Six New Product, Marketing, and Pricing Experts Added to TinySeed's Mentor List
At TinySeed, we greatly value the role of subject-matter experts as mentors, ensuring our founders have access to proficient advice when they encounter challenges or seek insights on industry best practices. We previously announced the addition of five expert mentors to our team, and we are now delighted to introduce these additional six experts to our mentorship program:
Andrew Skotzko
Product & Cognitive Science Expert
Andrew advises on product, leadership, go-to market / growth, and managing your own psychology.
He’s been building products and teams for 15 years in a bunch of different verticals. Before finding product management, he worked as both a growth hacker and engineer, and have also been a founder. He’s a lifelong student of what makes people tick and how products help them thrive (or fail to). Major geek on cognitive/behavioral science, mental health, and leadership.
Janna Bastow
Co-founder and CEO of ProdPad
Janna Bastow is the inventor of the Now/Next/Later roadmap and is co-founder and CEO of ProdPad, product management and roadmapping software for product people. Janna is also co-founder of ProductTank and Mind the Product, the global community of product managers. She often starts and stops conversations with the question: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Mariam Hakobyan
Co-Founder + CEO, Softr
Mariam is an ex-engineer turned entrepreneur and a mother of two daughters. She is passionate about all things technology, product, and design. She has built and led products & engineering teams for more than a decade, and now building Softr to make tech accessible to everyone. Softr is on a mission to democratize engineering genius and turn billion non-tech knowledge workers into app creators.
Claire Suellentrop
Co-Founder & COO of Forget the Funnel
Claire helps SaaS companies develop high-impact product marketing & growth strategies. Here’s what the heck that means:
At the start of her SaaS journey, Claire considered herself a marketer. But in 2014, she joined a (then) early-stage startup that had already amassed thousands of beta users — and so suddenly, her marketing skills weren’t all that useful.
Instead, Claire had to look further across the customer journey to figure out (a) who that startup’s most engaged, high-value users were, and (b) how to convert more of them into paying customers.
Put another way, she had to set aside everything she knew about acquisition**,** and rapidly figure out activation, revenue, retention, and referral. TL;DR, Claire had to quickly master product marketing & product growth — she just hadn't heard of those phrases at the time.
Since then, she’s built a pretty big pattern library by helping dozens (hundreds?) of SaaS companies uncover the real reasons people use their product (vs. the manufactured ones everyone assumes internally), and use that information to develop high-impact experiences across the end-to-end customer journey — from positioning and messaging, to website strategy, all the way through to new user onboarding and long-term customer retention/expansion.
Whitney Deterling
Product Marketing Strategy Lead at CoSchedule
Whitney is the Product Marketing Strategy Lead at CoSchedule. She has 10+ years of marketing experience in various roles & settings including an agency, SaaS startup, & higher education.
When it comes to Product Marketing, Whitney can help with product marketing related challenges & projects including product positioning, customer research, social proof, sales enablement, internal training, customer marketing, onboarding, & more.
Marcos Rivera
Founder and CEO of Pricing I/O
Marcos Rivera (founder and CEO of Pricing I/O) is a B2B SaaS pricing expert with over 20 years of experience helping tech companies capture value and unlock growth at scale.
As a former operating executive with Vista Equity Partners, he focused on value-creation areas of product management and pricing for a $65B portfolio of technology companies. Marcos coaches SaaS Founders worldwide and is a frequent speaker, board advisor, and published author.
If you’re interested in getting access to all our mentors and everything else TinySeed — which includes a robust year-long specialized SaaS accelerator program, over a hundred fellow founders for networking and knowledge sharing, and more — sign up for our email list to be notified of our next application period and other important TinySeed information.
