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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Prioritize Intimate Experiences Over Scale:
Ontop hosts curated founder dinners capped at 15 people—deliberately avoiding the 20+ attendee trap where personalized connection becomes impossible. They've executed this across 10 countries with plans for 12-24 events annually. The constraint forces quality interactions where every attendee can share vulnerably about founder loneliness and business challenges, creating deeper brand affinity than any webinar or conference booth.
Build Your Growth Machine Around LinkedIn Engagement:
Ontop developed a custom system using Lovable that scrapes and analyzes every reaction and comment on C-level LinkedIn posts. When a target ICP founder interacts multiple times—reacting to both personal and company-related content—they're flagged as engaged prospects and entered into targeted outreach workflows. This transforms social media from a vanity metric channel into a qualified lead generation engine with clear scoring mechanisms.
Match Channel Strategy to Regional Behavior:
Rather than forcing a single community platform globally, Ontop uses WhatsApp for Latin American founders (where daily usage is ubiquitous) and Slack for US-based founders (integrated into their existing workflows). This localization principle applies beyond geography—the key is identifying where your ICP already spends time daily, then building community infrastructure there rather than asking them to adopt new tools.
Make Your Hero the Community, Not Your Brand:
The biggest mistake in community-led growth is positioning your company as the solution hero. Ontop's events never pitch the product—instead, they facilitate peer-to-peer connections around founder pain points. When Beatriz helped a stuck founder with marketing strategy advice, that organic value exchange led to conversion and word-of-mouth referrals. The sale came from being helpful, not from selling.
Structure C-Level Content Around Four Pillars:
Ontop's executives post across multiple content pillars with only one weekly post directly tied to their roles at the company. The rest covers family, personal challenges, and life experiences. This 4:1 ratio builds authentic personal brands while maintaining enough company relevance to drive pipeline. They've seen direct correlation between this content strategy and pipeline growth, as prospects engage with the human before evaluating the product.
Create a Personal Brand Incentive for Executives:
Rather than mandating C-level LinkedIn presence as a company obligation, Beatriz frames it as building personal equity. The pitch: this community follows you, not just the company. If you start another venture or pivot careers, your LinkedIn audience is a portable asset. This shifts the conversation from "help the marketing team" to "invest in your own future," dramatically improving buy-in and consistency.
Leverage VC Networks for Systematic ICP Targeting:
Ontop scrapes portfolio companies from their VC connections, creating a systematic pipeline of qualified founder prospects. They score these profiles based on company stage and fit, then deploy targeted outreach strategies through automated workflows. This turns warm network effects into a repeatable, data-driven targeting system rather than relying on one-off introductions.
Post-COVID, In-Person Is Your Competitive Advantage:
In a world oversaturated with Zoom fatigue and AI-generated content, in-person experiences create disproportionate impact. Ontop found that intimate dinners and curated gatherings drive stronger conversion than digital events or massive conferences. The trend mirrors podcasting's shift to in-person studios—logistics are harder and costs higher, but the authentic human connection delivers measurable ROI that digital channels can't match.
Conversation
Highlights
In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Beatriz Gomez, CMO at Ontop, a global payroll and fintech platform. After eight years at BNP Paribas, one of the world’s largest banks, Beatriz made the leap to startup life and discovered her passion for community-driven marketing strategies. At Ontop, she’s pioneered a high-touch, in-person event strategy that targets startup founders across 10 countries, building authentic connections through curated dinners rather than mass marketing campaigns. Her approach centers on quality over quantity, creating intimate experiences where founders connect over shared pain points like loneliness and uncertainty—all without pitching the product. This conversation reveals how B2B companies can leverage in-person community building, social selling through executive LinkedIn presence, and data-driven engagement tracking to drive pipeline growth in an AI-saturated marketing landscape.
Topics Discussed
- Building authentic community through high-frequency, intimate in-person events
- Scaling curated founder dinners across 10 countries with 15-person sweet spots
- Leveraging WhatsApp and Slack for regional community management
- Developing automated growth machines to track LinkedIn engagement
- Social selling through C-level personal branding on LinkedIn
- Balancing authentic connection with pipeline conversion
- Using Innate and Lovable for workflow automation and lead scoring
- Creating community-first marketing strategies that prioritize belonging over transactions
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