The Scale Up Collective - Go-to-market for challengers

We remove the guesswork from marketing growth

Our vision is to create a world where more founders succeed more often by improving the odds of founder success

We work with Post-seed to Series B startups across Tech (b2c, b2b, b2b2c), SaaS, Fintech, Insurtech, <Healthtech>

Our mission is to improve your odds of success with our unique approach to audience research.

Scale Up Insights:  we understand what your audience really want & need, how you should priortise these audience segments to super power your growth

Scale Up CMO: we build the most potent marketing strategy and drive your team to reach goals 

Scale Up Talent: we assemble the right team to deliver on your goals

Ultimately, we ensure you solve the right problems in order to scale quickly and easily.


DM me if you’d like to learn more!

Founder

Angel Academe - increasing female investment

Angel Academe Member

Baltic Ventures

Baltic Ventures is an early-stage tech accelerator based in the Baltic Triangle, Liverpool that supports game-changing founding teams who are building the solutions and businesses of tomorrow.

Baltic Ventures Accelerator 2023 offers a 4-month cohort programme, including £50k investment, weekly workshops, VC investor meetings, and mentorship.

Coach and Mentor

Female Founders Rise

Supporting a growing network of female founders through advice, connection, insight and intentional networking.Supporting a growing network of female founders through advice, connection, insight and intentional networking.

Founding Advisory Member

A range of tech companies -> B2C fintech, regtech and the blockchain

I worked to launch and scale a number of startups as a fractional CMO including B2C fintech, regtech and the blockchain.

Fractional CMO

Yolt - Unthink Money

Chief Marketing Officer

The smart thinking money app that makes managing your money clear and easy. See more at http://yolt.com

Head of Growth, Yolt

Starling Bank

Starling is a licensed bank that won’t really act like a bank at all. We believe money should work in-sync with your life, work, and relationships. 

Our mission is to create a bank that guides and informs you towards better decisions. By giving you real-time insights, Starling enables you to understand your financial life in a whole new way.

Head of Growth

Yubl Ltd

- Led the marketing team to launch the new social media App with >1.4M installs, regularly in the Top 5 on the Social Media App Store Charts 
- Led the team across establishing brand positioning, qualitative research, marketing strategy and implementation of acquisition and retention programs 
- Worked closely with the Product and Development Team to build a customer-centric product 
- Worked in partnership with Head of Analytics to track metrics daily across acquisition and retention: MAU/DAU, Day 1, Day 7, Day 30, time spent in App etc

YUBL is the new social messaging mobile app that exists to help groups to interact; to debate, to play, to express as individuals and make decisions as a group.

Head of Campaign Management

Skype

- Curated large global audiences for Microsoft’s Entertainment Partnerships, culminating in brand engagement and acquisition  
- Led the communications strategy to support live entertainment and broadcast events with US$14m annual budget  
- Led campaigns across Skype, Nokia, Windows, Internet Explorer, BING & One Drive  
- Realised never-been-done-before projects such as Eric Whitacre’s Live Virtual Choir at TED 2013

Global Campaign Lead

Saatchi & Saatchi

- Straight off the plane from South America, I spent five months at Saatchi & Saatchi working across their Toyota EMEA and Weight Watchers business.
- Whilst WW were losing market share, led the team to strategically shift their brand in order to regain their No.1 market position. 
- On Toyota UK, tasked to increase the creativity of the global team’s work

Freelance Account Director

With over 20 years of experience in launching and growing tech startups, I am the Founder of The Scale Up Collective, a marketing strategy consultancy that helps post-seed to series B startups scale faster and easier. I am also an Angel Academe Member and a Women in FinTech Powerlist honoree, recognising my contribution and influence in the fintech sector.

At The Scale Up Collective, we remove the guesswork from marketing growth by creating and executing potent go-to-market strategies based on deep audience insights. We work as an extension of your team, bringing in the right experts as and when they are needed, and enabling you to reach your goals without breaking the bank. We have worked with 60+ startups across tech, SaaS, fintech, insurtech, and healthtech, and are on a mission to support over 1,000 startups in the next 5 years. I also coach and mentor startup founders and teams from disadvantaged backgrounds, as I believe that all good ideas deserve the chance to succeed.

Knowing when to keep going, tweak or stop

One of the hardest parts of marketing is knowing when to change course.

When to double down.
When to tweak.
When to stop.

The best marketers aren’t the ones who follow the plan no matter what. They’re the ones who listen to their audience and adjust quickly.

In a recent project, Google ads were driving traffic but the quality was poor and, based on research, we knew this wasn’t part of their customer journey. We reduced the spend to brand protection, focused on where the audience actually was, LinkedIn and Reddit, and rebuilt around activity that delivered results within the first two weeks.

The difference wasn’t luck. It was clarity. Knowing what the audience wanted and having the confidence to stop what wasn’t working.

Don’t confuse activity with progress. Listen, measure, and focus your energy where it counts.

#marketingstrategy #growth #fractionalCMO

Lucy Woolfenden

Growth-focused CMO | Taking the guesswork out of scaling tech brands | 20+ yrs launching success stories from Skype to Starling Bank

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It’s half term which means the juggle is real.

