From marketer -> startup founder -> GTME freelance

Richard is a GTM engineer based in Finland who spent three years building a VC-backed startup before returning to his roots in growth engineering. He's opinionated, technically skilled, and refreshingly honest about the realities of startup burnout and the evolution of the GTM engineering space.

Hey! Please introduce yourself.

Hi I'm Richard, a dude with lots of opinions on GTM and enough software engineering skills to build the ideas I'm selling. I live in Finland, ran an early stage startup for 3 years, and this summer quit and went back to my old profession which is nowadays called GTME. Doing freelance gigs here and there.

Funny story: my middle name is Arnold because my mom decided it was appropriate to let a 10-year-old choose an extra name. Guess which Arnold I was a huge fan of?

I like to help people and share whatever I learn publicly.

What's your professional origin story?

I started out as a marketer right out of university. Wanted to do pretty brand campaigns but quickly faced the reality that in B2B SaaS I wouldn't be doing that. Instead, I had to figure out how CRMs work, how to get data from point A to point B. Plus I was given unrestricted access to HubSpot and Salesforce configuration. Lol.

From there it was a horizontal move to essentially data engineering over the next few years. Learned to code on top of the Clearbit API, contorted HubSpot's forms to behave like Typeform's multi-step forms, crashed the entire n8n infra of my setup back in 2021. Many other stories.

Eventually I ended up building a full-blown data warehouse for the GTM department of a British fintech unicorn where we prepped and processed every data point and lead and synced those back to respective GTM systems: HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, and others.

You took a detour into startup land. What happened there?

I took a detour from GTM engineering to be a VC-backed startup founder. We built Reconfigured, a quick-capture journal for overloaded minds juggling tabs, tasks, and tools.

A year in, my co-founder Niko and I realized that v1 didn't have a future. So we started from zero. Interviewed over 100 data professionals. Tried selling a variety of ideas, including a "Slack spyware", lol. At one point we sat at a lake and joked about turning video game journals into SaaS.

By September we had something real. Launched, built, got our first 80 users in. By January we had almost 300 users, hit Top 10 on Product Hunt, and started seeing other roles flock in: marketers, UX designers, product folks.

But this summer, I burned out. Quit. Took a break. Had no intention of going to do a full-time gig at some company. Figured I'd do some freelancing and had a few clients lined up already.

When did you first hear "GTM Engineer" and think: wait, that's a thing?

Maybe a year ago? I had heard of Clay before but only got to know it once the term emerged.

I will be honest, I like the term a lot. I think it's appropriate. Previously we were called "growth engineers" and that didn't quite match, especially since there's a real growth engineering concept in engineering departments. Those people pretty much work on the product itself and how to optimize it for growth.

So GTM Engineer makes sense to me. It's engineering and technical practices applied to go-to-market, which is broad by definition.

What was the hardest part about coming back to this work?

Hard for me to say since I was in this game before it was a term. So it was quite easy. I just returned to what I knew.

This time around though, life is so much easier and more fun than it was pre-Clay, pre-LLMs. If we wanted to do something as simple as crawl a website to understand their pricing model, we'd have to set up custom headless browsers, map HTML tags, run classification models, and so on.

I'm not saying it's easy now. I'm saying I have full appreciation for the tools available to us today. And it also allows more people coming from GTM backgrounds to enter the technical arena. Clay, n8n... at the end of the day they're pretty much programming exercises with an interface. I'd even say configuring CRMs is a form of programming too.

But I digress. GTM Engineering is in demand right now. The hardest part of it all is always figuring out what to engineer. What to build.

Your tech stack. What are you actually using?

I don't want to be that guy and say tools are just tools, so I usually break it down to: a tool that helps me find people we need to talk to; a tool that helps me reach out to people; a CRM if there's a team.

Clay is great because I don't need to worry about error handling, retries, rate limits. For most use cases it's more than enough. And you get access to so much.

Sales Navigator is my go-to place for extracting up-to-date buyer profiles. I've come to the conclusion most sources are just not up to date. Easier to grab from Sales Nav and filter out the noise.

I used to love n8n but not so much nowadays.

I will sooner die than build Salesforce Apex code.

Share a workflow you're proud of.

Multiple Sales Nav queries feeding into multiple Clay tables. Send everything to one table, filter. Selective enrichment. CRM syncs. Then find people based on that "CRM syncs" table's company identifiers.

Simple on paper. Effective in practice.

Work-life reality check. How many hours are you actually working?

I have no idea. I have a toddler and family, plus I recently burned out, so I prioritize family and my own time over everything. I'm fortunate enough to only work four days a week for now.

What are you actively trying to figure out right now?

A quick testing framework for figuring out message-market fit. Plus recording learnings so they're not forgotten.

In one year, what does "winning" look like for you?

I am happy and excited about life and work. And not burned out. 😂

What advice would you give someone two years behind you?

Run your own outreach before you start setting up systems.
Run your own outreach alongside the sellers you support.
There's no way to fully understand what you're engineering unless you do the role yourself.

Also, get familiar with your browser's network tab.