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! 

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Partner

I work with Growth Division clients, building out growth marketing strategies and managing teams that execute on them, across paid and organic channels. My role is similar to a fractional CMO or freelance marketing director.

To date I have worked with companies including Makers Academy, Unlock, Hopp, Musiversal, Maji and Retain International across a range of sectors.

Growth Division is a community of self-employed marketing strategists and channel experts who work together on projects as an agency.

Growth Division was created to help founders more effectively validate potential channels to market by building growth teams of channel experts. We use the Bullseye Framework, the Lean Startup methodology and growth hacking techniques to find a scalable, profitable route to market.

Growth Strategist and Advisor

Kindred Works

We will build you a scalable, lasting sales pipeline. We believe the most effective way to do that is to combine growth marketing with a consumer's eye on your brand.

Growth marketing agency for B2B and B2C businesses. Strategy and execution across paid and organic channels.

www.kindredworks.co.uk

TakePlace.co.uk

Inspiring spaces for events, shoots and pop-ups. Looking for a venue? Browse our curated collection at takeplace.co.uk

Native Spaces UK

Activating commercial property. 

Past project - www.12burleighstreet.com

Nickleby Capital

Nickleby Capital provides investment capital to help accelerate growth in high-potential companies.

Venture Partner

Amantani UK

Amantani UK is a charitable trust that works with local partners to address the need for relevant education in rural areas surrounding Cuzco, Peru.

Voluntary role - I support Amantani whenever and however I can after spending time in Peru and seeing the impact their work has on the lives of some amazing young people.

Do contact me if you would like to find out more.

Ambassador

Ocean Bottle

Interim, fractional role, leading the growth and performance marketing team at Ocean Bottle.

Interim Head of Growth

The Supper Club

The Supper Club is an invitation only group of the country’s most innovative, fast growth entrepreneurs who share knowledge, experience and contacts in the spirit of give and take.

I joined as an account executive and left as manager of the sales and membership team, along the way I was lucky enough to work with a great team and hundreds of inspiring entrepreneurs.

Commercial Manager

Prelude Group

Parent company of The Supper Club and a number of other brands, all of which are aimed at supporting and developing entrepreneurs and their teams.

My role was largely focused on The Supper Club but I was involved in commercial strategy and winning new business across all of Prelude's brands.

Global Business Reports

Global Business Reports is an international provider of industry specific reports to the global trade and investment community.

I worked in Ghana and Mexico, conducting research and interviewing stakeholders before writing an editorial feature, published in a major trade journal.

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