Scaling Fuel Cycle from first intern to category leader

The starting point

Fuel Cycle is the market research and customer insights platform used by research and brand teams at Fortune 500 companies. When I joined, marketing was one intern: me. No playbook, no pipeline, no reporting, no team.

The first years were pure 0 to 1: the first campaigns, the first reporting infrastructure across Salesforce and Pardot, the first events program, the first brand system. Whatever marketing needed to exist, I made exist.

The build

Over a decade I grew with the function: Senior Brand Manager, Senior Marketing Manager, Associate Director of Corporate Marketing, then Director of Growth Marketing and head of marketing. Each rung meant building a new layer by hand: brand and creative, demand generation and partnerships, then the whole function.

When our VP of Marketing left, I took over the entire org and have run it ever since: the budget, the team, the pipeline number, through a company-wide rebrand and an AI-native repositioning.

What it proves

Founders get one shot at their first marketing motion. I have already made every early mistake and every early save inside one company, and I know which moves matter at zero. That is the playbook I bring to Seed through Series B teams.