Madhav Bhandari

Storylane

My priorities:
1. Create, capture and convert demand using organic search, brand, events, social and micro-communities.
2. Run day-to-day marketing operations
3. Find new growth initiatives and scale them
4. Find marketing team gaps and fill them

On the journey to hit $10M ARR in the next couple of quarters.

Director of Marketing

Early Stage Marketing

I help SaaS companies drive demand to grow from $5M to $15M ARR.

Current and former clients include Hubstaff, Close (YC), Bonsai (YC), Writesonic (YC), Weflow, Continu, TestBox, ProProfs, InsightlyAI, Timeero, ViralTag, Qualaroo and more.

Fractional Demand Gen

Weflow

Helped them grow from pre-revenue stage to their first set of customers.

- Owned the marketing funnel end-to-end, from awareness stage to install/demo
- Experimented with positioning, value propositions, buyer personas etc. to consistently reach our audience
- Crafted compelling, high quality content for our various channels— social media, email and newsletter, gated PDFs, SEO, product launches
- Built a revenue-driven content strategy, content production process and hired a team of freelance writers to build capacity (0 to 5000 visitors/mo in 6 months)
- Optimized website and executed changes to improve conversion rates and user engagement

Founding Marketer

Bonsai (YC W16)

I drove Bonsai's growth by implementing a "less is more" strategy, developed a high-performing marketing team and scalable systems. I handled decisions on expanding our marketing funnel, managing budgets, allocating channel investment, and building execution capacity to drive this growth.

Some of my work that helped 3x our revenue:
1. Scaled our SEO & content strategy
2. Grew the affiliate program
3. Managed our ads strategy & budget (with an agency)
4. Built our marketing team
5. Owned our lifecycle marketing projects

Head Of Marketing

Close

I was the first product marketing hire at Close and worked on several projects that helped us break into 8 figure ARR.

Some of those projects were:
- Led various launches like new features, rolling out our rebrand (Close.io to Close.com) and rolling out new pricing structure (introduce our lowest tier plan + change existing pricing). 
- Improved our new trial email onboarding to increase conversions
- Built our competitor comparison pages
- Launched our partner program
- Ran tests to expand Close to new verticals & international markets

I reported directly to the CEO (Steli Efti).

Senior Marketing Manager

Hubstaff

As Hubstaff's first marketing hire, my job was to test channels, shape our early stage growth strategy and grow our revenue.

Here are some projects that helped us achieve incredible revenue growth:
- Testing 84 marketing tactics across content marketing, SEO, partnerships, social media, email marketing to find our foundational marketing channels
- Developed our foundational marketing channels, primarily SEO, content and partnerships
- Wrote some of our highest converting articles & industry-leading reports (covered by Forbes, CNBC & Entrepreneur)
- Built and managed our content & SEO strategy
- Built scalable SEO processes based on team's performance on individual input & output metrics
- Recruited and managed a team of freelance writers, contractors and content marketers
- Created quarterly/annual marketing plans for SEO, content and partnerships
- Responsible for our team's marketing R&D budget to find our next big growth channel (led projects like building a talent marketplace to get leads, testing outbound sales, new verticals)
- Led vertical expansion projects to expand Hubstaff into a new category (field service companies)

These initiatives helped:
- Contribute 10-15% of our revenue through integration partnerships
- Contribute 60% revenue from SEO
- Grow Hubstaff's revenue from $200k to $5 million+ ARR in 4 years!

Hubstaff has now grown into the world's leading time tracking software with annual revenue of over $20 million.

Marketing Manager

ClinchPad

As a part of the founding team, I handled all customer-facing channels - marketing, sales & support. My work:
- Get early traction with quick marketing experiments, software partnerships & sales
- Plan & execute our content marketing strategy to generate MQLs
- Do product demos to MQLs
- Own customer support & refine product roadmap based on feedback

Grew our annual revenue from $0 to $100k ARR in 1 year.

Growth Lead

I'm a B2B technology marketer with 10+ years experience. I've helped many B2B tech companies drive millions in traffic, signups and ARR.

Some results:
- As Hubstaff's first marketer, grew revenue from $200K to $5M ARR (now $15M) in 4 years.
- As Bonsai's Head of Marketing, tripled ARR in 2 years.
- As Close.io's marketer, broke through revenue plateau.

Here's a snapshot of my background:

1.  B2B experience: 10+ years in B2B SaaS & working 100% remotely.

2.  Proven Track Record: Grew ARR for 9 companies, including 3 to $5M+ ARR and 2 to $15M+ ARR.

3.  Strategy & Execution: I make plans and I convert them into action - no matter the resources.

4.  Bootstrapped + VC-backed startup background: I bring the best of both to the table.

I have a deep expertise in demand capture and broad experience across demand creation and conversion. My go-to growth strategy is focused on SEO, complemented by content, affiliates, and ads for growth.

