Inside Olivine #22
🎆Highlights from 2023: a year filled with incredible clients across many exciting industries doing really impressive things.
🎶It’s me, hi, Arielle here again.
Tis’ the most wonderful time of the year and also, the most wonderful time (I think) to take stock of (and celebrate) the year you had. Was taking a peek at what Rae shared this time last year and turns out Olivine’s strategy focus for 2023 served us pretty well. In many ways we continued building off of lessons from 2022, and we worked with some *incredible* clients this year in some really exciting industries doing some really impressive things.
And… you best believe we’re gunna celebrate em’ 😉.
In 2023 we had the opportunity to work with 15 new clients in B2B SaaS across CRM, AI, fintech, climatetech, security, cloud infrastructure, blockchain, workflow automation, and more. It's been a whirlwind of a year, and we learned a lot. We’re grateful for the partnerships we’ve forged, the relationships we’ve built, and the experiences we’ve had. As we look ahead to 2024, we’re celebrating the work we proudly delivered to our clients, along with everything they achieved in 2023.
Here we go ⬇️
Kustomer: CRM Industry. Divested from Meta in 2023
Kustomer delivers faster, richer customer experiences by unifying them through omnichannel messaging and AI-powered automation.
🎉Kustomer secured $60M in funding to unleash its potential as a standalone company after divesting from Meta.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine continued its partnership with Kustomer through its transition back to a standalone company by helping shape a new strategic direction. Read our Kustomer case study.
Yurts: AI platform. Series A
Yurts is a generative AI platform built for enterprises seeking to integrate AI into their existing workflows seamlessly.
🎉Yurts announced a $16 million Series A to support its acceleration into the market. The capital will enable them to continue building their secure AI platform and expand their technology team.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine played a critical role in Yurts' growth by facilitating strategic workshops that led to new positioning and messaging, drove alignment across the founding team, and supported their go-to-market. Read our Yurts case study.
Mercury: Fintech. Secondary Market Round
Mercury is an all-inclusive banking platform designed for startups of any size or stage.
🎉Mercury introduced SAFEs by Mercury, a feature that enables founders to manage the end-to-end SAFE process straight from their Mercury dashboard.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine delivered a comprehensive personas and JTBD report and deck, complete with persona-specific buyer journeys. This made it easy for Mercury to tailor their marketing and sales strategies for maximum impact. Read our Mercury case study.
Verta: AI platform. Seed funding
Verta is an end-to-end GenAI application development platform for all tech-level builders.
🎉Verta launched Workbench, an all-in-one platform for builders to take their GenAI idea to product—fast.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: after developing new positioning and messaging and driving internal alignment across the team, Olivine created and designed a new landing page and sales deck to support Verta’s new product launch. Read our Verta case study.
Floodbase: Climatetech. Series A
Floodbase is an end-to-end flood data solution for designing and triggering global parametric flood coverage.
🎉They announced their partnership with African Risk Capacity Limited (ARC Ltd.) to develop, distribute, and scale parametric flood insurance solutions across Africa, in addition to partnering with Ag Guard to develop parametric flood insurance programs for Australia and New Zealand.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine helped reposition and launch Floodbase’s flood insurance product with an all-new name, logo, website, and supporting sales enablement. Read our Floodbase case study.
VIN IQ: Software Development. Privately owned
VIN IQ helps reduce marketing costs and inventory time on lot by using key insights to determine which vehicles need the most promotion.
🎉They recently expanded their team with Bret Barron joining as their new Vice President of Client Success.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine developed new branding to refresh VIN IQ’s website, in addition to new positioning and messaging that supported multiple pieces of sales collateral. Read our VIN IQ case study.
Smallstep: Security. Series A
Smallstep is automated certificate management for DevOps.
🎉They were named an Overall Leader in KuppingerCole Secrets Management Leadership Compass in 2023. The analyst firm recognized Smallstep’s innovation and its modern approach to managing secrets across the enterprise.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine helped Smallstep plan, organize, and execute the public launch of their certificate management project and extend it into a larger go-to-market strategy the team could execute on. Read our Smallstep case study.
Vultr: Cloud Infrastructure. Privately owned
Vultr is the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider, delivering unrivaled ease of use, price-to-performance, and global reach to businesses and developers worldwide.
🎉They achieved Elite status as a part of the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) for cloud service providers.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine led Vultr through several key workshops to align the platform’s messaging, including tailored messaging for Vultr Cloud Alliance. We also conducted in-depth interviews to validate and refine our personas' work. Read our Vultr case study.
