She left VC-backed startups to build a $500k company
“I’m probably more stable” was Asia Orangio’s response to when I asked her “why start your own venture?”.
She’s right, she’s more stable than both VC-backed startups she led marketing efforts at before starting her company, DemandMaven.
DemandMaven is an agency that helps early stage companies with growth operations. Another way to think about it is hiring them to be your fractional head of growth.
This is different than just marketing and demand generation though.
As Asia put it, “there are no silver bullets” to growth.
Your product and marketing efforts have to both work for growth efforts to really work.
Today, DemandMaven has over $500k in annual revenue and Asia has worked with organizations like Moz, Sparktoro, MicroConf, TinySeed, and Techstars.
Let’s dive into how Asia and her team at DemandMaven got there.
The start of Asia’s career
Asia started her career working in marketing for a tech consultancy where she did all sorts of marketing work. Within her 4 years of working for the tech consultancy, Asia eventually was overseeing the entire marketing department where she saw a lot of different areas of marketing.
Areas like paid media, content creation, email marketing, and events are to just name a few of the areas she managed.
From there, Asia joined two different venture capital (VC) backed startups and helped to lead demand generation and marketing efforts in both startups.
In both instances, Asia was laid off. As Asia put it in my conversation with her, “If you’ve ever worked in marketing for a startup or a SaaS company, chances are 9 out of 10, you’re going to be let go at some point in your career”.
In both cases, Asia wasn’t let go because she wasn’t doing great work, it was because of other areas of the business that she didn’t necessarily have visibility to in her role in those startups. For example, in the second startup, she was laid off because the startup took on too much tech debt and the entire go to market team was all let go.
Tech debt: when you’re prioritizing speed over quality in software development and some shortcuts were taken to get to one finish line. One way to think about it: just patching pot holes in a road rather than replacing the entire road.
After this second time of being laid off, Asia was looking for another role but eventually decided that her career and job would be more stable if she just ran her own business.
She could have full visibility in her own business and could control her own destiny a bit more as a result.
The start of DemandMaven
Given Asia’s background and previous roles, she started DemandMaven in February of 2018 and was open to any type of demand generation or marketing work.
As Asia put it, she would “do what whatever you needed” when it came to marketing or demand generation work.
Asia treated the launch of DemandMaven as if she was launching a product. It wasn’t just as simple as changing her LinkedIn status (she did do that though!)
Asia built up a little bit of hype by writing and creating content for where she thought potential customers might be, places like Growth Hackers, Brian Robinson’s blog, and App Queues.
She ended up posting on Linkedin that she was open to work and then tapped into her personal local network pretty heavily in Atlanta.
By working in 2 startups in the past, she already had connections to the startup ecosystem leaders in Atlanta that could help get her plugged into the ecosystem.
The two main hubs in Atlanta that she plugged into were Techstars and the Atlanta Tech Village.
By plugging into these two hubs, she was able to talk to a lot of different founders and potential clients. She didn’t always get a client out of these interactions, but Asia mentioned that it allowed her to get a lot of great experience and hear a lot about what they were being challenged with. Effectively, Asia was doing customer interviews without even knowing it.
DemandMaven had pretty much $0 in revenue its first year, ~$50k in year 2, ~$250k in year 3, and years 4 and 5 about $500k in revenue each year.
The art of pivoting and iterating
As Asia was growing DemandMaven, it became clear to her that most companies actually have other problems than marketing.
One of the examples Asia mentioned when chatting with her was even if we can triple a company’s leads and fill the top of the funnel, none of that matters if that SaaS company is churning 80% of their customers on a monthly basis.
“SaaS has a math to it” as Asia put it.
With noticing this trend with the clients she was working with and how competitive marketing and demand generation agency work can be, Asia decided to pivot DemandMaven a bit.
Instead of executing marketing plans, DemandMaven turned into helping companies fix their “growth operations”.
Growth operations being things like “what are you measuring?”, “how are you measuring them?”, “what’s the process to improve them?”.
It’s more than just marketing. Growth is marketing AND product working together in a systematic way.
Today, most of DemandMaven’s work is this growth work. Instead of hiring a full time Head of Growth, a company can hire DemandMaven to act as a fractional Head of Growth in a way. These companies mainly being ones that have less than $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Founder-Market Fit
In talking with Asia and having her explain her journey of building DemandMaven, it was really clear that she spent a lot of time finding founder-market fit.
Founder-Market fit is when the founder’s interest and skills match the a market’s need.
I like to think of it this way: Imagine you’re a racecar driver. You might be an amazing driver, but if your car is a Toyota Prius, you’re not winning a single race. However, if you’re an amazing driver and you’re driving a Ferrari, there’s a pretty good match between driver and car.
If your experience and skillsets as a founder don’t meet the needs of your target market, it’s hard to build a great business.
For Asia, her background in working with marketing and startups fit DemandMaven well out of the gate, especially having the mentality of “I’ll do whatever”.
