The usual setup
A lean team, a stack of tools, support that only upsells – and a backlog that keeps growing
You just prioritize, and your Forward Deployed Marketer clears the backlog, then keeps optimizing
We give growing brands the personalization once reserved for giants. Behind it is a team that has built marketing software used by 1000+ brands and learned the software itself was never the hard part – having the right hands to use it was
Ivan Borovikov and Alex Gornik launch Maestra with a simple pitch: one platform on a real-time CDP instead of a stack of point tools. Like every vendor, we also give each client a customer success manager. Ours happens to do the actual work – setting things up, building the flows, running the A/B tests. We know it matters. We just don’t know yet how much.
Maryna Hradovich joins as our third co-founder and COO, after building Semrush’s US operations from scratch. She and our founding account executive practically live on the road that year, working ecommerce events from coast to coast.
Back at base, our founding customer success manager turns the hands-on work we’d been doing for clients into the standard. The first case studies go up, and in them clients talk about their CSMs as much as the platform.
The team grows past 30, still self-funded. Our first nine-figure brands sign. Reviews pile up, G2 hands us a stack of badges, Best Support among them. More clients take the stage to tell our story for us. What clients keep crediting first is the person working alongside them.
We look for why, expecting a knowledge gap. Team after team, we find the opposite: marketers already know what to do next. The ideas just pile up, with no one to build them. That’s when it clicks. The bottleneck isn’t knowledge, it’s the backlog.
Once we spot a backlog problem, we give our CSMs one mandate: clear it. A typical CSM juggling sixty accounts couldn’t take that on. Ours manage about a dozen brands each. Every client gets a weekly call and a shared Slack channel. We bring the ideas, the client prioritizes, and what makes the cut gets built – with Maestra’s AI tools helping us build more every quarter.
In martech, “customer success manager” has turned into a fancy label for mediocre support and upselling. So we call ours Forward Deployed Marketers – people who both set the strategy and do the hands-on work.
Three people who’ve built and scaled martech before
Twenty years of building martech side by side, including a $40M-ARR platform. They launched Maestra as their answer to what SaaS got wrong: don’t hand marketers a platform and walk away – roll up your sleeves and build the results with them.
Took Semrush from zero to IPO and past $300M in revenue, then built Maestra’s go-to-market.
For general questions, or anything not covered above
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