Go-to-market
Took RichAds from zero to $1M MRR. Built 90-day launch plans with positioning, channel playbooks and prioritized experiments.
Applying for Product Marketing Lead @ Linkfire
Dmitry Sergeev
Product Marketing Lead · B2B SaaS · Feature launches & adoption · Musician
12+ years in B2B SaaS and adtech marketing. I've co-founded 10 companies and advised about 30 more on go-to-market. I start with customers every time: around 300 interviews so far. The launch narrative, the sends, the sales stories and the pitch at the trade show booth all come from what customers tell me.
I'm also a singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. My band Stone People had a video on a leading national music channel for about five years. Later I built a guitar learning app for beginners and designed its song bundles myself. I know what an artist wants from a smart link, and I'd like to help Linkfire's customers get more out of theirs.
- Activation +35% from one onboarding launch
- ~300 customer interviews
- 30+ trade shows as an exhibitor
- Musician myself, on Spotify, Apple Music and more
Why me for a solo role
Seven skill sets, one hire
You're rebuilding marketing with one person first. That person has to launch, write, design, sell, talk to customers, run events and set up their own tools. I've done each of these for real, mostly as a founder, where nobody else was going to do it.
Product marketing
Launch narratives, positioning and sales assets. Repositioned RichAds around results and profit protection, and rewrote Ultra Boxing VR's messaging around what a player feels.
Customer discovery
Jobs-to-be-done interviews and journey maps. They set a dating app's positioning and stopped a messaging app before anyone paid to build it.
Business development
Closed deals myself, up to a $50K setup fee. Signed partners including MGID and IPONWEB, and built a partner network that brought in 40% of revenue.
Event marketing
Ran the booth, the meetings and the follow-up at trade shows worldwide as an exhibitor. Led market entry into North America and APAC.
Design and content
Designed the bundle covers for my guitar app, below. Made short video and AI video, landing pages and creatives, and went on camera for demos and livestreams.
Agentic development
I build with AI agents every day: SaaS MVPs, an AI outbound engine, and this page, which I built and deployed with an AI coding agent.
Music
Singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. I've been the artist your customers market, and I built a product for people learning to play.
Most product marketers have two or three of these. A solo marketer at a music-tech company needs all of them in the first year.
The launch you asked about
One onboarding launch, 35% more active customers
Your posting asks for a feature launch and what happened to adoption afterwards. Here's mine from RichAds, a self-serve ad platform that grew to 20,000+ business customers.
Before
Sign-ups who never started
Self-serve worked, but about 60% of new accounts never made the first $250 deposit. Interviews showed why: advertisers cared about results, not the interface, and they got stuck on setup and KYC before they saw any.
What I launched
A person within 10 minutes
Every new account got a message from its own account manager within 10 minutes, with help on setup and KYC. I built what the managers worked from: conversion benchmarks by vertical, so they could tell each advertiser what good looked like, and answers to the common objections.
Customer success then took each client from the first deposit to the third, the point where they became a regular account.
Adoption after
+35%
activation
The company went from $0 to $1M MRR in 16 months. The same research moved budget from interface polish into hands-on customer success and a managed-campaign offer.
The Linkfire version: find the accounts that have Artist Workspaces but haven't set it up, learn what stopped them, then write the launch for exactly that.
“I'd set it up from the Linux command line if you give me quality traffic.”
An advertiser in a RichAds interview. That one line changed what we built and how we sold it. I'd look for the same kind of line in Linkfire's customer conversations and get it to the commercial team.
Music
My band, and a guitar app I built
Stone People
My band
I sing, write songs and play guitar and piano. Stone People's video ran on a leading national music channel for about five years, and our 2017 album Back to the Primal is on all the major platforms.
A guitar learning app for complete beginners
Product I built
The app teaches famous songs as 1, 2 and 3-string guitar loops, so a complete beginner can play along from the first day.
Bundle covers I designed
I grouped the songs into themes people already recognize, then designed every cover myself. Packaging songs for a beginner is the same job as packaging a feature for a busy label marketer: who it is for and why they should care now.