I consult with companies like ProProfs, Writesonic, Weflow, Continu, TestBox and Timeero, helping them overcome specific demand gen challenges on their journey from $500k to $5M ARR.

Head of Marketing

Internally, the Chief Content Officer at Storylane.

My goal is to drive demand for Storylane using content-led initiatives such as video, social, organic search, brand and partnerships. 

Navigating the $1M to $10M ARR journey over the next couple of quarters.

Still soaking it in… building in public can take you places!

#ahrefsevolve

Head of Marketing @ Storylane | Toddler Dad

No alternative text description for this image

I’ve been spending some time figuring out how to show up more in LLMs.

The deeper I went, the more it reminded me of early SEO days - a lot of buzzwords, half-baked playbooks, and people claiming they’ve cracked it. AEO. GEO. LLM.txt files. Visibility tools. Everyone’s got a theory. Few have proof.

Most of the noise today comes from trying to “control” LLM visibility. But there’s no real standard yet.

Take LLM.txt files, for example. You can create one - it won’t hurt - but it won’t move the needle either. No LLMs are reading them right now, and there’s no guarantee they will in the future.

We even tested a few tools that claimed they could send anonymized queries to “train” LLMs to show our brand higher in responses. None of them worked. All fad.

So I started testing, reading, and talking to people actively spending on AEO/GEO. My goal was to find the 80/20 - the 20% of tactics that actually drive 80% of visibility.

Here’s what that 20% looks like from what I’ve observed so far:

1. Brand drives most LLM visibility.
When people talk about you, cite you, and mention you across credible sources, LLMs pick it up. Brand mentions, dark social conversations, interviews, podcasts - they all matter. Even citation-building (the new link-building) in publications that consistently show up for your target queries helps. Get known in your category or among your ICPs, and you’ll show up in LLMs.

2. Add prompt queries in your content.
LLMs need context. Creating content that mirrors how users phrase their prompts gives LLMs more ways to associate your brand with relevant queries. Sometimes a single unique keyword phrasing means your content is the only one that answers it. Even better is to approach content like a journalist - uncover new insights, be the source others cite. 

Tools like Profound and Scrunch AI have been great for identifying these opportunities. Below screenshot is from Profound.

3. Rank on Google.
Old-school SEO still feeds the machine. You don’t need to hit #1. Just land on page one. LLMs still lean heavily on what Google ranks.

Everything else to me right now is just... noise. 

These are working observations, not conclusions - and I’m happy to be proven wrong. Is this the 80/20 or am I missing something critical?

Profound

Scrunch

Keith Hayes

We’re spending $700K on LinkedIn ads this year.

But with a budget that large, a few challenges are becoming clear.

First, competition in LinkedIn timeline ads is growing fast. CPMs continue to go up. Second, we’re not planning to increase that spend - it’s already a significant investment. The focus now is on getting more out of the same dollars.

One area with a lot of room to optimize is audience targeting.

For months, we’ve been running native LinkedIn targeting - job titles, company sizes, exclusions, everything. The setup’s pretty solid. But our audience penetration wasn’t growing.

A big part of that was large non-ICP companies consuming a big chunk of ad budget. And sometimes, LinkedIn’s own targeting rules just weren’t strict enough.

So I’ve been exploring another angle.

The idea is to build our audience in a tool like Primer, send it into LinkedIn as a 3rd-party audience, and then layer on seniority exclusions.

That setup would give us tighter control over the companies, ICPs, and seniority levels - and help us avoid wasting impressions and dollars on people who’ll never buy.

The way we’ll test if it works is simple. We’ll run it as an isolated campaign and compare CPMs and ROAS against our native targeting campaigns.

If it delivers, we’ll have a more efficient way to make the same $700K go further.

Brand partnership • Head of Marketing @ Storylane | Toddler Dad

One of the hardest things you can ask your team is:
“Hey, we need to think differently. Can you come up with some new campaign idea that can make us go viral?”

It sounds inspiring. But it’s completely directionless.

I’ve asked that question before - and it never leads anywhere. The team doesn’t know where to start, and honestly, neither do you.

That’s what led me to create the PIPE (Pattern Interrupt Portfolio Engine) Framework at Storylane.

Instead of asking for random ideas, I started asking a different question:
“What’s a pattern in our industry that we can break?”

That single shift changed everything.

It gave the team a starting point. They began spotting repetitive patterns — the same visuals, the same messaging, the same tactics — and that’s where the real ideas began to surface.

It turned creativity from something vague into something structured.
From one-off sparks into a repeatable process.

That’s the philosophy behind PIPE. It’s not about chasing inspiration. It’s about building a system that helps you consistently find ways to stand out - again and again.

