you want a growth mindset, you need to shift from chasing breakthroughs to chasing continuous learning.

We never intended to build an agency when we started Growth Division.

We were trying to solve a problem we’d experienced ourselves.

At my previous startup (Ordoo), once we raised our seed round, growth only really accelerated when we stopped hiring generalists, brought in channel specialists, and coordinated it all by a growth lead.

That insight shaped everything we built at Growth Division.

Because the vast majority of growth problems aren’t solved with more people. They need the right specialist at the right moment, backed by structure and accountability.

So instead of fixed teams and rigid retainers, we built a vetted expert network.

We’ve now used this model with 130+ startups and scaleups, and the pattern is consistent:

Specialists outperform generalists when they operate inside a system.

I’ve written a deeper breakdown of how our expert network works, how we vet specialists, and how we build growth squads around each startup.

You can read it here: https://lnkd.in/dfcer5BV

“What would the first 90 days with Growth Division actually look like?”

For a long time, that was a hard question to answer cleanly. Not because we didn’t have a process, but because, in the early days, we were still learning and iterating it ourselves with every new client.

Now, after working with 130+ startups, I’m genuinely proud of how structured (and still flexible) that process has become. From how we set channel strategy in the first month, to how experiments are run, reviewed, cut, or scaled over time.

I’ve written up a detailed breakdown of what clients can expect in their first 90 days (and beyond), based largely on how they describe working with us.

If you’re curious about how we actually work day to day, this should give you a much clearer picture 👇

https://lnkd.in/dYwFfpsX

Can big brands afford to be less targeted? 🤷🏻‍♂️

In one of our recent Startup Teardowns, we took a look at OpenAI’s website, which features simple messaging, broad reach, and a very straightforward call to action: just sign up.

For a brand with massive awareness, sometimes the job isn’t precision targeting, but for early-stage startups, that approach would be reckless.

At scale, when your audience is effectively “everyone,” broad distribution can work, but the real question is: has your brand earned the right to be broad?

Watch the full teardown here: https://lnkd.in/ebkzEZJB

Hiring is easily one of the most difficult parts of building a company.

Over the last six years at Growth Division, Tom Dewhurst and I have interviewed and hired over 100 freelance and full-time marketing experts. And honestly, finding top-tier experts is super difficult.

People can have what looks like a great career history on LinkedIn, have worked for impressive companies, show fantastic portfolios, and even interview really well. 

But a lot of the time, you can’t actually tell how someone works until you start working with them for a few weeks on a real project and see how they operate day to day.

And that’s why hiring is so hard, because interviewing is, by definition, a proxy where you’re trying to simulate real performance in an artificial environment.

Thankfully, over the years, we’ve really honed our interview process. We’ve identified red flags and defined what exceptional looks like for us.

We got it right by setting clear table stakes that we absolutely have to see from a candidate by using mock projects and getting our Growth Strategist candidates to run mock phase one launch calls as part of the interview process.

But, even with all of these techniques, filtration systems and ways to identify good people, it’s still incredibly hard to know how good someone is going to be.

At the end of the day, the real and only way of understanding how good someone is, is by actually working with them.

That’s why our freelance/fractional model makes so much sense.

As a result of our processes, we’ve built a vetted community of experts over the last six years. The best freelancers are the ones who keep working with us continuously because they keep performing.

Finding good freelancers is really difficult, but finding great ones who consistently deliver is even harder.

That’s the gap we’ve spent years trying to solve.

Your gut instinct probably isn’t wrong, but you’re making a mistake by leaving it untested.

Great marketers use instinct to shape targeting and messaging, but the difference is that they validate it. 

They write down the hypothesis, define the metric, run the experiment, and let data sharpen their thinking.

Over time, instinct becomes informed pattern recognition instead of guesswork.

If experiments aren’t structured and stored, the learning disappears, and teams keep starting from zero. 

GrowthEX was built to give that learning a home.

It gives teams a structured way to document experiments, track outcomes, connect results to their North Star metric, and turn one-off tests into a compounding knowledge base.

If you’re serious about building growth through structured experimentation, you can learn more about GrowthEX here: https://www.growthex.ai/

AI option overload sound familiar?

There’s no shortage of tools anymore. New AI products are launching every month, each claiming to unlock faster growth or better performance. The real challenge is deciding which ones are worth integrating into your workflow, and which ones are just adding noise…

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PS. I’m leaning more into video this year. If video is on your radar too and you’re not sure where to start, feel free to reach out.

A new episode of ‘Startup Teardowns’ is officially LIVE! 🚨

Alongside Ryan Rutan and Tom Dewhurst, we broke down how Loops is presenting itself in a crowded email market, and where small messaging choices can make a big difference.

👉 Watch the full teardown here: https://lnkd.in/dV8s7nVY

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