Maxta came out of stealth in November 2013 with a hypervisor-agnostic, software-defined storage platform, a handful of early customers, Andreessen Horowitz behind it, and a $1M first-year revenue goal. What it didn’t have was a marketing team, a validated buyer, or any way to turn market attention into measurable pipeline. The Artesian Network stepped in as Maxta’s outsourced marketing team for a three-phase engagement: validate who buys and why, build the message and assets around that, then prove it all out through an instrumented demand engine.
The Challenge
Maxta’s MxSP platform let companies run VM-centric storage on standard servers, eliminating the need for external storage arrays. The technology was real, and so were the early proof points: paying customers, published case studies, and analyst briefs from ESG, SSG-NOW, and Storage Switzerland. The problem was the market it was launching into and the machinery it didn’t yet have.
Virtualized storage in late 2013 was one of the noisiest categories in enterprise IT. Maxta was up against incumbents with enormous marketing budgets — EMC, NetApp, HP — and a wave of well-funded converged and VM-aware storage startups including Nutanix, SimpliVity, and Tintri. Standing out required reaching the right VMware administrators and IT buyers repeatedly, and knowing which of them were actually in market.
Internally, almost none of that was possible yet. Maxta had no marketing-automation platform, no lead scoring, and no agreed hand-off between marketing and sales. Its best content was either ungated and untracked or hidden behind “we’ll contact you” forms. No search-engine work had been done. The contact lists sales had assembled from data providers and VMware User Group (VMUG) events had never been mailed and weren’t opt-in — one bad send could have damaged the domain’s deliverability on day one. And with a goal of $1M in first-year revenue at roughly a $15K average deal size, Maxta needed a steady flow of qualified opportunities, not a launch-week spike.
What We Did
Operating as Maxta’s marketing team, The Artesian Network ran a three-phase program, each phase feeding the next.
Phase I — Validate the buyer and the use case
- Tested who buys and why. Applied Artesian’s use-case validation and Sales Learning Curve frameworks to Maxta’s early deals, pipeline, and market data to pin down the work Maxta was being hired to do, the organizations most likely to buy, and who inside them decides.
- Found where “hypervisor-agnostic” actually lands. Only about one in four small-business and back-office buyers wanted multiple hypervisors, and loyal VMware shops were likely to give false negatives. The recommendation: hyper-target the segment that cares instead of leading with it for everyone.
- Measured the language gap. Only about a quarter of buyers had heard of “software-defined networking,” and far fewer knew “software-defined storage” — so the story had to lead with the business problem, not the category name.
Phase II — Build the message and the assets
- Reframed the story around the problem. Built messaging that starts with what virtualization broke in traditional storage — the “I/O blender” effect, boot storms, runaway array costs — before introducing Maxta as the answer, and pressure-tested the cost, simplicity, and resiliency value propositions against competing alternatives.
- Created education-first content. Wrote the buyer’s-guide paper Optimizing Enterprise Storage for Virtualized Compute Environments, a “What is software-defined storage?” explainer, and new landing pages built to teach first and sell second.
- Turned the content library into a lead engine. Replaced the site’s free-trial, demo, quote, contact-sales, and partner forms with tracked forms, and gated every datasheet, solution brief, customer case study, and analyst report so each download created or enriched a Salesforce lead with its source attached.
- Laid the search foundation. Ran keyword research across 800+ terms and shortlisted two paid-search campaigns.
Phase III — Prove it through an instrumented demand engine
- Implemented marketing automation. Stood up Pardot (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) and connected it to Salesforce, the website, and Google Analytics — from kickoff on January 3, 2014 to full deployment by early March — with Maxta staff trained to own it.
- Built lead scoring and the sales hand-off. Designed, with Sales, the scoring model and drip path that mature a “suspect” into a sales-ready lead, plus a documented lead-action protocol and joint review cycle.
- Protected deliverability before the first send. Vetted and cleansed three contact lists — 30,623 records down to 27,461 — so a first mailing to a cold, non-opt-in list wouldn’t trigger bounce or spam penalties.
- Ran two integrated campaigns where buyers already were. Built A/B-tested campaigns around the VMware User Group’s first Virtual VMUG conference and the Orlando VMUG, written to invite rather than sell, with matching inside-sales call scripts. Paid search launched at closeout.
- Gave leadership a weekly funnel view. Delivered a weekly dashboard tying campaigns and web activity to leads and opportunities.
- Handed over a data-backed playbook. The closeout readout set the next moves: independently prove the simplicity, cost, and resiliency claims; hire a senior full-time content lead; add short explainer videos and an aggressive back-linking program; and fix the Free Trial and Contact Sales pages, where 79% and 89% of visitors were dropping off.
The Outcome
In about ten weeks, Maxta went from no demand infrastructure to an instrumented funnel that showed exactly where pipeline came from. The first send to the cleansed, non-opt-in list drew zero spam complaints and only 197 opt-outs — roughly a quarter of what the team had braced for — plus 29 event RSVPs and expressions of interest. Between January 9 and March 7, gated content generated 156 new web leads and 302 tracked downloads, and the rebuilt contact forms added 106 new leads to Salesforce, all feeding the scoring model. Weekly website visits climbed from roughly 500–600 in December to about 1,000 by February.
The pipeline moved with it. Maxta created 44 opportunities in Q1 2014 — counted quarter-to-date at closeout — against 17 in each of the two prior quarters. By the program’s own tracking, 62% of the new gross pipeline was originated or accelerated by the project, including more than $470K in opportunities with Pardot-tracked engagement.
Just as important, Maxta now had a validated target buyer, a problem-first message, and the reporting to keep improving the engine rather than guessing. Two months after closeout, in May 2014, Maxta raised a $25M Series B led by Tenaya Capital and Intel Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz participating.
It was a pleasure and privilege to work with Jonathan recently. Jonathan is very creative, entrepreneurial and very current in the new "digital marketing" strategies and tactics. Jonathan and Artesian were able to add value to our internal marketing and sales efforts and deliver tangible results in a very short time. If I have the opportunity, I would consider hiring him again.