I can neither confirm or deny that I'm writing a book about it 😅

This morning, I found myself in San Diego, sitting across from Reid Carr, the CEO of Red Door Interactive.

He DM’d me about doing a podcast together, so I stopped by their office. I walk in – and it’s not your regular office. It’s a pattern-interrupt of an office. You can tell when a team is built to think differently.

After we wrapped, Reid shared that his enterprise clients often want new ideas that are already proven to work. To me, that’s a paradox. New ideas aren’t new if they’re already proven. Everyone wants innovation, but they also want guarantees. Until today, I would've dismissed it.

But he's found a solution to it and it's simple and brilliant - they just look outside their category. They interview marketers across industries to uncover ideas that have already been battle-tested by them. Then they re-apply them for their client's own category.

That’s one of the smartest ways I’ve seen to find pattern interrupt ideas in B2B marketing.

Because most of us get stuck in our own bubbles - same channels, same playbooks, same formats. And no matter how hard you try to think or come up with new ideas, you just can't. Sometimes the real breakthroughs come from cross-pollination.

- Influencer marketing worked in B2C for years before B2B picked it up, and now it’s one of the most cost-efficient channels. 
- Visual branding is following the same path - bold color, emotion, creativity, storytelling - a lot of ideas worth borrowing from consumer brands. We’ve done the same at Storylane, taking cues from other industries and reshaping them for our world.
- Even the idea I shared last week about putting constraints around creativity — having a start and end date for campaigns - came from Coldplay. 

And that’s the real lesson from today - fresh ideas rarely come from staring harder at your own category.

Step outside it. See what’s been working elsewhere. Borrow it, tweak it, make it your own.

Talk to people who think differently. Pay attention to what’s been working in completely different industries. Do something different - hit the gym, travel, volunteer, or just step away from your everyday loop. That’s what breaks your mental patterns and opens new ones.

You might be at the gym, and suddenly something clicks - a random thought from another world (gym) connects perfectly to a problem you’re solving at work (B2B marketing).

That’s one of the most reliable ways to find pattern interrupt ideas in B2B marketing.

PS: Day after tomorrow, I’ll debut my pattern interrupt framework PIPE on stage at Ahrefs Evolve. If you’re building a software company in a crowded category and want to rethink your GTM, come to my talk.

I saw something Coldplay did recently that made me rethink how we run episodic marketing content at Storylane.

They’ve decided to stop at 12 albums. That’s it. Done.

Chris Martin explained why: “Having that limit means the quality control is so high right now. For a song to make it, it’s almost impossible, which is great. Where we could be coasting, we’re trying to improve.”

I love that mindset. Because it’s the same thing that happens in B2B too.

When there’s no finish line, momentum turns into maintenance. Things that start with purpose slowly become routine. 

- The customer podcast that hasn’t had a new story in months and feels mechanical.
- The recurring webinar that happens just because it’s Thursday.
- The case studies that have been going on for so long that the context behind why you started writing them is lost.

Now at Storylane, we're approaching these differently. 
- Our Demo Kitchen series (our spin to case-studies) will run for 10 episodes, and we'll close it out. 
- GTM on the Go wrapped after 12 episodes. 
- Demo Dundies (our demo competition) might not run beyond season 3 next year.
We'll make these our best and then we'll move on.

And if something really connects, we can always bring it back for another season.

Most episodic marketing campaigns need a start AND an end date - not a forever date. The constraint is the creative edge.

That’s how you keep the quality high, the energy sharp, and the work from drifting into autopilot.

PS: Prompted Sora to show Coldplay’s next era by reimagining them as B2B marketers writing on LinkedIn about "what touring taught them about B2B marketing. Sorry not sorry.

Couple months back someone from our sales team told me this:

“We only get 30 mins on a first demo call. By the time we do intros and show the product, the call is over. We’re not even getting into use cases. Can we pre-educate prospects so the call is about advancing the deal, not showing them the basics?”

And they’re right. 30 mins is already a lot to ask from a prospect. Many don’t even read the website. They land on Storylane, fill the demo form, and hop on the call cold.

(Kind of makes me question the point of the website sometimes - but that’s for another time.)

So we made a simple change. Every time someone books a demo, 30 minutes later they get this email from the AE assigned to their account:



"Hey <name>,

Thanks for booking time. Couple of quick things, before we chat:

Buyer Hub → All our products, pricing, and resources (https://lnkd.in/eHFjdc9h)
Playbooks → How 5,000+ teams use Storylane across sales, marketing and product / CS (https://lnkd.in/embgB4TD)
Showcase → Examples of our customer's live demos (https://lnkd.in/eNNBJNsJ)

This should give you a quick head start before we connect.

