Myk Pono 🇺🇦

I share strategies and tactics to build, market, and grow products.

Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs and go-to-market teams with strategies and tactics to build, market, and grow great products.

- Led Product Growth team with the mission of making it easy for anyone to get personalized financial help. Oversaw multi-product direct-to-consumer (DTC) experiences and Partner API for debt resolution programs, personal loans, and home equity loans.

- Defined product vision, mission, roadmaps, strategic initiatives, OKRs/KPIs, P&L statement, and annual financial plan to grow revenue and margins across paid, organic, affiliates, direct mail, re-engagement, and partner channels.

- Established product experimentation framework to improve primary KPIs: CAC, conversion rate, offer take rate (app starts), enrollments, close rates, revenue, and margin per unit.

RESULTS / OUTCOMES (Q1'2023 vs Q1'2022):
- Turned around the paid channel from negative to positive margins: elevated ROI from -19% to 57%.
- Raised pre-qualification flow conversion rate by 46%.
- Grew Offer Take Rate by 40%
- Increased Lead-to-Close rate by 23%.

Led Product-Led Growth Team responsible for Email Threat Scanner.

RESULTS / OUTCOMES:
- Redesigned and rebuilt ETS: introduced 1-click (self-service) free trial activation and launched threat/scan pdf report sharing.
- Reduced signup time by 54% by eliminating 14 form fields, three clicks, and one page.
- Achieved 4x conversion rate growth from 0.35% (6/2020) to 1.8% (3/2021).
- Tripled (3x) the number of completed scans from Q1'21 to Q4'21.

I worked with marketing and growth team at Hire by Google focusing on designing nurturing strategy and SDR processes.

Google shutdown Hire in September of 2019.

Lead Product Growth and Web teams.

Design, developed, launched MVP/POC with 3 customers.

We are building a content publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to start a blog that grows the audience and generates subscription revenue. With Publishnow, writers can provide free, email-gated, and paid content all-in-one place.

Aptrinsic was acquired by Gainsight in Fall 2018.

First marketing hire. As a Head of Marketing, I managed everything from writing and publishing the book to strategic messaging, competitive analysis, PR, first industry event, content marketing and distribution, website, and demand generation.

Co-authored: Mastering Product Experience in SaaS: How to Deliver Personalized Product Experiences with Product-Led Go-to-Market Strategy

Focus: customer onboarding, adoption, and customer nurturing.

I advised founders on marketing and product growth: ideal customer profile (ICP), brand story, strategic messaging, customer acquisition process, content strategy and distribution.

Hired by CRO to build a more effective messaging framework to decrease sales cycle

Focus: Product Marketing, Messaging Framework & Value Map

- Managed the team of 7 marketers, overseeing marketing, strategic messaging, product marketing, content, and user acquisition strategy for mobile advertising products.
- Boosted total traffic by 50% and organic sign-ups by 25% in six months.

Focus: Strategic Messaging, Product Marketing and Positioning, Content Marketing & PR, Sales Enablement

Improved product onboarding that increased product activation rate by 100%

Focus: Demand Generation | Paid Acquisitions | Email Marketing

Launched a product growth campaign that led to 3x organic (SEO) traffic growth (read case study below)

- Consulted for Soundbite Communications (acquired by Genesys in 2014) with focus on marketing operations
- Provided on-demand marketing strategy and implementation focusing on helping the marketing team design marketing campaigns, landing pages, manage CMS, connect marketing automation and CRM, optimize and track marketing campaign performance.

Consulted and advised 20+ companies focusing on growing SaaS/enterprise/subscription products with effective product-led growth, marketing, and go-to-market strategies.

Clients: Google (Hire), Callfire, Trust Wallet (acq. by Binance), Metadata, Respondly (acq. by Buffer), Datanyze (acq. by ZoomInfo), Apteligent (acq. by VMWare), PandaDoc, BrightIdea, Social Capital, Civic.com, Genesys, Cangrade.

Marketing & GTM Expertise:
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), customer interviews
- Strategic messaging, positioning, and brand story
- GTM, demand generation, content strategy and distribution
- Marketing & GTM Audit; Competitive & Industry analysis

Product-Led Growth & GTM Expertise:
- Architecting customer acquisition process (sign-ins, signups, freemium free trials, hybrid model)
- Designing customer journeys
- Building onboarding flows to drive conversions and deliver the first product value
- Designing nurturing strategies and SDR process
- Aligning product roadmap and prioritization to drive product growth vision and KPIs
- Conducting qualitative (customer interviews) and quantitative analysis

Author:
- The Marketing Playbook Series – read over 1.5M times | https://bit.ly/2wmJSPh

- Owned product strategy, roadmap, and release planning for a lead-generation advertising product with over $5M in annual revenue.
- Discovered a technical issue that caused ~$40K per month in lost revenue.

Left Monster to work on a startup project: Demand7.

- Led demand generation, SEO/SEM strategy, analytics, and A/B testing.
- Generated $550K in opportunities in six months.

Headed eCommerce marketplace, SEM/SEO strategy, customer research, conversion rate optimization for the checkout process, analytics, and reporting.