PRODUCT GROWTH

Pump

TIMELINE

MAR 2026 - PRESENT

ROLE

Design Engineer

TEAM

2 person marketing team

RESULT

$60K ARR, 300+ leads warmed, two-sided job board

OVERVIEW

Problem

Pump's self-serve funnel converted SMB teams with fast sales cycles and lower contract values. Enterprise and mid-market buyers don't enter that funnel: they don't self-serve, paid acquisition reaches them badly, and they need months of familiarity before a first call. Pump had no surface that warmed a buyer at that stage.

Context

I joined Pump's GTM team, where I spoke with prospective customers daily, followed their sales cycles, and logged where deals stalled. I turned that into a set of owned growth surfaces and was promoted to Design Engineer after five months. Pump manages over $1B in cloud spend across 1500 SMB customers and is now moving upmarket.

INSIGHT

Moving upmarket is a trust problem, not a traffic problem.

GROWTH STRATEGY

Built owned acquisition surfaces instead of scaling paid.

Paid acquisition reaches enterprise DevOps buyers badly and expensively. I built four owned surfaces that each capture demand at a different stage: a job board for top-of-funnel familiarity, industry pages for self-qualification, a partner landing page for referral conversion, and rebuilt sales collateral for the closing conversation. I owned concept, design, instrumentation, and automation across all four.

JOB BOARD — ACQUISITION

Built a two-sided acquisition surface that feeds the CRM automatically.

Pump's user is the infrastructure engineer. The job board aggregates DevOps, SRE, platform, and infrastructure roles — 213 live, refreshed daily via API — filterable by location and role, with paths to submit a listing or join a talent network. Both sides compound: engineers arrive for jobs, hiring companies arrive to post, and both are Pump's buyer. I integrated the board with HubSpot so listings and talent-network signups flow straight into the lead funnel, and first-time companies receive an automated courtesy email. I owned concept, design, automation, and the HubSpot integration.

INDUSTRY PAGES — QUALIFICATION

Moved qualification upstream so inbound arrives further down the funnel.

Six industry pages — AI & Machine Learning, Fintech, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Data & Developer Infrastructure, Sales & GTM Software, and Ecommerce & Retail — each opening with that segment's spend problem in its own language and addressing segment-specific security concerns. The copy system does qualification work a salesperson would otherwise spend a first call on.

PARTNERSHIP PAGE — CONVERSION

Shipped a referral conversion surface that has closed $60K ARR.

A dedicated landing page launching Pump's referral partnership with Slash. Referral traffic arrives pre-trusted, which collapses the credibility work the rest of the funnel has to do, so the page optimizes for conversion rather than persuasion. $60,000 in ARR since launch in early September.

BY THE NUMBERS

$60K

ARR from partner page

300+

Leads warmed via job board

Close-rate lift

SALES COLLATERAL — CLOSE

Rebuilt collateral so a deck converts without a presenter.

Pump's collateral was built for self-serve SMB, where the brand's job is to feel approachable and the product sells itself in a free trial. Upmarket, that same system read as small, and the graphics didn't show the product working. I rebuilt the system and the product graphics so a deck carries the argument asynchronously, when it gets forwarded internally to people who were never on the call.