Common Room

Head of GTM strategy

Head of Marketing

Head of Demand Generation

Ashby

Marketing Advisor

Gretel.ai

Deepnote

Head Of Marketing

Retool

Segment

Head of Growth Marketing

HackerOne

Director of Demand Generation

SingleStore

Responsible for product adoption and sales funnel growth at MemSQL.

Key areas of focus include:
- Demand generation via Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads
- Build and optimize nurturing campaigns (Marketo)
- Design and optimize landing pages with a focus on conversion
- Build and monitor marketing and sales funnel dashboards

Director of Demand Generation and Marketing Operations

Gigya

I managed the day to day marketing adoption and growth for Gigya including:
- Building marketing campaigns triggered by context and behavior
- Designing landing pages and optimizing to increase conversion
- Leading content strategy to fuel inbound lead funnel

Director of Marketing Operations

Marketing Manager

Online Marketing Analyst

HUNTINGTON SURF AND SPORT, INC.

Responsibilities:
Optimize PPC and affiliate advertising campaigns
Create and manage email campaigns 
Calibrate search engine optimization through link building, and on-page optimization
Contribute in weekly meetings with management to discuss sales reports and projected goals
Provide proper training, supervision, and evaluation for Web Merchandising and Customer Service Associates

Key Achievements:
Managed many successful multi-level advertising campaigns with targeted CPA of $20 or less
Maintained high AdWords quality scores (7-10) with a high CTR 
Led team to 5% sales revenue increase in 2009
Held a high sales conversion rate between 1.5% - 2% 
Developed strong relationships with leading brands in the surf industry

Director of Web Marketing

Demand @ Common Room | Advisor to SaaS Startups | Ex Growth & Marketing @Segment @Retool

Core focus: demand gen, marketing automation, conversion optimization, paid acquisition, lead nurturing and scoring, multi-touch attribution, funnel analysis

Cat’s out of the bag… Today, I’m thrilled to share that I’m joining Scrunch AI to lead marketing. Here’s why 👇

MARKET SHIFT

We’ve all seen the posts about website traffic going away. We all know where that traffic is going—AI platforms. And, some of us have experienced this firsthand (I know I did).

This shift is presents a massive opportunity and greenfield growth channel for growth.

For those open to embracing the change, Scrunch is building a must-have product that not only gives visibility into brand presence on LLMs but it’s also a wedge into the new, AI-first customer journey (more on that below).

_____

PRODUCT

I have to admit, from the outset, I was a skeptic in the GEO/AEO/LLMAO space (still need to get market consensus on that term, btw).

But when I got a product demo, I was blown away by just what’s possible today with AI monitoring alone.

If you’re just relying on Google Analytics to grok your AI presence and traffic (and I know 99.9% of the market is), you’re pretty much flying blind.

Then, when Chris Andrew showed me what’s cooking with our experience platform--essentially, the ability to translate, prioritize, and serve consumable content to AI platforms--I was sold.

**SIDEBAR:** I’m still ramping up, but absolutely intend to demo and pitch the product myself. So if anyone wants to be a guinea pig for me, book a demo at scrunchai.com / book and tell me I sent you.

(I’m on a personal quest to 2x demo requests in a month starting now 😇)

_____

TEAM + INVESTORS

As I got to know the founders, Chris and Robert, everything just felt simpatico.

They understand their marketing strengths and weaknesses (and also were humble about it). Strategically, we see things eye-to-eye in terms of growth channels, execution, etc.

It was just one of those things that’s hard to put a finger on but felt right.

Another major deciding factor was re-joining forces with Patrick Salyer. It’s been 10+ years since our run at Gigya, where he was CEO. Over the years, we’ve remained friends and exchanged notes on marketing. I’ve always wanted to work together in some capacity, and I couldn’t be happier that that’s now come to fruition.

_____

EMPATHY

Finally, one of the things I loved about my time at Common Room was the built-in empathy I had for the customer.

That built-in empathy (i.e., marketing to an audience when you’ve personally been in the seat and felt the pain firsthand), is something I don’t think I’ll ever give up going forward.

