Marketers of Technology
00:00:00 · Cristina Bunea, Andres Figuera
[00:00:00] S0: I've heard it so many times now. It's just like someone says, oh, yeah, I just had an agent running in the background doing lots of research on Northflank because it seemed really interesting when I first came across it. And it was clear from the research that I had to talk to you guys. Hey, [00:00:18] S1: everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Marketers of Technology. My name is Andres Figuera, and this show is brought to you by Frontline Studios, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're looking to launch your own show, we offer a full podcast as a service experience. You show up and host, and we handle everything else. And with that said, we are going to start today's episode by mentioning that I am speaking with Cristina Bunea, head of marketing at Northflank, a self-service developer platform that automates and unifies deployment of any workload on any cloud at any scale. And with that said, Cristina, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing today? [00:00:56] S0: Likewise. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great. Just it's it's... There's a heat wave in The UK where I'm at right now. I'm in London and trying to survive through that. [00:01:05] S1: Oh my goodness. I am a bit jealous of that because I'm living in Argentina and we're smack dab in the middle of winter. And I must say it is getting... It is... It's getting unbearable, this this type of coldness that I'm living. So hopefully the the temperature will will get a little bit lower on your side and rise a little bit here.
00:01:05 · Andres Figuera, Cristina Bunea
[00:01:05] S1: Oh my goodness. I am a bit jealous of that because I'm living in Argentina and we're smack dab in the middle of winter. And I must say it is getting... It is... It's getting unbearable, this this type of coldness that I'm living. So hopefully the the temperature will will get a little bit lower on your side and rise a little bit here. [00:01:24] S0: Yeah. I'll send I'll send that over. [00:01:26] S1: Alright. And and, Cristina, just so that we can hit the ground running then and and provide the audience with a bit more context, would you be able to tell us further about your background, how you came to become head of marketing at Northflank and then what Northflank is in your own words?
00:01:40 · Cristina Bunea
[00:01:40] S0: Yeah, for sure. So, I actually didn't plan to start in marketing. I studied computer science. I have a technical background. I started the company right out of university in 2019. And all of my co founders and I were technical. I loved writing. So, I was like, sure, I'll try to do a bit of marketing here and there. And sort of stuck with me. I really enjoyed everything that I was doing. Our product was consumer, so a lot different than what I'm doing now. But I think it gave me all of the right foundations and all of the right learnings for me to be able to move into B2B. So, ever since I've led marketing at a handful of early stage companies, Seed, Series A, and now Series A with Northflank, we are a developer platform. So, help, as you mentioned in the beginning, we help engineering and now more recently non engineering teams, because everyone is white coding, everyone is creating apps and building products. We help them deploy their workloads to production. And we do that in their own VPC. I would say our primary customer is larger enterprises in sort of spaces like we have government agencies using Northflank public companies, regulated industries, and things like that, where data residency is really important and running those workloads production with the right controls, having it being in their own cloud account or on premise is very, very important. And that's an interesting job. It's very challenging because we deal with people's basically most important workloads. And it's, yeah, it's an infrastructure company that deals with, I would say the most critical path of the product.
00:03:17 · Andres Figuera, Cristina Bunea
[00:03:17] S1: Okay. No, I understand. And how has the experience been with marketing this to all the potential customers? Like what has been the channels that you feel have worked best for you? Or have you had any experiences or insights when it comes to marketing, what Northflank does? [00:03:31] S0: Yeah, I would say for us, the number one channel has been content. I think that was a very sort of intentional decision that we made when I joined about almost two years ago now. I think we were quite early to the AO, GEO, I don't know what the term is this week, but I would say we were very, very intentional with that. And we're a PLG product, so developers can just self serve and try the product without really having to talk to us, but we do have a sales motion as well. And it's how a lot of the larger enterprises sort of start interacting with us. But we do like our marketing team does a lot of that work before they even need to talk to us because we educate them quite a lot before they even try out the platform. So, would say for us content has been probably the highest driver of growth. Right now we have more, and I know it sounds crazy, but we're quite a small team. There's only 22 of us and then quite a small marketing team. There's only three of us on the marketing team, but we have more inbound than we can really manage. So hiring is like top of mind right now. But yeah, I would say content for sure is up there.
00:03:31 · Cristina Bunea, Andres Figuera
[00:03:31] S0: Yeah, I would say for us, the number one channel has been content. I think that was a very sort of intentional decision that we made when I joined about almost two years ago now. I think we were quite early to the AO, GEO, I don't know what the term is this week, but I would say we were very, very intentional with that. And we're a PLG product, so developers can just self serve and try the product without really having to talk to us, but we do have a sales motion as well. And it's how a lot of the larger enterprises sort of start interacting with us. But we do like our marketing team does a lot of that work before they even need to talk to us because we educate them quite a lot before they even try out the platform. So, would say for us content has been probably the highest driver of growth. Right now we have more, and I know it sounds crazy, but we're quite a small team. There's only 22 of us and then quite a small marketing team. There's only three of us on the marketing team, but we have more inbound than we can really manage. So hiring is like top of mind right now. But yeah, I would say content for sure is up there. [00:04:38] S1: And what type of content? Has it been more like educational in order to explain what you guys do or more like storytelling on behalf of customer experiences or have you done like everything and it's more of like a...
00:04:38 · Andres Figuera, Cristina Bunea
[00:04:38] S1: And what type of content? Has it been more like educational in order to explain what you guys do or more like storytelling on behalf of customer experiences or have you done like everything and it's more of like a... [00:04:50] S0: It's a mix. It's for sure a mix. So we have everything from thought leadership, our product being very technical. Developers love to read all of these in-depth sort of stories about how the technology behind, for instance, our sandboxes works and things like that. So a lot of very technical content. Obviously, have our docs, which is an extremely good source for knowledge and understanding the product. But I would say the biggest chunk is just in our SEOAEO content. So, all of the articles we write for Top of Funnel. So, how do people discover us? I would say we've got a pretty good handle on all of the LLMs now recommending Northflank for a variety of use cases that we serve. [00:05:31] S1: Wow, that is very nice when you reach that sweet spot where the LLMs are scraping the internet and you guys already have enough content for them to really understand that you're a key player in this type of area and in the industry. And that way people really, you get in front of them before they even know your name because the AI just comes out and recommends you because they found you. And I feel that is very special when you're able to obtain that in the marketing funnel.