Growth & Product Marketing

'sup! I'm Lazar

Product Marketer, Growth Marketer, and Go-to-Market Operator for early-stage SaaS, DevTools, and EdTech B2B & B2C startups.

Acquiring new customers is damn hard.

Sadly, SaaS growth is stuck in the previous decade.

You're chatting with marketers about your SaaS growth and you're getting the same answer every time: top-down, funnel-based activities... Pour more in. Get more out. Hopefully.

Top-down marketing approach makes your teams operate in silos — everyone trying to figure their shit out and working on goals they are biased about. Yet, on every quarterly meeting, you're seeing sales and marketing teams misaligned and dysfunctional.

For decades, this worked. But when you take a step back and look at how that growth curve grew over time, it feels linear.

97% of marketers still praise the top-down approach. Me and the 3-percenters praise embedding marketing into the product and using product as the biggest growth lever.

The mantra is simple: acquire users by showing them where they are and where they can be, handhold and guide them to feel the promised value within the first hour, build trust by showing them that it actually works, utilize product usage, company, and intent signals to know when is the right time to ask them for more money, and shape your business with them so they feel a sense of ownership and rave about you in every occasion.

This approach allowed me to acquire more than 250k users and $3M in revenue for bootstrapped EdTech and B2B & B2C SaaS, DevTools, and Marketplaces backed by angels and VCs like Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia's Surge, CRV, and more.

Work

Startups I help(ed) go to market, faster

From bootstrapped to VC and angel-backed startups that collectively raised $18M+ in funding. Currently a part of Uxcel as a Product Marketer.

Uxcel

Users like to call us Duolingo for UX Design. Uxcel is used by 350k+ designers and design-first companies to learn and improve their design skills through gamified, interactive learning.

  • Acquired 150k+ users
  • Converted 9k+ users to customers
  • Generated 450k+ net new ARR
  • 100%+ MRR growth in 1 year
  • From 5.5k to 16.7k new user per month

Checkly

Checkly is a B2B developer tool in the synthetic monitoring space that pioneered monitoring as code. Backed by Mango, CRV and Accel (Series A startup).

  • 8500+ new users
  • 44% customer growth
  • Lowered advertising CAC by 1100%
  • Optimized PLG and PLS efforts
  • $330k net new ARR in 5 months

Joberty

Joberty is an angel-backed marketplace where people in tech anonymously share their experience working for tech companies.

  • Scaled from 60k to 100k+ new users
  • Scaled Growth team from 1 to 15
  • Built referral and WoM engine
  • New market expansion
  • Scaled outbound sales ops

Glorify

Glorify is an all-in-one design tool, focused on eCommerce businesses, raising $2M seed round from EU-based VC. Served as Head of Growth.

  • From 2.4k to 20k+ users
  • $1M revenue in 5 months
  • PH Golden Kitty Nominee
  • 3rd product of the week on PH
  • 19% visitor to user conversion

Hashnode

Hashnode is a community focused developers (now blogging platform for developers), backed by Sequoia’s Surge, Accel, and Salesforce Ventures.

  • From 900 to 7.6k new users per month
  • Launched a new product that became the pivot
  • Launch recap: $0 spend, 5k users in 30 days
  • 2k users monthly from Twitter only
  • Built social growth engine from 0 to 1
What I do

Building predictable growth engine

I've been lucky enough to be a one-man army, as well as to scale marketing teams from 1 to 15 in a matter of months. This allowed me to tackle product marketing, growth, and sales activities, and to get the best out of them to build a predictable growth engine.

Acquire

Building predictable acquisition engine by embedding marketing into the product.

Activate

Crafting onboarding and feature adoption flows to handhold users to see the value within the first hour.

Convert

Building trust by showing that it actually works through conversion-focused and user generated content.

Expand

Building product-led sales with first-party, product usage signals and third-party, intent signals.

Advocate

Turning users into raving fans by building retention models and word of mouth loops that scale exponentially.

Giving back

Helping founders and marketers skip the trial-and-error

Giving back to the community has been my number one priority. That's why I dedicate my time to mentor startups and marketers and share my fails, stories, and processes.

GrowthMentor

Mentoring startup marketers and founders, focused on helping them go to market, faster.

  • 36 sessions so far
  • 4.99/5 average rating
  • Mentoring Founders & CXOs
  • Mentoring Heads of Growth
  • VC-backed and Boostrapped startups
A tablet mockup with Lazar's GrowthMentor profile

Univerzum Accelerator

Hosted early-stage marketing and GTM session for startups in the 2023 batch. The team that I mentored ended up winning the pitch competition and receiving non-equity €20k grant.

  • 4-hour GTM crash course
  • From beta to 1000+ users
  • Messaging and Positioning
  • Mentored the team that won $20K grant
  • Helped them acquire 2k users in 7 days

Delta Business Incubator

For two batches, I've been invited to lecture and educate startups in the ideation phase with go-to-marketing strategies and how to go from beta to first 100 paying customers.