The Greatest Movie SoundtracksMemorable songs from famous movies 
Greatest American BandsUS rock songs anyone can play 
The British InvasionUK rock songs anyone can play 
Crunchy Alternative RockTop rock songs from the 90s 
Heavy Distortion and Whammy Bar AbuseTop rock songs from the 80s 
Mainstream Rock Number-One SongsTop rock songs from the 2000s
How I'd start
My first 90 days at Linkfire
Your posting says the first job is to get existing customers using what you've built, then turn their results into stories that help sell. Here's how I'd run that.
Weeks 1–4
Learn who uses what
Read the usage data, sit with the relations managers, and interview 10 customers (artists, labels and artist managers) who use the newest features and who don't.
Ships: adoption baselines, feature positioning, launch calendar.
Month 2
Run one launch end to end
Narrative, segments, then owned channels (email, in-app, website, social media), with visuals and short videos I make myself. Measure feature adoption at day 7 and 30.
Ships: first launch, playbook, adoption report.
Month 3
Turn results into stories
Find customers getting real results and turn them into signed-off case studies, testimonials and sales snippets. Plan events like ESNS, Reeperbahn and ADE.
Ships: 3 case studies, snippet library, events plan.
Experience
Where I've done it
Sep 2026 – Present
NOCREW Studio
Co-founder
- Agentic developmentBuilding AI-assisted SaaS MVPs.
- VideoAI video for brands and a first vertical series, made with Midjourney, Seedance and Kling. A person edits every piece before it ships.
2023 – Present
Product Marketing & GTM Consultant
Independent, about 30 clients
Positioning, customer research and launches for SaaS, apps and marketplaces.
- ResearchA dating app in New York and Texas. Interviews kept showing the same reaction: people responded to a staged reveal of profiles, close to the "Love is Blind" format. The founder didn't like the comparison, but the pattern held across every round, so it became the positioning.
- ResearchAn instant messaging web app. 100 conversations with potential users showed no real need for it, and the founder learned that before spending on a build.
- LaunchA 90-day launch plan for an AI developer tool: positioning, channel playbooks and 15 prioritized experiments.
- AIAn AI outbound engine for a B2B client increased booked meetings by 40% and cut prospecting time by 60%.
Jun 2024 – Mar 2025
Telegang Agency
Head of Growth & Strategy
Subscriber growth for Telegram channels run by brands and media.
- CreatorsAround 20 core clients, and conversations with hundreds of Telegram channel owners about how they grow and earn from an audience. I've also worked with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok creators.
- Retention2M+ subscribers acquired and cost per subscriber down 20%. Kept retention above 50% through lifecycle marketing: automation and audience segmentation.
- Fan dataBuilt subscriber economics models so clients could see what each subscriber was worth.
- ContentDid the copywriting and content creation myself: wrote the hooks, made the creatives and ran A/B testing on formats.
Aug 2022 – Jun 2024
Ultra Boxing VR
Co-founder & Growth Lead
VR boxing and fitness game, now live on Meta Quest.
- Product launchRan the product launch: grew a Discord community of 1,000+ early adopters before launch, and fed their feedback into messaging tests and the product roadmap.
- PositioningRewrote the landing page and campaign messaging around what a player feels. Conversion went up 25%.
- ContentDirected the visual style and went on camera for demos and livestreams. Ran 10+ experiments a month across landing pages, video variants and influencer funnels.
Mar 2018 – Oct 2020
RichAds
Co-founder & Director of GTM & Revenue (Product Marketing)
Self-serve push, popunder and native ad network. A two-sided marketplace of advertisers and publishers.
- AdoptionAbout 60% of sign-ups never made the first $250 deposit. I added a person to onboarding: every new account heard from its own account manager within 10 minutes, with help on setup and KYC. Activation went up 35%.
- LifecycleSet up the handoff to customer success, whose job was to get each client from the first deposit to the third, the point where they became a regular account.
- Industry eventsRepresented the company at industry events: exhibited at 30+ international trade shows, and ran the booth, the meetings and the follow-up.
