Tristan Gillen

GrowthEX

A growth marketing platform, run by AI agents.

GrowthEX, a growth marketing platform that enables marketers to identify, prioritise, and execute the most impactful growth experiments.

Co-Founder

Growth Division

We scale seed-stage startups by building expert Growth Marketing teams.

We've helped scale the likes of Weavr, Startups.com, Unlock, Makers, Addland, Greenomy, Kitt, Retain, Libeo, Surreal, Ted's Health and many more of the fasted growing startups. 

Founders and marketing generalists don’t have the expertise to effectively validate potential channels to market. Growth Division uses the Bullseye Framework, the Lean Startup methodology and growth hacking techniques to find a scalable, profitable route to market.

Founder

Business on Boats

Director

I’ve worked with over 100 startups as a founder, as a consultant or with my startup growth agency Growth Division,  helping startups find and validate channels to market their products and services. Now I offer:

- FREE 30-minute growth consultation sessions on specific growth challenges
- On-going advisory relationships
- Contributions (written or speaking)

Startup Growth Consultant | Startup Advisor

Shilling VC

Funding for pre-seed and seed startups. Sector agnostic, European focus, up to €1,5M ticket.

Investment Scout

GrowthMentor

Helping startup founders and growth marketers solve key growth challenges they are facing. I help advise on:

🎯 Go to market strategy
🚀 Growth marketing
🤖 Marketing automation
🤝 Building a growth team

See my profile and book a call with me through this link: https://app.growthmentor.com/mentors/tristan-gillen

Growth Mentor

Startups.com

The startup journey can be confusing, inefficient, and lonely. We help founders launch and scale startups using education, community, and tools to surround them with brilliant, connected peers who understand pains and solve problems together.

I specifically advise startup founders on: 

🚀 Go-to-market strategy
📈 Growth target setting
🎯 Growth Experiments
🤝 Customer acquisition

See more information here: https://www.startups.com/community/founder-groups

Growth Advisor to Startups

Squadra

We are a collective of seasoned professionals offering on-demand services to startups and scaleups. Whether you need part-time executives, coaching, or mentoring, we're here to help in a fractional manner tailored to your needs.

I'm a Fractional CMO offering mentorship and advisory to Founders in the Squadra community.

Fractional CMO | Growth Coach | Mentor

Growth Squared

30-day GTM Acceleration Programme for Pre-Seed and Seed Stage Startups.

✓ A complete go-to-market strategy you can start executing on immediately
✓ 1:1 sessions with a Growth Advisor
✓ 1:1 sessions with channel experts
✓ Access to resources and content that unlock scale for you and your team

>>> Apply here >>> https://growthsquared.ai/

Growth Advisor

Growth DAO

A Web3 Venture Building Ecosystem.

We’re building a decentralised organisation to scale Web3 startups by providing funding and growth experts.

Find out more here: https://linktr.ee/growthdao

Founding Member

Founder at Growth Division | Growth Squared >>> Applications for our 12-week growth programme NOW OPEN

I fulfill several key roles at Growth Division. I am a co-founder, new business generator, CRM expert, martech whizz, drum n bass track recommender and Southern European correspondent from my current base in Lisbon. 

After Uni, I joined Europe’s largest tech distribution firm in their Business Intelligence unit. There I learned just about everything there is to learn about CRM, automation and analytics. 

Eventually, I partnered with Tom Dewhurst to work on Ordoo (an ordering F&B app), where we navigated the mad world of London startups and eventually got taken over by an investor. 

From there, I became a freelance CRM strategist and worked with 25 startups over the course of 18 months helping them get their customer journeys, automations and Spotify gym playlists right. 

A few years later, Tom and I joined our forces again and started Growth Division to help other startups overcome one of the biggest challenges Ordoo faced: finding and validating channels to market. 

We've so far helped 100+ startups globally find scalable channels to market. 

Beyond the day job I am a coffee obsessive, and avid adventurer wandering from London to Lisbon, Paris to New York.

Just got promoted to 'Dad' too, learning to juggle bottles and business! 