It’s that empathy that allows me to:
✧ Post on here with authority
✧ Demo the product in an authentic way
✧ Ship without the need to ask an SME for feedback

It’s a huge unlock to marketing execution, and I would feel handcuffed without it.

======

Needless to day, there’s a TON to do--it’s literally day 1.

Onwards.

Kevin White

Marketing @ Scrunch AI | Advisor to SaaS Startups | fmr Growth & Marketing @Segment @Retool @Common Room

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I’ve got some big career news to share: starting Monday, Sept 1, my time as a full-time Common Room employee is coming to an end.

I’ll share more about what the future holds in a post next week.

For today, I just want to reflect on what I consider a feather-in-the-cap run at Common Room and express a tiny fraction of the immense gratitude I have for my fellow Roomies.

To my team…

Words in a LinkedIn post can’t say enough. You all are the driving force behind our awareness and growth engine—and ours is an SR-71 Blackbird at that (look it up). Every week, someone asks me what’s our secret to marketing at Common Room, and I give them the same answer every time: “Just hire really great people and let them cook.”

---

To current Roomies…

I truly feel like I’m leaving things in good hands. It’s becoming more and more clear that our product is the winner in the space (that, plus the roadmap is straight fire). There’s a massive opportunity and market still to capture. Just need to execute like crazy.

(You better believe I’m executing all my options, so my money is where my mouth is.)

---

To the founders…

Thank you for all that you’ve built—product, team, culture. It might sound cheeseball, but of all the places I’ve worked, Common Room feels the most like being a founding member of the GTM team. Thank you for letting me be part of that. 

And special shoutout to Viraj Mody—just mad respect—never seen a CTO who’s so close to the customer and determined to win. It’s been real working with you.

---

To Linda Lian…

Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Thanks for sticking with me during the tough times. Thanks for the freedom and encouragement to post on here. Thanks for being a thought partner. Thanks for pushing me/us to do better (I know I pushed back a lot, but, in the end, you were mostly right).

====

One last thing…

As for my time at Common Room, it’s not exactly coming to an abrupt end as I’ll be stepping into an advisor role for at least the remainder of the year.

So you’ll still see me repping Common Room at a handful of scheduled talks (plug to check out my talk at INBOUND) and dropping some Common Room demos—just this time as a customer.

Finally, even though my full-time role is changing, I’ll always be “Kevin from Common Room” at heart.

✌️

On my last day full time day at Common Room, I figured it would be apropos to reflect on the last 2.5 years. Here’s a brief breakdown of what was shipped by the numbers👇

🚀 32 product launches

📓 66 playbooks published

📹 42 product demo videos

🎙️ 11 podcast appearances

🎤 19 talks delivered (both in person & webinar)

🧪 5 AI growth experiements shipped (shoutout playgent.ai)

✨ 6 Kevin-telligence appearances (prob should have done more)

📅 111 internal weekly marketing updates shared (only missed a few weeks)

1️⃣ One major product pivot & category created — Customer Intelligence Platform

♾️ Infinite good times

Special shoutout to Matzen Shirley Eric Wendt Krystal Wu Claire Maynard Josh Lind Rebecca Marshburn Joel Primack—none of this would have been possible without you all!

I’m not a fan of the 30/60/90 format. I’m one week in at Scrunch AI and have no idea what day 90 is going to look like at this point.

So, instead of using a dated framework (that is frankly too slow for startup speed), this is my plan to ramp with haste 👇

🚀 Learn the product

I’m throwing myself into the fire with this one.

Next week (week #2), I have dozens of demos booked from my network. For me, it’s a forcing function to use a real-world pitch convo to demo the product.

Also, I’ve found it builds empathy with the sales org if you can put yourself in their shoes. And I very much intend to have strong sales <> marketing alignment.

______

👋  “Get out of the building”

If you’re not familiar, this is Steve Blank’s way of saying go out and talk to customers.

As a baseline, I’ve found running a product/market fit survey to be an enlightening starting point for building audience empathy and positioning. I intend to do that along with interviewing customers using jobs-to-be-done-like questions.

