How Speakeasy found their marketing Swiss army knife with Divisional
“We would’ve spent months trying to find a marketer like Tatiana. The ownership that she took of our growth activities and ‘get shit done’ mentality made us realize that we needed her full-time”
- Simon Yu, Co-Founder
Speakeasy is the go-to platform for technical teams to create a great API Developer Experience, leading to faster onboarding for users, registry-compliance via Terraform, and visibility on API changes. They are off to a flying start since their inception in 2022, raising $11M in funding and boasting industry-leading customers across a range of verticals — such as Prove, Codat, Airbyte, Unstructured, and more.
Problem / Challenge
Off the back of a strong start to organic marketing via Divisional, Speakeasy entered a new world of problems: how do you test multiple channels when you don’t have an in-house marketer?
As they started to onboard new agencies and freelancers, Simon & Sagar, the co-founders of Speakeasy, returned to Divisional with a variety of challenges:
1. Hold agencies & freelancers accountable to their work
After onboarding numerous partners across organic social, outbound, PR, and more, the Speakeasy team had trouble keeping them all aligned. Timelines were being missed and many of the teams didn’t have the context they needed to take their work to the finish line.
Both co-founders were stretched between customer calls and work on the product, which left a backlog of partially completed tasks and frustrated agency partners. They needed someone to coordinate with these partners, set expectations, and share with the founders what the status of all these activities looked like.
“We had a lot of balls in the air but it was challenging to get them all to deliver. I was getting stretched between my core focus (Dev Rel) and all these other projects, which was very challenging”
- Nolan Sullivan, Developer Relations Lead
2. Support the internal team on events & conferences
For Dev Tooling, the importance of in-person conversations and community activation can’t be understated. With a small team, however, preparing for a conference and making it a success is very challenging.
Simon & Sagar needed a marketer who had a track record of helping teams prepare for conferences, get unique value-add opportunities (i.e. keynote speeches), and show how this actually drove the company’s growth.
3. Take projects to the finish line
External agencies can only accomplish so much, and even with the right project management, sometimes the back-and-forth didn’t lead to a finished product. For example, when Speakeasy was planning a new product release, their social agency partner would create the core content, but it was up to the internal team to handle the other moving parts, like formatting it for email, their website, etc.
This amounted to needing someone who would push projects to completion and do some of that heavy lifting themselves. Historically, Speakeasy hadn’t found an agency partner who could be this integrated.
Solution
Divisional again looked to their roster and internal know-how to find the perfect fit for Speakeasy. This being their 2nd swing of the bat, Speakeasy came better prepared in communicating what they needed:
- Act as a project manager for marketing activities/initiatives, making sure that people are sticking to planned timelines, and flagging when things are slipping
- Including coordination with some of the other marketing contractors that Speakeasy works with
- Make sure the content calendar is up to date with the latest info
- Help out with the nitty gritty like publishing content to the site, or formatting it for email
After a detailed check, Divisional introduced the Speakeasy team to Tatiana Caciur within a week. She had a track record of managing multiple freelancers & in-house hires, was comfortable going from 0 to 1 as traditionally the 1st marketing hire, and also had numerous reps of helping startups prepare & succeed as conferences.
Tatiana was no stranger to the chaotic environment of early stage companies and felt like the opportunity was the perfect fit:
“I could empathize with the Speakeasy team as someone who has worked in startups for 10+ years. I knew from day 1 that I wouldn’t need hand-holding and could figure out the best way to approach things where the work actually got done”
- Tatiana Caciur, Fractional Marketing Manager
During the introductory call, Tatiana shared how she approaches project management for an early stage company, what her typical cadence & reporting looked like, and how she liked to communicate. Nolan, having already seen the success with their last Divisional hire (Emilie), felt like it was a strong fit and wanted to start ASAP.
Implementation
In her first couple of weeks, Tatiana found a bunch of areas for improvement with Speakeasy’s marketing. One that stood out was conference management; Speakeasy had applied for a developer conference but their pitch was rejected. Upon reviewing it, Tatiana noticed that it was very sales-driven and didn’t match the conference theme as closely as it could.
She worked with Speakeasy on an iteration that focused more on speaking to the problem space and the numerous options (including Speakeasy) that could solve it. To their surprise, the proposal to deliver a presentation was approved and the prep could begin!
Overall, Tatiana took the following approach to Speakeasy’s marketing:
- Get a sense of the goals & deliverables from the internal team
- Meet with each agency & freelancer to confirm her understanding of their progress
- Dive deep into Speakeasy’s product to understand the messaging and audience
- Implemented a ‘get shit done’ attitude to decide when to communicate with a partner VS get the work done herself
When reflecting about the experience, Tatiana noted how trust with startups is built by getting your immediate work done, then starting to expand to other areas for impact:
“I focused on accomplishing the ‘work management’ role first, and getting Speakeasy back on track. Then, I started to give my opinion on how the work was going, what could be improved, etc.”
- Tatiana Caciur, Fractional Marketing Manager
Results
In addition to her impact on conferences, Tatiana transitioned from getting Speakeasy’s agencies on track to actually empowering the founders to make decisions based on their performance.
For example, Simon was skeptical of cold email to a developer audience, and was frustrated that their agency - despite sending a high volume of messages - wasn’t getting any results. In looking at their messaging, Tatiana noticed that the emails used good signals (i.e. hiring for developers) but were using irrelevant copy.
As a strong believer of cold outreach, Tatiana took it upon herself to write a V2 of the sequences that involved manually pulling profiles and personalizing Speakeasy’s value prop to them. The sequences yielded a positive performance, with the most successful one (to date) getting an:
- 85% open rate
- 50% conversion rate to demo
- Positive reception from numerous Enterprise clients
A big part of this was positioning — with Tatiana’s support, Speakeasy was able to narrow down their targeting within a developer audience to drive much better adoption. It was this shift in messaging that helped Speakeasy to find the right champions within an organization, and was a driver in the above success with one of their cold outreach campaigns.
“Tatiana worked across the entire marketing organization for us: conferences, emails, SEO, sponsorships, etc. We ended up letting go of a lot of our agencies and have her manage a lot of it internally. This was a huge cost saving, not to mention a lot less headache! ”
- Nolan Sullivan, Developer Relations Lead
Conclusion
In a great example of Divisional’s placement quality, Tatiana quickly went from 15 hours / week, to 30 hours / week, to full-time hours. After 6 months of working together, the Speakeasy team made a full-time offer to Tatiana and she joined the team to help spearhead their growth.
Over her tenure with the organization, Tatiana was able to:
- Run successful outreach campaigns (up to 50% conversion rate) that brought in high-value customers
- Get Speakeasy into FinTech Dev Con as a presentation speaker, which also drove a large customer
- Launch a newsletter sponsorship that got them an Enterprise customer
- Help Speakeasy fine-tune their Ideal Customer Profile