-----

Want to scale your startup/scaleup? Let's chat!

A great product isn’t enough on its own anymore.

There’s still the idea floating around that if you build something good, the customers will come.

Most markets are saturated, and everyone is competing for the same five seconds of attention.

That’s why Minimum Viable Brand matters, especially at the early stage. It’s the system that brings your business together.

It shapes:

→ Your product: how you build it and who it’s for
→ Your culture: the values that guide decisions
→ Your communication: how you tell your story

At recent startup events I have been speaking at, one thing kept coming up: founders are great at shipping Minimum Viable Products, but very few are shipping Minimum Viable Brands.

And that gap is where traction stalls.

A strong MVB makes your company look intentional long before there’s a full track record. That compounds. It attracts better people, sharper customers, and makes every other part of growth easier.

If you’re early stage, don’t put brand on the “later” list. Build your Minimum Viable Brand now.

Founder at Growth Division | GrowthEX - Scaling startups with expert growth marketers + our AI Growth Platform

Search ads aren’t just Google anymore.

When people think SEM, they often think Google or Bing, but search intent exists everywhere.

We’re now seeing ads performing well across platforms like:
🛍 Shopify and app store searches
💼 Glassdoor and Rightmove listings
💬 Even AI search tools like ChatGPT

The principle stays the same: meet people exactly when they’re searching for something. That moment of intent is still one of the most powerful signals in marketing.

It’s also one of the easiest channels to validate early. A few solid keywords, a great search ad expert, and a modest budget can tell you quickly whether it’s worth scaling.

We’ve run hundreds of experiments across search platforms, and the best results always come when you find those niche, high-intent queries where competition hasn’t caught up yet.

If you’re considering adding search into your growth mix, it’s definitely one to test early, as the signal-to-noise ratio is still hard to beat.

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Need help hiring an expert? 🤔

👉Drop me a message or visit Growth Division to find out more about our amazing community of digital marketing specialists: https://lnkd.in/dMHztsxr

Rejection is part of building something new.

As a founder, you’re constantly putting ideas into the world that don’t yet exist, and that means hearing “no” far more than “yes.”

Things will go wrong. Experiments will fail. Decisions won’t always land. But that’s the reality of creating something from uncertainty, and not a sign you’re on the wrong path.

If you want to go far, you can’t avoid failure. You need to get used to it, learn fast, and keep moving forward.

2025 has been a big year: a mix of progress, learning curves, and a few healthy failures along the way.

GrowthEX has been the highlight. Getting back into product building has reminded me how much I enjoy the messy early stages.

Bringing on Alex Robinson as CTO and co-founder has been a game-changer, and seeing early customers genuinely excited about what we’re building has been incredibly fulfilling.

We’ve also signed our lead investor, which gives us real momentum heading into next year.

On the personal side:

● Hit my reading goal again: 27 books (currently wrestling with War & Peace).
● Kept working on my French: ~30 hours of lessons + a month in France. My wife speaks to me in French now (and I mostly understand…). Still stuck on speaking, but comprehension is improving each year.

Not everything worked, and that’s okay. 

We shut down Growth Squared this year, which generated £50k revenue but with no sustainable growth channel. It was a good reminder that failure is part of progress.

All in all, it was a good, difficult, but fulfilling year. 2026 has a lot to live up to.

No growth channel is guaranteed to work.

Every one of them takes time, and the right fundamentals, before you can really tell if it’s moving the needle.

That’s why giving up too soon can be a mistake. You might be one iteration away from traction. The key is to keep experimenting: refine your messaging, test your audience, and understand why a channel is or isn’t working.

With enough testing, learning, and refinement, you can make almost any channel work for you.

Most founders spend months perfecting their pitch, and about 10 minutes checking who they’re pitching to.

But choosing the right investor is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make, and ironically, it’s the part most people rush.

It’s easy to get excited when a fund shows interest, but interest and intent aren’t the same thing, and trust alone is not a strategy.

