🚀 Founding Marketer @profound ⬅️ Former Growth Consultant for @watershed @airhq @glean @angellist @typefaceai @float_financial ⏪ Prev @loom @mail_gun
Brooklyn, NY
Joined July 2011
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This is hard to admit, but I didn't want the Head of Marketing job at Profound.
I'm not the right fit for it. And I told that to Trevor Pyle when he started as the second marketer here.
But that left me with a question: what do I actually want?
Throughout my career, I've learned the hard lesson that you have to be honest with yourself in order to get to where you want to go. Sometimes that means saying no. I was honest with myself, and I was honest with Trevor, too.
I told him what I didn't want: a bigger title following the same path. What I wanted was something different. Something that didn't exist yet.
I thrive when I can make a direct impact: rapidly experimenting with new tools and ways of unblocking my team, creating authentic relationships online and in-person, and building the brand in public across conferences, webinars, and podcasts.
Today, Profound is announcing a first-of-its-kind role: The Marketing Engineer.
And I'm becoming Profound's Founding Marketing Engineer.
A Marketing Engineer isn't an ops person. They're part builder, part marketer. They sit inside your marketing team and build the AI agents, automations, and data infrastructure that let everyone else do their highest-leverage work. And that’s exactly the kind of work I love doing.
The Marketing Engineer serves the marketing function. Sales got RevOps. Go-to-market got the GTM Engineer. It’s long overdue for marketing to have its own role.
Every marketing team I talk to tells me some version of the same story: brilliant people buried under operational weight. 80% of the week is eaten by work that could be systematized. The remaining 20% is supposed to be where the magic happens.
The Marketing Engineer changes that, giving the rest of the team something rare: permission to focus. On taste. On creativity. On the slow, deliberate, deeply human work of building a brand people remember.
I didn't want a Head of Marketing job. I wanted this one. And I'm grateful to Trevor and James Cadwallader for believing in me to help bring this new role to the world.
My role is unique. Not only will I be doing the work, but I will be talking about the entire process. What I’m building, what I’m learning, and what it’s like to travel around the world talking about how AI is changing marketing right now.
The era of the Marketing Engineer starts now.
"For a 230-person team, we have 90 agents now."
@HollyNY works as VP of Growth Marketing at @Samsara. On The Marketing Engineer, she shows what comes after adoption:
"How do these agents talk to each other?"
"How do they leverage the output from each other?"
"What's the discovery process look like?"
"Instead of managing campaigns, you're going to build the agents to manage the whole thing end to end."
Austin Lau works in growth marketing at @AnthropicAI. On The Marketing Engineer, he describes the Marketing Engineer shift:
"Large language models are so good at coding. It's really democratized access to software development."
"That gives marketers more time to focus on their craft."
Soon every company on the planet will have their own internal marketing eval to help define what "good" marketing looks like to them
because it's different for every single company
Austin Lau from Anthropic broke it down on the Marketing Engineer podcast for me a few weeks ago and I keep coming back to this
Matt Ratchford changed @mutinycorp's homepage headline and saw a 71% increase in signups overnight.
He’s also the entire growth marketing team and writes a weekly growth update on LinkedIn about what's working and what isn't, including all their experiments with AEO, which I think is genuinely one of the most helpful and insightful recurring content series on LinkedIn right now.
I sat down with Matt for The Marketing Engineer podcast to talk about rebuilding Mutiny’s narrative after its pivot from website personalization to an AI sales assistant and we talked about:
✅ Give your bets a kill date. Matt works in six-to-eight-week sprints, checks the signals around week three, and changes direction when something isn’t working.
âś… Mutiny shifted their entire business which meant nearly *everything* on the internet about Mutiny was now incorrect overnight. Matt was in the trenches contacting publishers and former competitors to update or remove outdated descriptions of Mutiny, putting his old SDR experience back to work.
✅ Cold outreach is a skill every marketer should build. He reaches out to experts every day, shares what’s working for him, and asks about the problems he’s trying to solve. (this is also how I got my job at Loom back in the day)
Matt is one of the sharpest growth operators and is worth paying attention to over the next few years.
"The top-down is great as a start."
@HollyNY works as VP of Growth Marketing at @Samsara. On The Marketing Engineer, she explains which AI adoption model lasts:
"Long-term, the bottoms-up approach is really what's most sustainable."
"The people who are closest to the workflows and the pain points are the ones who know how to really iterate on the agent building."
"Marketers can become better at software development than an engineer can be at marketing."
Austin Lau works in growth marketing at @AnthropicAI. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows why marketers have the edge:
"You've been the actual operator for all these marketing functions, and now you have the ability to build the solutions."
"How can I go out and do this myself?"
"More information does not equal better information."
Lucy Hoyle is Senior Content Engineer at Carta. On The Marketing Engineer, she explains context rot:
"Every time you stuff a model with information, it loads all of it alongside its own memory."
"When it hits the limit, it condenses the conversation and degrades."
"Give Claude only what the task requires, in focused chunks."
"We cannot hire a marketing engineer to AI-fy or transform the organization."
@HollyNY works as VP of Growth Marketing at @Samsara. On The Marketing Engineer, she pushes back on hiring one person to AI-fy the org:
"Every single marketer needs to be a marketing engineer."
"The whole organization needs to become builders and systems thinkers."
"Do not automate ahead of the models."
Luke Harries leads growth at @elevenlabsio. On The Marketing Engineer, he shares the capability-gated rule behind ElevenLabs' marketing agents:
"One big shift is the switch from human-in-the-loop to background agents."
"Map the whole workflow, automate only the proven steps, and keep watching the gaps."
"They're the ones who own the business logic. They're the ones that own the channel."
"From about $100K of pipeline to over $8 million by the end of H1."
Luke Harries leads growth at @elevenlabsio. On The Marketing Engineer, he breaks down the webinar system that made the jump:
"It's really this enablement function for the marketers to then do their best work."
"What's the actual system itself? What's the different templates so it's repeatable?"
"When you set a big goal, it forces you to rethink."