Matthew Stein

• Built AI-powered tooling to automate agent evaluation - Replaced fully manual review with AI tooling that parses JSON step structures, prompts, and capabilities. Cut manual review from a peak of 200 submissions/week to 2-3/day.
• Served as the voice of the builder in product decisions - Sat between the builder community and engineering, turning scattered feature requests into clear requirements and prioritized input that shaped what got built next.
• Ran “Mercury 7” our premium builders program - Owned the full loop from requirements to launch readiness: collected builder needs, translated them into specs for engineering, trained builders on new capabilities as they shipped, and coordinated with our marketing team to support builders' own go-to-market campaigns for their agents.
• Integrated the data layer for agent evaluation - Integrated Product Data, Agent metadata, HubSpot (unified product + user data) and the PostHog MCP (usage analytics) to inform product prioritization and marketing's promotion decisions.
• Ran large-scale developer relations initiatives - Partnered with HackerEarth to recruit 100,000+ new users, adding 850 agents to the marketplace with a $50K prizes pool.
• Customer Marketing - Actively engaged the builder community to promote usage of newly built features and drive adoption.
• Training at scale - 26 workshops total. Monthly public "Agent Building 101," a 3-session/6-hour training session for HubSpot’s Digital Marketing team, a 2,500-person partnership workshop ("The Assist"), a restaurant-industry AI session with ShyBird, two HubSpot/WGU AI Foundations bootcamp sections, and "AI Cribs", an internal show-and-tell series I created.
• Thought leadership - Developed a 5-step "AI slop" framework, delivered as the closing Keynote at Profound.ly's 2026 Kickoff, as several in-person events, and a Maven.com Lightning Lesson. Also published 9 articles on practical AI frameworks for Agent.ai's blog
• Grew our podcast “Prompted” - as Executive Producer, we grew from 8,000 to 104,000 subscribers over 44 episodes getting 2.08M views. Guests included notable marketing/GTM voices like Sam Mallikarjunan.
• Final Numbers - Platform reached 2.6M+ signups from 180+ countries, 70,000 agents built, 2,440 public, 35 premium during this period.

Ran a 14+ person team, plus a network of 5 agencies and ~10 freelancers. My department spanned Content, Events, Performance Marketing, Partnerships, and Podcast on a $2.5M annual budget, helping triple ARR during this period.

Led the fully remote team by writing clearer strategy documentation and teaching full-funnel thinking. That aligned content, performance marketing, product marketing, and partnerships in one unified pipeline strategy. This set new records for performance, scaling content-driven leads 18x (30 → 587/month) and MQLs 7.7x (28 → 215/month).

Launched SpotDraft's first-ever corporate conference just 107 days after joining — aligning Product, Sales, and Executive leadership to debut a new AI product to 140 attendees in NYC, then scaled the format to a second event in San Francisco (200 attendees) and a full events program of 75+/year.

Transformed podcast production processes to eliminate 2 agencies and speed up episode publication velocity by 7x. Turned an underperforming podcast into the anchor of an omni-channel social strategy.

Launched three annual original-research reports (State of Legal Ops, Compensation Survey, Contracting Efficiency Benchmarking.) Those, along with partnerships and content syndication, became the team's top lead sources.

Grew monthly site traffic 4x (20K → 85K) in 18 months; organic search nearly 2.5x'd (7.5K → 18K/month) and direct traffic doubled, while cutting $500K in underperforming programs to fund what worked.

Wrote and published "What Does Mommy/Daddy Do?", 2 illustrated children's books explaining in-house counsel work. Those became the most-requested conference swag at CLOC 2024 and other events.

Starter launch. First task I had when I started was to prep the marketing team for the launch of our free tier product. I defined the onboarding behaviors we wanted to track and worked with product to get the data pushed into HubSpot and Salesforce. Using those fields, we defined what a Product-Qualified Lead looked like, and the PQL handoff process to the sales team.

Our lightning strike, pairing a funding announcement with the starter launch, resulted in a 4x increase in our normal monthly organic traffic.

While untangling the marketing-ops pile of spaghetti, I uncovered 26,000 leads which were never uploaded properly into our Martech stack. After uploading, segmenting and prioritizing then, we ran a campaign to nurture them resulting in a 320% increase in Monthly MQLs.