- PositioningInterviews showed advertisers cared about results far more than the interface. I repositioned the brand around profit protection and wrote the landing pages, the outbound sequences and the webinar funnel, which I scripted and hosted. Watch a RichAds webinar
- Sales enablementBuilt the sales enablement kit the commercial team sold with: conversion benchmarks by vertical, competitor comparisons and objection handling. Hired and coached the Head of Sales, and wrote playbooks for 5 regional markets.
- Outcome$0 to $1M MRR in 16 months and 20,000+ B2B clients onboarded. A partner network brought in 40% of revenue. CAC down 35% through lead scoring and better routing.
Jan 2013 – Oct 2020
Platform.io
Head of International Business Development
White-label adtech SaaS for building custom DSP, SSP and DMP products. A sales-led product with a long buying process.
- Market entryLed market entry into North America and APAC.
- Key customersClosed deals with key customers myself. The largest was a $50K setup fee for a customized platform, and that client ramped to $100K in monthly revenue on it.
- WritingTurned technical specs into value propositions that non-technical buyers could take to their own leadership.
- PartnershipsSigned 50+ partnerships, including MGID and IPONWEB.
What Linkfire asked for
Skills, with the proof attached
Launching features to existing customers (customer marketing)
The RichAds onboarding launch above: activation up 35%. Lifecycle automation at Telegang kept retention above 50%, and Ultra Boxing VR had 1,000+ early adopters waiting on launch day.
Positioning instincts
Who it's for, what problem it solves, why it matters now. A dating app's positioning came from an interview pattern the founder didn't want to hear. RichAds moved from selling the interface to selling results.
Customer messaging, segmentation and automation
Lifecycle automation and audience segmentation at Telegang. Email programs on Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Beehiiv, HubSpot as the CRM, and capture pages built on Kit.
Clear, persuasive writing
Copywriting: landing pages, webinar scripts, outbound sequences and sales copy. I turned DSP and SSP specs into business cases that non-technical buyers acted on. Writing songs is good practice for cutting words.
An eye for design, and making content yourself
Content creation: the bundle covers above are mine. Short video and AI video at NOCREW, on camera for Ultra Boxing VR, creatives and hooks at Telegang, 150 creative tests in 3 weeks for one client.
Comfort with data
Product analytics and tracking: GA4, server-side GTM, Meta Conversions API and S2S postbacks. I set up the tracking myself, then change the plan when the numbers say so: lead scoring and routing cut CAC 35% at RichAds, and creative testing cut one client's cost per lead 38%.
An eye for a customer story
About 300 interviews, and the Linux command line quote above came out of one of them. At Platform.io a client who paid a $50K setup fee ramped to $100K in monthly revenue. That's the kind of story I'd get signed off and into the commercial team's hands.
AI in daily work, with opinions
Every customer call I run is transcribed and synthesized against open hypotheses, and I build with AI agents daily. Where it helps: synthesis, first drafts, variations, video and code. Where it gets in the way: it smooths out the customer's own words and will invent a quote if you let it. So a person checks the output before it changes anything.
Music industry, creator and entertainment markets
A musician myself, with a band and a guitar learning app behind me. I've worked with hundreds of Telegram channel owners and with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok creators, launched a VR game, and now run an AI film studio.
Fan and customer data
Fan engagement: subscriber economics models at Telegang showed what each subscriber was worth, with retention above 50%. CRM and customer data: at RichAds I tied CRM, product usage and revenue together with HubSpot, postbacks and server-side tracking.
Async, distributed work
Fully remote since 2023, working with about 30 consulting clients across time zones.
Tools
Customer messaging
HubSpot
Email
MailchimpKlaviyoBeehiivKit
Analytics & tracking
GA4Google Tag ManagerMeta Conversions API
Design & video
CanvaMidjourneySeedanceKling
AI & automation
ClaudeClaude Coden8nMakeClay
Languages and education
English C1. Russian native. Belarusian State Economic University — Bachelor's degree.