Werk Overview
Werk is a B2B work and team productivity platform that brings task management, team chat, and voice and video calling into one workspace, positioned against tools like Monday.com and ClickUp and built for the remote-work era.
When I joined a roughly ten-person startup, Werk was chasing Turkish enterprise deals from a weak position. I repositioned it toward a global audience, where teams were more familiar with this category and budgets were larger, and helped turn it into a product the market could actually buy on its own.
Overview of My Role
I joined as the founding and only marketer, working directly with the founders, developers, and our one salesperson. I owned the entire go-to-market from scratch, with no brand or growth infrastructure in place, and in my final months I hired and managed a small team of three as the company scaled after funding.
From Sales-Led to Product-Led
My first move was to shift Werk from an enterprise sales motion to product-led growth. I led the work to redesign the UI and UX, reworked the feature set and visual identity, and repackaged the product so users could try a demo and buy directly with a credit card, no sales call required. I also built the self-serve onboarding flow from scratch, since none existed before.
The Product Hunt Launch
I ran the full Product Hunt launch, on a platform where roughly a thousand startups launch every day. Werk finished #2 Product of the Day and #2 Product of the Week, and the launch alone generated more than $100K in revenue. In the months around it, Werk grew to around 4,000 active users.
Building the Growth Engine
Behind the launch was a full growth engine I built from zero. I made the entire site SEO-compliant and wrote organic articles that turned search traffic into users, layered TOFU and BOFU content on top, and ran sponsorships with YouTube reviewers and high-audience newsletters to drive qualified traffic. I managed Google and Meta ads for acquisition, and built the email and in-app onboarding automation flows that retained and monetized new users.
Fueling the Seed Round
The traction made the company fundable. I prepared the financial projections, built and presented the go-to-market strategy, and sat in the investor negotiations alongside the founders. Werk closed roughly $500K in seed funding across two rounds within six months, led by APA Ventures, which gave the team a real budget to scale.
Results
As the founding marketer, I helped take Werk from a weak enterprise position to a product-led business with a standout launch: #2 Product of the Day and Week on Product Hunt, $100K+ in launch revenue and around $400K all-time, roughly 4,000 active users, and a $500K seed round.