If you want to protect the company you’ve worked so hard to build, you need to do your due diligence before you’re willing to take anyone’s money.

While investors provide capital, they can also bring risk, influence, and a say in your future.

With that in mind, here’s a carousel of some simple checks worth doing before you take on any investor.

4 checks to do before taking on an investor

Some reviews celebrate results, but the best ones validate the process that got you there.

One of our clients just left us a 5-star review on Clutch, and it stood out for exactly that reason.

Yes, the numbers are exciting:

●  50% increase in leads
●  Landing page conversions from 3 to 156 per month
●  80% more users arriving organically

The part that really resonated was this line:

“They operate more like an extension of our internal team than an external agency.”

That’s exactly what we’re aiming for at Growth Division. Not a bolt-on, but a team that embeds, experiments, adapts, and stays aligned with a client’s stage and goals.

Big thanks to the team behind this one: Daniel Hardoon Adulayavichit, Alex Dawson, Alicia Naidoo, Stephanie Strachan, Tom Tigwell, Filip Saračević, and Nicholas van Ryneveld.  👏

And thanks to our client for trusting us on this journey!

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Need help hiring an expert? 🤔

👉Drop me a message or visit Growth Division to find out more about our amazing community of digital marketing specialists: https://lnkd.in/dMHztsxr

A big welcome to three new businesses we’re partnering with @Growth Division.

Each one is doing something genuinely meaningful in their space:

🧠 RTN Mental Health: Making ADHD and autism assessments more accessible and supportive for people across the UK.

💼 Business Leader: Creating a stronger ecosystem for founders and CEOs to connect, share, and scale.

⚡ Threefold Energy: Helping businesses cut carbon and costs with smart, battery-powered energy systems.

Very different missions, but the same mindset: ambitious teams building things that make a real impact.

We can’t wait to help each of them scale what’s already working further, and experiment our way to the next phase of growth together.

Some serious in-person events in Nov...

🤝 DeSummit side event in Lisbon with Todd Chambers
💳 The Fintech House talk on Growth Strategy
🟢 Growth Circle event with AI roundtable in London
🫎 Antler talk on GTM in Berlin 

+++ some exciting news on signing terms sheets with a lead investor for GrowthEX! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

It's gonna be a fun end to 2026...

Hello helloooooo, November has been filled with in-person, handshaking events at Growth Division ... 🤝 DeSummit side event in Lisbon hosted with Todd

Open article: Thoughts on Growth - November by Tristan Gillen • 3 min read

Everyone wants to scale.

But if you push budget into growth before you know who you’re serving and why they should care, you’re setting money on fire.

Without a clear customer, message, and value prop, every pound spent on growth just accelerates in the wrong direction.

If you’re serious about growth, you have to get comfortable with long-running tests that sometimes lead nowhere.

We invested in a paid VC partnership expecting a strong volume of qualified opportunities, but after 3 quarters, the results proved otherwise.

It was a failed experiment, but one that saved us from years of misplaced effort.

Stefan Repin

Vice President Sales and Marketing

VP of Marketing @ Platforce | Fractional CMO, B2B expert

"Marketing without sales alignment is just expensive content creation."

That realization changed everything for me after watching a brilliant tech company burn through $500K in marketing spend with zero enterprise deals to show for it.

Now, I help B2B tech companies stop marketing like startups when selling to ENTERPRISE.

I specialize in fractional marketing services that transform marketing from a cost center to a predictable revenue driver. My results speak for themselves:
- Reduced CAC by 85% for SaaS companies
- Shortened enterprise sales cycles by 2 months
- Scaled a tech company from $6M to $18M
- Generated 500x ROI within three months for a Belgian tech company

I build cost-effective demand generation engines based on what works for YOUR company — not cookie-cutter strategies. Whether it's ABM, founder-led brands, webinars, or content marketing, I choose the channels that deliver the highest ROI for your specific situation and strengths.