Every time the holidays roll around I remind myself that I can’t do it all. This week isn’t about trying to tick every box, it’s about focusing on what’s actually important.

When time’s tight I go back to the things I know work. 
✔️The content that’s already performed well. ✔️The posts that sparked a real conversation. ✔️The insights that people saved or shared.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking we need to create something new every time. But repurposing your best content is one of the smartest things you can do. 
Turn a great post into a short video. 
Pull a quote for a visual. 
Reshare a story that still holds up. Most people won’t remember seeing it the first time.

So this week I’m choosing progress over perfection and using what’s already proven to work.

If you had to pick one piece of content to repurpose this week, what would it be?

(Pic taken yesterday, walking the sandstone trail with my dad and Percy the dog)

𝐅𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝.

My friend and all-round powerhouse Emmie Faust is leading something incredibly important:
 👉 The Rise Report
One of the largest surveys of female founders in the UK.

It’s anonymous, it takes 8 minutes, and we’re nearly there:
 ✅ 1,600 responses in
 🚀 2,000 needed

Emmie's doing this because 
🤯  There hasn’t been robust, national data on women founders for over five years.
😶‍🌫️ Because when 300 responses and 1,200 data points were submitted to the Parliamentary Enquiry, they were ignored.
🚀  Because if we want change, we need evidence — not anecdotes.

This is about creating a credible benchmark report that captures the real experiences of women running businesses across the UK. 
The challenges, yes, but also the wins, the resilience, and the success stories that deserve more attention.

If you’re a woman founder, please add your voice:
 👉 Share your experience in The Rise Report: https://lnkd.in/ez4taF9j

We’re nearly at the finish line. Let’s get it there.
#TheRiseReport #FemaleFounders #WomenInBusiness #Entrepreneurship #DataForChange

There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from doing brilliant work that goes nowhere.

Do you know what I mean? 

Last year I sat with a fintech CMO who’d done 30+ customer and non-customer interviews.
✅ Beautiful insights, clear messaging by segment
❎ But six months later, nothing had changed.

“The website’s the same. Sales still use the old deck. I know what we should be doing… we just can’t make it happen.”

I’ve been there. 
You finally understand your customers, you can see what better looks like but the gap between knowing and doing feels impossible.

Not because people don’t care, but because turning “IT cares about integration, compliance cares about audit trails” into 47 tactical changes across 6 channels is huge.

So the insights sit in a deck. 
Gathering dust.
Tomorrow I’m sharing what I’ve learned about bridging that gap 
and how to turn insight into action and get results.

If you’ve ever felt that frustration, this one’s for you.

#B2BMarketing #Positioning #GrowthStrategy

Here's how we turn customer conversations into content that converts

Here’s how we help B2B SaaS teams unlock their next stage of growth without spending a penny more on acquisition:
↳ Record five real customer calls (sales, onboarding, support)
↳ Transcribe and feed them into AI (your LLM of choice)
↳ Feed your LLM with your Jobs To Be Done / customer problems you solve 
↳ Ask questions like “What problems do customers repeat most often?” or "How did they feel after they purchased" 
↳ Build messaging and roadmap priorities only around those patterns
That’s it.

Every time I’ve seen this be integrated properly, marketing suddenly sounds like customers, not consultants.
And this makes growth feel easier, because you’re not guessing anymore

The answers are already sitting in your conversations. 
You just haven’t looked closely enough.

Follow me, Lucy, for more frameworks that help founders scale smarter, not noisier.

PS I also got this idea from a client conversation yesterday. Winning when my brain is dead at the end of the day!

Carousel of growth tips

You don’t need to “find time” to write content, 
you just need a better way to capture it.

If “write something for LinkedIn” keeps sliding down your to-do list every week, 
you’re not alone.

Every founder I speak to says the same thing:
“I know I should be posting… I just don’t have time (or energy) to write.”

That’s completely fair.
And also me last week 🫠 

You didn’t build a business to become a content creator.
But you don't actually need to write from scratch, you already have the content.
↳ It’s in your calls with customers.
↳ It’s in the way you explain your product to investors.
↳ It’s in the conversations where you light up talking about what’s broken in your industry.

The problem isn’t that you’ve got nothing to say. 
It’s that no one’s capturing it.

That’s what we’ve been fixing.

We spend 30 minutes talking to founders, no slides, no scripts, just a proper conversation.
↳ Then we've trained AI to pull out the best bits: the sharp opinions, the stories, the moments you sound most like you.
↳ From that one chat, you get 4-6 weeks of content that actually sounds like a human (because it started with one).

As one founder said to me last week:
“I stopped feeling guilty about not posting. Now marketing just happens in the background.”

If you're sick of trying to “find time” to write it down.
Just start talking.

👇 Read the full blog to see exactly how we do it (and what we got wrong before we nailed it).

#foundermarketing #contentstrategy #b2bmarketing #ai #startups

Hi there 👋 Can we talk about the thing that's probably sitting on your to-do list right now, making you feel slightly guilty every time you see it? "

Open article: Why you're not creating content (it's not what you think) by Lucy Woolfenden • 8 min read

Why you're not creating content (it's not what you think)

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