What five years inside a Dutch SaaS startup taught me about marketing, product, and growth

My path into SaaS did not start in marketing. It started with a translation project. A Dutch software company needed help translating its platform from English into Brazilian Portuguese, and I was working remotely from Brazil with a degree in Administration and some marketing experience. I had never been to Europe.

At the time, I did not know what SaaS was, I did not know how software companies operated, and I definitely did not expect that project to shape how I think about marketing, positioning, and growth today. Nor did I imagine that a translation job would become the first chapter of a much larger education.

What began as translation gradually expanded into customer support, sales, content creation, product communication, marketing, and cross-functional work. I wrote articles and landing pages, created videos, ran campaigns, grew audiences, interviewed developers, answered customer questions, and helped shape how the company communicated with the market.

At first, those responsibilities seemed unrelated. Looking back, they were all teaching me the same thing: businesses are not just built internally, they are interpreted externally. That is what marketing, branding, and positioning are really about.

SaaS was also changing while I was learning it. What began as a model built largely around convenience, access, and delivery became a far more crowded market where usability, trust, consistency, and customer experience started carrying much more weight (Lemon Learning). The product still mattered, of course. But the experience around it mattered too, which is usually how the plot thickens in business.

Translation taught me that meaning doesn’t travel automatically

At first, I thought I was translating words. What I was really translating was meaning. Software does not always translate neatly across languages, and a literal translation is often not enough.

You need to understand what the feature does, why it exists, how customers use it, and what will make sense in context. In other words, you need to understand the gap between what a company means and what a customer understands.

Years later, I realized that this is also what positioning does. Most businesses do not struggle because they lack value. They struggle because the value is not being interpreted clearly. Which is less dramatic than failure, but somehow more common.

The market does not experience a company exactly as the company experiences itself. It experiences the signals the company sends through language, structure, visuals, consistency, and messaging. Customer feedback is one of the fastest ways to see whether that interpretation is working in real time (Intercom).

Translation was never just about language. It was about interpretation. And interpretation, inconveniently, is the part customers care about most.

Customer support showed me where the message was breaking

One of the biggest surprises was seeing how much positioning happens outside marketing. Customers rarely say, “Your positioning is unclear.” That would be far too efficient. Instead, they ask the same questions repeatedly, misunderstand the same features, hesitate at the same stage, and use different words from the ones the company uses.

It is not subtle, but it is useful. Customers are basically running an unpaid diagnostics department, except without the meeting fatigue or the budget.

Before I ever worked on positioning professionally, customer support was already teaching me how customers experienced the product—not how the company assumed they did, but how they actually did. That difference matters because support conversations are not just service interactions. They are feedback on clarity, usability, and message alignment.

When companies miss that signal, they often end up solving the wrong problem with enormous confidence. Which is rarely a good business model—and a very expensive way to discover that your message has been saying the same thing badly for months.

Simple experiences are built on invisible complexity

When I joined the company, software development felt like a black box. Years later, I was interviewing developers about architecture, maintenance, scalability, and product evolution.

One lesson stayed with me: simple experiences are usually supported by a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Customers see a button. Developers see dependencies. Customers see a feature request. Developers see trade-offs. Customers see functionality. Developers see architecture.

Simple experiences are not accidental. They require coordination, restraint, and a clear sense of priorities, including decisions about what to remove, what to standardize, and what to make easier to understand. If a product feels effortless, somebody almost certainly worked very hard to make it look that way.

Simplicity is elegant, but it is not cheap. It is usually just better-dressed chaos.

Perception shifted before the product did—and that was the point

One of the most valuable lessons I learned had nothing to do with lead generation. The company already had a good product. Customers consistently described it as easy to use.

But internally, I kept noticing problems with consistency. Different dashboards had evolved separately. Branding varied across the platform. The same action sometimes had a different name depending on where users were. Nothing was dramatically broken, but the product experience was less coherent than the product itself.

Around that time, I became interested in Dutch design, especially its focus on clarity, practicality, and consistency. We started applying that thinking to how we presented the product. We standardized language across the platform, aligned branding across different tools, and made the experience more coherent.

The software itself did not fundamentally change, but the way it was perceived did. That distinction mattered, because customers do not evaluate products in isolation. They form impressions through repeated signals. Positive customer experiences shape brand perception, build trust, and reduce friction, while brand consistency helps reinforce competitive advantage (Harvard).

What changed was not just the interface. It was the feeling of the product. And feeling, inconveniently enough for anyone who prefers spreadsheets to ambiguity, is part of the product.

Most growth problems are actually alignment problems

Working inside a startup exposed me to something I still see in consulting today: many problems that look like marketing problems are really alignment problems.

Sometimes the issue is not lead generation. It is product clarity. Sometimes it is not awareness. It is customer understanding. Sometimes it is not messaging. It is inconsistency. Sometimes it is not branding. It is a disconnect between what a company is and how it is perceived.

Growth rarely belongs to one department. It happens when product, customer experience, operations, leadership, sales, and marketing move in the same direction, as a system, not a departmental hobby. Reforge frames growth around interconnected drivers like acquisition, retention, and monetization, precisely because treating growth as a single-channel exercise is how companies stall (Reforge).

When teams are aligned, the market gets a clearer experience. When they are not, the market notices. Markets are polite, but not that polite.

In other words: the funnel is often innocent until proven guilty.

The symptom is rarely where the problem lives

One of the biggest advantages of working inside a startup is that you start seeing how decisions connect across functions. A drop in conversions is not always a marketing issue. Rising support tickets are not always a support issue. Stalled growth is not always a demand problem.

Sometimes the visible symptom sits in one department, while the actual cause starts somewhere else entirely.

That lesson shaped how I work today. When a client comes to me with what looks like a marketing problem, I rarely assume marketing is the whole story. Sometimes it is. But often the issue is a lack of clarity, a gap in positioning, or a disconnect between the product experience and the way the business is being communicated.

That is where strategy becomes useful, not as a layer of abstraction, but as a way to see the system more clearly before investing in the wrong fix.

I still work with startups

The other day, my father asked me what a startup was. I laughed, because I spend most of my time talking about founders, positioning, experimentation, digital products, and growth, but that world still feels abstract to a lot of people outside it.

He was not being difficult. He was being honest. Startups are one of those things that sound obvious until you try to explain them during a 10-hour road trip in Brazil without accidentally making them sound like a personality trait.

The truth is, I have spent most of my professional life around startups—first inside one, and now alongside them. And while the products, industries, and business models differ, I keep seeing the same pattern.

A business creates real value. A product solves a real problem. Yet the market does not fully see it. Not because the value is not there, but because it has not been translated clearly enough.

There is something humbling in that. Building something valuable is only part of the work. The other part is helping people understand why it matters, without making it sound like either a TED Talk or a cry for help.

More than a marketing problem

After five years inside a SaaS startup, and years working with founders and leadership teams, I have learned that growth is rarely just a marketing problem. More often, it is a clarity problem. A positioning problem. A perception problem.

That is probably why this story still matters to me. What looked, at first, like a translation project turned out to be an education in how businesses become legible, not just across languages, but across teams, touchpoints, products, and markets.

If you are building something valuable but suspect there is a gap between what your business is and how it is being perceived, that is the kind of problem I help clients untangle. 

The value is probably already there. What it needs is a better translation. And honestly, when I started this, not in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would end up running a marketing strategy consultancy from Europe. But here we are.

Everything I’ve learned over those years goes into how I work with clients today—starting with a 1-hour audit where you bring your business and we find the problem behind the problem together.
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