Following their Seed round, Panther hired a content lead and a marketing manager, and had technical team members contribute to marketing efforts, as well. The CEO was leading marketing, but was looking for experienced marketing guidance and leadership to enable him to focus on more specific aspects of positioning, product-market-fit discovery, and sales. He was not ready to hire an in-house CMO or VP Marketing just yet, and instead partnered with Blue Seedling’s Netta Kivils for marketing coaching.
During the engagement, Netta worked with Panther’s marketing team members and guided them through the creation of their first marketing calendar and the buildout of their initial marketing infrastructure. This included building a marketing database of hundreds of leads, setting up an email marketing program, sending out the first email newsletters, and publishing content on Panther’s brand-new blog.
The results: Initial traction leading to rapid growth and a Series A
Panther’s audience and traction gradually expanded through content and email marketing, webinars, and successful marketing partnerships with other companies in the space, such as Snowflake. They signed up fast-growth cloud tech companies such as GitLab, Dropbox, Canva, Figma, and Signifyd. Investors took notice and in September 2020, less than a year after raising its Seed round, Panther announced a $15M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