Who knows? Perhaps one of those chats might turn into a customer story 😉

______

🌐 Website/brand refresh

I’m afraid to include this because it’s a marketing leader cliché.

BUT… our website is vastly underselling the value, credibility, and use cases the product has to offer. It was already in the works before joining, but I’m very aligned to make it happen and step in to own it.

______

✍ Founder / personal content

There’s a ton of knowledge trapped inside our internal team (especially the founders). I intend to extract as much of that as possible to inform our content engine. You can expect to see a lot more from me and the team in the next few weeks.

______

💼 Hiring

This is a tough one. I’m 100% sure I’m going to need some help.

That said, times have changed. What worked in marketing just a few years ago (think ebook/syndicated/ABM content playbook) doesn’t stand a chance today.

I’m leaning towards going the route of a generalist who can wield AI like a wizard, but obviously need to spend some time formulating a point of view here.

If you know A-players, pls DM a referral. 🫡

========

⚡ Quick wins

I’m a big fan of getting some quick wins in the first 30. Here’s my hitlist so you can hold me accountable in t-minus 25 days:

✅  Generate demos via a LinkedIn post (cheating a bit with my new position announcement from this week)
[ ] Ship a mini product launch with a demo video to accompany
[ ] Get an MVP of marketing infra setup
[ ] Run a product/market fit survey
[ ] Ship a customer story

========

**Disclaimer:** This plan is by no means intended to be a roadmap for others to follow. My intention, rather, is to be transparent about something that’s often held close to the vest.

How does our brand show up in AI results vs the competition?
If you’re not already getting this question from your CEO or board, it’s only a matter of time.

But what seems like a simple question to answer is not so easy…

❌ Web analytics only show referral traffic from LLMs.

❌ Prompting yourself is overly manual and just an n =1.

❌ Some SEO tools give you surface-level benchmarks but not detailed insights into how to go about improving results—the next inevitable question from your boss(es).


This is one of the many use cases we’re tackling at Scrunch AI: take the guesswork out of how your brand shows up in AI results.

Not only that, we give you a detailed trail of why your brand shows up the way it does.

I recorded a short demo (my first of many with Scrunch) to show just how easy it is to track and act on your presence in AI platforms.

In it, I walk through how to:
✧ Benchmark AI brand presence vs the competition
✧ Drill into prompt topics and levels of intent
✧ Identify what LLMs are citing in results

Really just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this one (I needed an easy quick win) but check it out and lmk what you think.

And when you get that inevitable ask from your CEO/board, I’m here for ya 😉

If you’ve ever been curious about the performance of career update posts (I know I was), here’s the results from an n = 1.

tl;dr — lots of reactions; little reach

Here’s a real quick breakdown.

Yesterday, I posted a career update.

I always see that these posts get a lot of action. Makes sense as LI is an employment-centric social network with work relationships.

Given that I post a decent amount on here, I have an impression to reaction ratio in my head—ballpark around 50 impressions for every reaction.

Every time I see someone post a career update, I can’t help but notice that posts get a ton of reactions. And, I always thought that they must get a lot of distribution as well.

Turns out that’s not the case in my experience.

While my post from yesterday got a good amount of reactions (309 likes and 76 comments as of right now... but who’s counting?), it didn’t get much reach.

To put things into perspective, I posted a comment on a semi-viral post that got more impressions than my career update post with an order of magnitude less reactions.

Anywho… no real takeaway from this other than sharing some behind the scenes anecdata that I’ve always been curious about.

I sit on a lot of demos and I hear a lot of pitches. My biggest pet peeve on said calls, is when I’m not being listened to.

How it typically goes...

Me: This pain is REALLY acute right now… can you help me solve it?

Rep: Absolutely. But first… [boilerplate questions followed by boilerplate pitch].

Me: [ties to move things along in the direction of my pain]

Rep: [steamrolls through that]

Me: [tunes out after an attempt or two]

===

On the other hand, the rare calls that go well, reps will:

1️⃣ Listen and show me how to relieve the pain quickly. Or not. Either way they are honest.