Highlights
121%

Average YoY Growth

250K+

Users acquired

$3M+

Revenue generated

7.5+

Years of experience

#17

Best educational product of 2024 by G2

Praises

Lazar is the salesperson's dream to have in a marketing team - he is a great marketer but is focused on overall revenue generation. He helped me come up with creative ways of outreach and prospecting and is incredibly resourceful at finding ways to blend technology to create efficient systems.

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Court Lewis
Sr. Solutions Advisor @ Checkly, ex-Lokalise

Lazar is a pleasure to work with, has in-depth knowledge of growth marketing tactics and strategies, and is  well-versed in the use of many marketing tools and platforms. He also is constantly suggesting new ideas to tackle demand generation and marketing operations challenges.

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Jeff James
Director of Content @ Checkly, ex-Gatsby

Lazar was great to partner with on many growth projects. His experience and understanding of different growth marketing tactics, along with extreme passion and energy helped give new perspectives to our growth initiatives.

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Darko Stanimirovic
ex-Product Growth @ Checkly

Lazar has a strong talent for connecting data sources and marketing tools to streamline processes. Pair that with his creativity to drive engagement and user acquisition, and you'll see your funnel filling up.

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Stefan Juris
Head of DevRel @ Checkly, ex-Twilio

Amazing call with Lazar! So much value! I will be booking another call soon again! He came prepared and helped me create a viral product launch for my edtech business. I really like the strategy and tools that he recommended! :)

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Zaurbek Tsorojev
Creator @ Codebender, Engineer @ DataCamp

Lazar is amazing. He is prepared and his advices are actionable. He shares generously about his past marketing strategies and how they can be applied to my situation. Very practical and helpful. Highly recommended!

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Siravut Thammavaranucupt
Product Owner @ Berryjam and Validex

Lazar went above and beyond for our mentor session where he helped me navigate the Apollo platform and shared his approach to list building. It's great to speak with someone who really is deep in the trenches and generous with their knowledge.

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Jonathan Baillie Strong
Founder @ SpotlightPodcast

Extremely impressed by Lazar. I've had a lot of GrowthMentor sessions but the one with Lazar was by far the best. He was incredibly generous with his insight and shared a ton of practical advice which I know is going to have a profound impact on our marketing analytics.

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Toby Dietz
Founder & CEO @ hairqare

Every minute of my cession wit Lazar was gold. He understood very fast where were my blockers and could immediately provide laser focused ideas and experience that was absolutely on point and so helpful. He is very friendly and shares his passion for marketing data analysis with simplicity and clarity. Thank you for the tremendous help!

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Pauline Battais
Founder & CPO @ hairqare

This was one of the best mentor sessions I've had so far. Lazar helped me with the LinkedIn campaign strategy. He explained interesting tools and new features to me, it was really eye opening.

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Mette de Hoon
Marketing Consultant, ex-Noord e-Bikes

Wow! I'm still reeling from the session. What really differentiates Lazar is how practical he is. He only recommends something he has done recently himself, and he goes as far as taking you through the screens to show you how to do it. He is the true archetype of a growth hacker, living his experiments and walking his talk.

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Oran Cohen
Founder @ GWork

Had an excellent session with Lazar. He gave me a lot of solid, actionable advice on how to work on different kinds of strategies across SaaS Marketing. It was a fast-paced, value-loaded call.

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Nemanja Losic
Marketing @ Walls.io

Most likely the most valuable call on GM so far. Lazar outlined an entire strategy and roadmap that helped him to grow a successful marketplace, sharing specific step-by-step tactics, tools, tips, just as new interesting ideas. I highly recommend anyone who is looking to grow their SaaS or marketplace business to schedule a call with Lazar!

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David Kaninka
Founder @ Yantle & PropertyAgentScore

Lazar's consultation was truly mind-blowing. He clearly put in the effort to deeply understand our unique situation, providing spot-on actionable advice. The tools and strategies he recommended were practical and immediately useful. His dedication to delivering real value was evident, making him highly recommendable for anyone seeking insightful and effective guidance.

Michael Chang
Orazio Salvini
Founder @ Expaty

We've been stuck at a plateau from trying the same old marketing tactics that every company is familiar with. Lazar has really found some unique angles to grow SAAS users that target the people facing problems their product has a solution for. I had some amazing takeaways and a clear path on what to focus on in our industry. :)

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Brady Kirkpatrick
Founder @ Gunmade

I had a blast session with Lazar. He is very knowledgeable and gave me 3 pieces of advice to help me with customer acquisition. He demonstrated them with tools in real-time and backed the effectiveness with real examples. Highly recommend.

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Ming 'Tommy' Lee
Partner @ Biolearn
Reach out

Say hi

I'm currently not open for additional projects, but you can always reach out and ask anything related to Growth, Product Marketing, GTM, and Mentorship!

Thanks for reaching out!

I'll try my best and respond to you within the next 48 hours. In the meantime, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

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