What clients say:

"Stefan is a 1st class marketing professional... I have personally learned much from Stefan, mostly around the breathtaking collection of marketing tools at his easy disposal. Stefan comes ready to work: upbeat, optimistic and always with a new idea to discuss or campaign possibility to A/B test." — Thomas Bianco, Head of Sales, ITG Commerce

"Stefan has a great grasp on growth strategy and will serve your startup well." — Robert McMillan, Founder & Management Consultant

"Stefan has a lot of energy and can help you shape your marketing machine. Stefan keeps the ball moving 👍" — Hugo Gervais, CEO @Urbest

Clients receive CMO-level expertise without the 5-month wait or full expense of hiring a VP of Marketing. We start with a one-month pilot to prove value before any long-term commitment.

My approach: I generate more demand from the resources you already have. High ROI, low effort.

Past and current clients include: Irrational Labs, Lensa, Central European University, Groundbreaker (now Janover Connect), Angloville, Reinvently, Provectus, Viseven, Platforce, and Gitential.

B2B Marketing and Sales Growth Mentor

Providing 1:1 mentoring for entrepreneurs starting and growing their own businesses through GrowthMentor, a curated platform of invite-only startup and growth marketing mentors who have proven experience in their fields. Join to find your next mentor » www.growthmentor.com

A few interesting experiments that drove some good revenue. Obviously they were based off creativity and not just by scaling AI.

A few truths that we all forgot about and we should remember or remind ourselves about.

A few cool actionable things that I've discovered this week.

Helping to market and sell to enterprise, aka B2B/B2G |B2B Demand Generation and ABM for Technical Buyers| AI implementations and automations for complex sales cycles

View newsletter: Practical thoughts on Growth

When Everyone’s Building Rube Goldberg Machines (And Calling It Strategy) The GTM world just figured out it has a cake mix problem. We’re spending 40 

Open article: I will tell you what's working in B2B — and why 90% of what you read on LinkedIn is performance art for Venture Capitalists. by Stefan Repin • 9 min read

I will tell you what's working in B2B — and why 90% of what you read on LinkedIn is performance art for Venture Capitalists.

Been excited to be at the Tekpon conference! 
Although I had some serious cold and fever the night before :(  and missed on a lot of  great convos. 

Some hot insights for you like my tea this morning. 

AI scales the playbook — but relationships still close enterprise deals.

The new norm is at least 1 million $ per employee. 

Sara Maldon was talking about some pretty cool automations you can pull with make.com, cut the research time and increase the customer facing time with clients. 

Vincent Jong gave some good benchmark on how efficiency should look like in the AI first world. Also a very helpful table about what AI can do well and what it cannot do well. 

Frank Sondors 🥓 Bill Stathopoulos Jeko Kolev had a pretty cool conversation about AI's role in today's #GTM strategy. 

Todd Paris came with some incredible insights on difference in terms of ranking factors for LLMs, what do they like, their personality and how to optimize for that. 


Some personal thoughts: 

Found: AI wins when it automates sales ops (post-call follow-ups, CRM enrichment, research), freeing reps to focus on human conversations.

Realized: ABM + co-created content = faster access to decision-makers and higher-quality pipeline.

Identified: First‑party signals (hires, multi‑language site relaunches, investor moves) drive better account selection than noisy intent feeds.

Found: Enterprise buyers want bulletproof solutions — GDPR, SOC2, and provable ROI beat flashy demos every time.

Realized: ICP clarity is non‑negotiable — know who uses the product vs who signs the check (marketing vs CFO/ops).

Identified: Product‑led, API‑first businesses that prioritize engineering scale revenue per employee and reduce dependence on large sales teams.

Noted: Top-of-mind benchmark — aim for ~$1M revenue per employee in AI-first product companies; anything less risks being out-competed on efficiency and cost structure.

Credibility quote: “AI helps SDRs by doing the grunt work — prospect research and CRM enrichment — but it doesn’t replace the relationship you need to close enterprise deals.” 


This left me with a question: 

 If you’re scaling #GTM with #AI this year, are you prioritizing automation or proving measurable ROI to finance — and how are you or are you tracking revenue-per-employee as a success metric?