Darktrace: Cyber Security. IPO
Darktrace is an AI-driven cyber security platform for businesses of all sizes.
🎉Darktrace unveiled a new cloud-native security solution using AI to provide real-time cyber resilience for cloud environments.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine delivered a comprehensive personas and JTBD deck after a series of strategic workshops, which included specific value props and use cases that mapped to each core persona across every product. We also created multiple pieces of sales enablement. Read our Darktrace case study.
CDP: Environmental Services. Not-for-profit charity
CDP runs a global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states, and regions to manage their environmental impact.
🎉Paul Dickinson, CDP's Founder Chair, was recognized by TIME as one of the most influential leaders driving businesses to take climate action.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine helped CDP communicate the value of its supply chain membership program to existing clients by training sales with a new pitch deck and supporting sales enablement materials. Read our CDP case study.
Bakkt: FinTech. Post-IPO Equity
Bakkt is a cryptocurrency custody solution for financial professionals and institutions.
🎉They acquired Apex Crypto LLC, an integrated platform that handles execution, clearing, custody, cost basis, and tax services.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine presented a GTM strategy based on industry, market, and customer research. We also quickly developed a new product brochure for an important industry event and then updated the website’s product page to reflect these changes.
SketchUp: 3D software. Venture - Series Unknown
SketchUp develops three-dimensional modeling software for drawing needs.
🎉They recently released untethered VR experiences with the new SketchUp Viewer for Meta Quest.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine realigned and further validated Sketchup’s foundational product marketing. We researched and collected 100+ customer reviews, conducted interviews, synthesized the findings, and presented core personas with accompanying pain points, motivations, and use cases.
Opal: Computer and Network Security. Series A
Opal is an identity and access management platform built for the dynamic security demands of modern enterprises.
🎉Opal launched its custom app integration, allowing enterprises to implement just-in-time access for internal applications.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine recently partnered with Opal to revamp their product’s positioning and messaging. After completing three strategic workshops that culminated in a new personas and a JTBD deck, as well as a brand-new positioning and messaging guide, we’re excited to move on to creating sales enablement assets for them.
Fireblocks: Blockchain, Cybersecurity. Series E
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform that provides secure infrastructure for handling digital assets, including moving, storing, and issuing them.
🎉Fireblocks acquired BlockFold, a smart contract development and consulting firm specializing in tokenization.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Olivine worked with Fireblocks to both revamp their existing sales collateral as well as create new foundational sales enablement materials. We delivered multiple product-specific one-pagers, a new sales pitch deck, and a how-it-works guide.
Momentum: Workflow automation platform. Seed funding
Momentum is a revenue platform that utilizes AI and workflow automation to assist teams in managing deals, gaining pipeline insights, and enhancing Salesforce hygiene.
🎉Momentum announced AI Signals, a powerful way to send insights to your GTM team.
🌰Our work in a nutshell: Momentum brought Olivine on to create fresh positioning and messaging, tying its legacy and newer features together in a cohesive platform story. With updated positioning and messaging, Olivine is now leading a copy and design overhaul of Momentum’s website, in addition to working on a fundraising deck.
Top LinkedIn post
The brilliant April Dunford (who has a new book, “Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win”) makes an important distinction between the storytelling marketers prioritize versus the storytelling sales find useful (aka a “Sales First” approach). As product marketers, I’m sure most of us are focused on enabling more sales in 2024, so give her newsletter and book a read (and her podcast a👂listen).
Fresh finds
Tool I love: I recently upgraded to the premium version of Grammarly after using the free version for over a year. The Chrome extension is awesome, and it just makes my writing tighter.
Shallow dive: Great write-up from Matt Hodges on how they developed the vision, mission, and strategy at Equals
Deep dive: One of the books that deeply impacted me in 2023 was “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis. It’s one of those reads that’s going to change the way you look at your professional and personal life.
Inside Olivine
Content gems
What our clients achieved in 2023 (and how we supported them)
They did it! Highlights from The PMM Career Launch Accelerator
Job openings:
Vultr is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
ClickUp is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager
Confluent is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
Motorola Solutions is hiring a Product Marketing Manager (Cloud)
See more open roles on Olivine’s job board.
Thank you for welcoming us into your inbox every month—we don’t take it lightly. Here’s to a great year ahead together (fingers crossed 🤞).
Rooting for you,
Arielle
I love reading and learning from you Arielle! Everyone interested in product marketing should read this substack post!
Love to see it 👏