Speaking Links:

• How to Develop your PQL Strategy
• A Masterclass in Product-Led Marketing
• How to launch a sales team within a PLG-first company
• #TheRealPLG – EP 03 | How Marketing Operations will Adapt for PLG
• #TheRealPLG – EP 05 | PQL & Automation Sync with Marketing Leadership

Started as the solo person for Support and Success activities. Hired and trained Northeastern Co-ops to handle support responsibilities. Re-focused on the customer onboarding experience. I hired a Director of Support to implement our support strategy and expand round the world coverage.

Case Studies - Created successful and enthusiastic customers and to help our marketing team produce 5 written and 2 video case studies

Hand in glove with customers - Worked deeply with customer's QA teams, security teams, devops teams and engineering leadership to improve their testing coverage and quality. Testing environments and pipelines are critical and highly sensitive infrastructure. Ensuring mabl's automated testing worked seemlessly with their deployment pipeline was the first major technical challenge for each new customer. With that achieved, I created a scalable and systematic approach to training, adoption, expansion and creating delight for customers.

Solving for the customer - What does that mean? When making decisions, customer needs take primacy. This principle guides me while considering the myriad choices required in a growth-mode startup. Choosing between a better customer experience or a more efficient workflow for my employees, I choose the better customer experience and solve for efficiency later.

Other Highlights:
• Hired Support lead to scale team and take us international
• Performed experiments for Onboarding training
• Embedded product usage metrics on SFDC account pages
• Developed QBR process for Key Accounts
• Brought CS team into weekly Sales pipeline meetings for better alignment
• Defined customer developmental milestones for upsell and expansion
• Defined incident severity levels and created response plans

Responsible for Midaxo Customer Success, building and managing a distributed team handling customer onboarding and reducing churn.

Building for Scale - I streamlined our hiring process, cutting the cycle down to 9 days from over 3 weeks. Experimenting with two target personas, I defined hiring criteria and created scorecards. Teams need direction, motivation, and on-going skills development. During weekly 1:1's, each of my team members received that support.

Measuring What Matters - When I started, the CS team had fractured communications and no measurement of where they spent their time. I implemented a ticketing system that met our security requirements. That enabled reporting data about issues to our Product team. Our Customer Onboarding process was ad hoc, and led by the customer. The senior members of the CS team created a playbook and we rolled out a 90-day, 8 hour onboarding process. At 90 days, I called each customer to survey them about their onboarding experience.

Solving for the customer - What does that mean? When making decisions, customer needs take primacy. This principle guides me while considering the myriad choices required in a growth-mode startup. Choosing between a better customer experience or a more efficient workflow for my employees, I choose the better customer experience and solve for efficiency later.

Other Highlights:
• B-round funding
• Customer onboarding process standardized
• Increased revenue by charging for services
• Unified customer communication
• Defined incident severity levels and created response plan
• Negotiation training for CS team
• Redefined customer lifecycle stages
• Tracked product usage
• Prepared for GDPR
• New hire training and developmental milestones
• Monthly team metrics posted on internal wiki

Built user on-boarding automation framework and content. Experimented to find out which messages worked from Sales team, then automated them. Check-ins and follow-ups measurably moved potential customers through the sales funnel. Worked with internal security team and Ops to ensure all user data was protected when integrating 3rd party marketing software.

Project Managed the new sign-up flow post-launch, improving conversion rates from 42% to 66% while also collecting more data. Worked with multiple internal teams to roll this out smoothly and successfully. Iterated bi-weekly to experiment and improve based on data collected. Only member of the marketing team with GIT access to push code to production.

Made HubSpot do things it normally can't. Examples include: Multi-part form conversions on single page; posting form data to multiple end-points; Aligning email workflows to days of the week; A/B and multi-variate testing in email workflows.

I was brought in to SonicBids to overhaul and re-build their marketing team and infrastructure. When I started, SonicBids' blog was plagued by technical issues, broken image links, and non-existant content strategy. Daily Gig Guide emails, a huge driver for the business, had zero tracking data, and took 4-5 person-hours each day to send.

Through some creative automation and new software, I freed up enough people-hours to assign new tasks. The daily emails that kept the business running now only took 15 minutes to send, down from 4-5 hours per day. We also started collecting open and click rates to improve our designs.

I began blogging with relevant content for our users. I taught lunch-and-learn sessions on blogging to get posts from our Sales team. For more content, I recruited subject matter experts as guest bloggers from the music industry. This also gave us co-marketing opportunities. In the first 4 months we tripled organic traffic.

Our members used Sonicbids to host music, photos, videos, performance schedules and other promotional materials. I worked with Engineering to improve page structures to maximize visibility by search engines.