Go to market operator for B2B/B2G |Demand Generation and ABM for Technical Buyers| AI implementations and automations for complex sales cycles

In this newsletter, I'm bringing you, as usual, the most actionable and truthful stuff I've found over LinkedIn, Twitter, and Substack. 

Subscribe more to get more insights and learn something. 
I hope you do learn something from this.

Really! 

P.S. 
There are a few good tips, such as:
Why you should have three potential lists in your ABM outreach
How you can design a workflow which will help your product-led growth

The GTM Chaos Chronicles: When LinkedIn Goes Full Battle Royale Content on social is having another one of those weeks where everyone's either having 

Open article: The GTM Chaos Chronicles: When LinkedIn Goes Full Bananas by Stefan Repin • 8 min read

The GTM Chaos Chronicles: When LinkedIn Goes Full Bananas

The main lesson I’ve learnt from working with smart people:

Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. 

This will give you information about what you should actually be doing or asking. 

Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.

No alternative text description for this image

Here is a trick on how to get vps and chief officers of something attention, inspired by the video made by Kyle Coleman. 

It’s a trick that proved to be working, but please use it wisely, as it is a hack and it might erode the trust in you :)

The state of AI these days. 
Sarcasm
Fun intended

I just spent two weeks tracking what's  actually working in B2B GTM vs. what we wish was working.

The gap is wider than ever, wider than Grand Canyon and that stuff is BIG. 

Here's the uncomfortable reality no one's talking about:

→ AI SDRs sound great in demos, fail spectacularly in production 
→ Most GTM systems are built around the wrong buying signals 
→ Your "perfect" RevOps stack might be accelerating your decline 
→ Every GTM playbook has an expiration date (and yours just expired)

But some teams are quietly crushing it.

They're not chasing #AI #hype. 
They're engineering systems around actual buyer behavior.
I analyzed 18 posts from operators shipping real results:

Stan Rymkiewicz's AI copywriting workflow that scores 0% on AI detectors

Janis Zech's findings after talking to 450+ RevOps leaders about GTM AI 

Lillian Pierson, P.E.'s wake-up call: "GTM Engineer" isn't BS—it's real 

Jamie Walsh's brutal truth: systems don't fix unclear signals 

Dimitar Stanimiroff on why every playbook breaks (and always will)

The pattern?

Winners aren't building bigger stacks. They're finding clearer signals.
They're not replacing humans with AI. They're making humans 10x more effective.

They're not following last year's playbook. They're rebuilding for the environment that exists today.

This week's newsletter breaks down:

✅ What AI can and can't actually do in GTM (with receipts from 450+ teams) 

✅ The 5-step workflow that creates AI content that doesn't suck

 ✅ Why your buying signals matter more than your CRM 

✅ How to measure ABM with a simple 50/50 split test 

✅ The discovery framework that actually qualifies deals 

✅ Why "GTM Engineer" is now a real role at 89+ startups

 ✅ What your 2026 budget should actually be (by sector)

If you're frustrated with GTM right now, it's not you.
The old playbooks died.

 The new ones are being written by operators who understand one thing:
Clarity creates compounding. AI just accelerates it.

📬 Full breakdown in this week's newsletter (link in comments)

What's your biggest GTM frustration right now?

P.S. Shoutout to Scott Finden, Yurii Veremchuk, Janis Zech, Stan Rymkiewicz, Jamie Walsh, Tim Busschops, Dimitar Stanimiroff, Lillian Pierson, P.E., Canberk Beker, David Zeledon, Sumit N., Jen Allen-Knuth, Dan Ptak, Andrei Zinkevich, Kate Syuma, and Kieran Flanagan for the insights that made this newsletter possible.

LinkedIn's been having another identity crisis this week, and honestly? I am starting to get tired of it. Promise, the next newsletter will be more or

Open article: The Great GTM Reality Check of 2025 (What's Actually Working vs. What We Wish Was Working)
 by Stefan Repin • 11 min read

The Great GTM Reality Check of 2025 (What's Actually Working vs. What We Wish Was Working)

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