2️⃣ Do the homework upfront to understand (or even ask before the meeting) what I care about. Infer that pain based on signals like the pages I’ve visited or from the context of previous exchanges.

3️⃣ Connect the dots of 1&2 to hold a conversation that’s informative and gets me excited about the possibilities the product/solution can bring.

It’s rare that this happens, but when it does, it’s like magic. It leaves a good impression. I take the next step. And occasionally, a deal is made.

===

Shoutout to the team at Aligned for sitting down with me for a vent session. 

Here’s a little clip from that therapy session related to the above👇

#buyersblock?

✌️reasons to go to HubSpot INBOUND conf:
1) I’ve got a speaking session on Thurs (Sept 4)
2) We’re hosting a GTM mixer with Wistia on Wed (Sept 3)

More on each 👇

Speaking session → From Signal to Revenue — Sept 4 at 10:30am

I’m teaming up with Eunjoon (EJ) Cho from Tofu to deliver a session all about using first and third-party signals to identify warm prospects and run campaigns that convert.

For my portion, I’ll be sharing:
✅ How to use signals to find in-market audiences
✅ How to select which signals to get started with
✅ Examples from the highest converting plays I’m seeing

Link to session: https://lnkd.in/gRgHXbHv

===

GTM Leadership Mixer — Sept 3 at 5:30pm
(It’s the f***ing GTM leadership mixer!)

While we’re not going to be on a boat, we will have epic rooftop views at our GTM leadership mixer on Wednesday evening from 5:30 to 7:30.

We’re hosting with signal partner, Bombora, and featuring the GTM team Wistia as our customer speaker to share a little bit about what’s driving pipeline and revenue for them.

Join us for the views, good vibes, eats, and share notes with GTM leaders.

RSVP here → https://lu.ma/cjv22yhk

When I hear the fearmongering rhetoric that AI will “replace knowledge work,” I’m reminded of the Picasso napkin story.

As legend has it, Picasso was at a market in Paris when an admirer asked him for a quick sketch on a napkin.

He agreed, drew it in minutes, and handed it back--asking for a million Francs in exchange.

Shocked, she said: “How can you ask for so much? It only took you five minutes!”

“No,” Picasso replied, “it took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.”

===

For those with years of expertise (the Picassos in this analogy), AI is the tool that compresses decades of experience into seconds.

It’s not replacing knowledge. It’s accelerating time to value.

Copywriters Catch-22 of today: Say “AI-powered” and you sound like everyone else. Don’t and you’re not seen as AI-native.

Here are 28 ways to tell me you’re AI without telling me you’re AI 👇

🔢 Probabilistic / Statistical

- Non-deterministic: same input, different outputs
- Probabilistic: works in probabilities, not certainties
- Likelihood-based: chooses outcomes based on odds
- Confidence-weighted: ranks answers by certainty level

________ 

🧠 Learning / Adaptation

- Few-shot: learns from just a few examples
- Adaptive: adjusts as data or context changes
- Self-improving: gets better the more it’s used
- Self-learning: improves by analyzing new data
- Zero-shot: handles tasks without prior examples
- Weight-based: outputs guided by trained parameters, not rules
- Continual learning: learns new tasks without forgetting prior ones

________ 

🐕 Retrieval / Reasoning

- RAG: looks up info, then generates
- Token-level: builds text piece by piece
- Context-aware: factors in surrounding data
- Semantic search: finds results by meaning, not keywords

________ 

🎨 Generative / Creative

- Autoregressive: generates step by step
- Synthetic: creates new data, not reused
- Diffusion-based: refines noise into structure
- Generative: produces new content from patterns
- Model-driven: guided by models, not hard-coded rules
- Inference-based: applies learned weights to generate answers

________

🦾 Performance / Behavior

- Predictive: forecasts likely outcomes
- Contextual: adapts to surrounding input
- Iterative: improves through repeated steps
- Reinforcement-tuned: learns from trial and error
- Non-deterministic outputs: same input, different results
- Dynamic responses: varies answers instead of repeating
- Probabilistic reasoning: weighs options, picks the most likely

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