As DemandMaven has grown, Asia has been intentional about clarifying the message of what DemandMaven does and as a result, has had to ask herself questions like “What do I love?”, “What am I good at?”, “What does this market need?”, and “how can I make money?” and finding the intersection between all four of these questions.
All four of these questions are part of a Japanese concept called Ikigai.
It’s an old philosophy to finding your purpose as a human being and Asia used it find her own purpose a bit along with what the purpose of DemandMaven is.
In my personal perspective, it’s a key reason why DemandMaven has been able to find a “blue ocean” of sorts and carve out a niche of one. DemandMaven isn’t just a typical marketing or demand generation agency that you can find all over the place.
It does some of that work, but Asia and DemandMaven have a sweet spot in growth operations. They’ve created a “category of one” as you’ll hear in Blue Ocean Strategy.
The Growth Strategies of Asia Orangio and DemandMaven
As Asia pointed out in my conversation with her, there are no silver bullets to growth for a startup. There are reasons why startups grow and some are definitely larger than others, however, there’s not one single reason why a startup starts growing.
I would argue Asia used 5 different channels (that she still uses today!) to grow DemandMaven: Networking from past jobs, advising startups, Twitter (X), speaking opportunities, and referral partners.
Let’s go through the three that I think were the most impactful: Twitter, advising, and referrals.
Twitter or X
I’m a pretty big fan of building in public (yes, very biased because it makes these articles easier 😂) and to me, building in public on Twitter seems to be one of, if not THE best, spots to build in public.
Now, Asia hasn’t been building DemandMaven in public ton, but there are some build in public elements to how Asia has interacted with people on Twitter. She’ll post questions like this cash flow question on Twitter:
Post like these on Twitter might seem just like throw away tweets, but they do help build trust and community with others. If you’re building in community with people on Twitter, you’re probably going to be recommended and noticed by that same community.
Asia mentioned that Twitter was the primary growth channel in her early days of building DemandMaven.
That’s saying a lot given that Asia doesn’t have a massive audience on Twitter, as of August 2024, she only has ~5,000 followers on Twitter and in 2021, it was ~3,500 followers.
Asia is just active in replying to other’s tweets and being an active community member in the startup community on Twitter.
Today, Twitter isn’t necessarily the primary growth channel for Asia and she mentioned to me that since Twitter has changed to X, engagement on X is significantly down from what it used to be. So, posts like the one mentioned above about financials probably wouldn’t get the same response that it might have in the past.
Advising
One of the mottos I’ve always appreciated from Techstars is #GiveFirst. This meaning that you should give to the community first without an expectation of receiving anything back.
Asia did exactly this to plug into the startup communities and actually received a lot back without even thinking it would be a growth opportunity for DemandMaven.
Asia started DemandMaven in February of 2018 and in December of 2018, was advising companies in Techstars Atlanta and in the Atlanta Tech Village. Two of the main startup ecosystem hubs for Atlanta.
Some of the companies Asia advised in this time period became clients eventually of hers, but Asia mentioned to me that the experience and knowledge she gained in talking with these companies was incredibly valuable.
To me, I take it as Asia was doing customer interviews without even knowing it. She was understanding their biggest challenges and really getting an in-depth knowledge about her target customer.
She was learning a lot and Asia’s network was growing a ton by doing this type of networking. Asia had the connections to Techstars and Atlanta Tech Village, but by being an active member of those two communities (similar to the Twitter community above), she continued to meet more and more potential clients.
With Asia becoming known as a great advisor for companies, she ended up being asked to be a mentor at other places that were not based in Atlanta. Places like other Techstars Global Accelerator programs, TinySeed, and GrowthMentor.
Being able to add all of these places on her website and Linkedin as places she was mentoring definitely helped to bring credibility to the work she was doing. In some ways, I see it similar to being promoted several times in the same organization.
If you’re doing great work at an organization, you typically get promoted and you can show that growth pretty easily on a resume or LinkedIn.
I see Asia’s growth as an advisor similar. Started at Techstars and Atlanta Tech Village and now she’s advising all over the place.
This growth as advisor helps credibility, but also continues to grow her network in a significant way. She has a much larger net to catch potential clients is one way to think about it.
Referrals
For service based businesses, referrals are sometimes the only way a business grows and sometimes the only growth channel you really need to grow a service based business.
That’s because services are based on trust. As a customer, you need to be able to trust someone that if you pay them to do something, they’ll be able to do that work at a high level.
For Asia, this has been true since she started.
By being active in communities and talking to nearly anyone (she talked to me for this article, so it’s literally everyone), she’s building trust continually and becoming known as the go to person for growth operations.
For example, now that I’ve gotten to know Asia a bit and seen her work online, I definitely have enough trust to say to someone, “you should go to Asia for growth operations”.
The important catch there is that you have to be known for something.
If Asia was just known as “super great startup operator”, she wouldn’t be referred for anything but random opportunities that probably she won’t say yes to.
Asia has clarified her message throughout building DemandMaven and that’s been key to driving referrals that actually become clients of DemandMaven.
As Asia said above, “there are no silver bullets” and referrals on their own wouldn’t work.
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