Talk soon,
<AE name>"


What were the results? 1 out of 5 prospects clicked through the demos!

Which means at least 20% of our calls are no longer “let me show you the product” walkthroughs - they’re moving straight into deal progression and questions.

To me, that’s a BIG win. And I expect those numbers to keep climbing as we optimize this campaign.

Even better - we’ve added token variables (?name=John&company=Acme) to the Buyer Hub link via Storylane HubSpot integration. Which means anyone in the email thread who checks out Buyer Hub is tracked.

Our AEs see exactly what was clicked, which product demos were explored, and which modules got the most attention. They walk into the call with the full history of the prospect (and the entire buying committee). They know what the prospect cares about and can anticipate questions.

That’s how we turned a 30-minute intro/demo call into a 30-minute sales conversation.

Seriously worth trying with your demo flow.

PS: We built Storylane so prospects can try your product before buying - through interactive demos. 5,000+ teams use it. First demo’s free: https://lnkd.in/e8pAsVkJ

Everybody thinks interactive demos are gonna replace the sales call.

Wrong.

I’ve been at Storylane for a little over 2 years now. Interactive demos are not the silver bullet to close the deal. You still need the live demo. You still need to shape the conversation, tell the story, and focus on the right use case. Some of the detail just doesn’t fit into a guided flow.

Here’s what they do though.

Storylane gives buyers a first look. They can click through, get a feel for the product, and immediately see the value. No waiting around for your AE’s calendar. No sitting through a 30-minute intro call.

And when your champion needs to pitch it internally, they’ve got something they can send to the exec who only has 90 seconds of attention span. That’s real leverage.

These things don’t make headlines, but they stack up. The small edges. The compounding ones. The difference between starting cold and starting warm.

So no, Storylane isn’t killing the live demo. But it is making the path to that demo shorter. Easier. More scalable.

That’s a competitive advantage.

PS: We built Storylane so prospects can try your product before buying - through interactive demos. 5,000+ teams use it. First demo’s free: https://lnkd.in/e8pAsVkJ

Sales reps have come a long way.
From dinosaurs showing off new boulder tech to knights demoing catapults to kings - every era had the same problem.
The demo always broke.

We turned that pain into a product film.

And thankfully, it’s 2025 now - where Storylane lets sales teams run sandbox demos that don’t crash, lag, or need a “hold on, it’s loading.”

AEs, SDRs, and SEs use it to spin up reliable demos in minutes, nail the narrative, and never worry about live environment fails again.

65 million years later, the perfect demo finally exists with Storylane 

Enjoy this piece of art from our social team! 😂

PS: We built Storylane so prospects can try your product before buying - through interactive demos. 5,000+ teams use it. First demo’s free: https://lnkd.in/e8pAsVkJ

Not all interactive demo tech is the same.

There are 4 types. And if you don’t know the difference, you’ll pick the wrong one.

I’ve seen every version. Here’s the breakdown:

1️⃣ Screenshot demos with guided tours

Clickable screenshots. Guided path. Done in hours, not weeks.
They look polished, load instantly, and let prospects self-serve.
Perfect for marketing websites when the CMO says, “We need this up tomorrow.”
But - you can’t edit the content inside each screen as it’s a product screenshot.

2️⃣  HTML demos with guided tours
This is the money-maker. It feels like your real product. Buttons work. Scrolling works. You can edit ANY text, data, or image.
You control exactly what buyers see - highlight features, drop in your own messaging, block off what you don’t want them poking around in.
Sales teams love it. Perfect for champion enablement - when your buyer needs to sell it up the chain without you in the room.

3️⃣ Sandbox demos
Same as HTML under the hood, but no guided tour. Prospects can explore freely. Looks identical to the product, but it’s a closed instance. No backend risk.
Sales can tweak logos, data, buttons - whatever - to tailor for each prospect.
Presales builds the templates, sales customizes them. Efficient, repeatable workflow.

4️⃣ Live sandbox demos
This is your actual product with sample data. The “realest” experience.
Prospects can touch everything. Great for technical evaluation.
But - they’re a bear to maintain. Setup takes weeks or months. Every update needs engineering.

So which do you choose?

Marketing wants fast? Screenshot demos.
Sales needs tailored conversations? HTML with tours.
Sales wants freedom without engineering? Sandboxes.
Technical buyers demand full functionality? Live sandbox - if you can spare the dev time.

Match the demo type to the exact job it has to do in your funnel. 

Oh, and by the way… Storylane already supports the first three types of interactive demo tech. That’s a huge advantage when you want to roll demos out across multiple GTM teams. Most vendors only serve one team, which means you end up with two different demo tools in the org which is a waste of budget.

See how Storylane makes all three possible: https://lnkd.in/e8pAsVkJ

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