About
I'm Robbie Maltby. I work in growth-stage B2B SaaS, usually across the whole acquisition engine rather than one part of it. I work from Montenegro.
The homepage explains the marketing work. This page is more about why I work the way I do, what else I build, and some of the people and ideas that have shaped it.
Why I stay small
I like being close to the work.
If the research changes, the ad should change. If the ad changes, the page probably should too. Then the form, the tracking and whatever happens next need to follow.
That's much easier when the person making one decision can also make the next one.
I've worked in bigger teams and there are obvious things they can do that I can't. But for the kind of work I enjoy, adding more people often means adding more distance between noticing something and doing something about it.
So I stay small deliberately.
Remote by choice
I left the UK for Dubai and later moved to Montenegro.
Remote work suits me because I like long stretches of uninterrupted work and decisions written down clearly enough that somebody can act on them without another meeting.
I'm not against offices. I just don't think being in one should be the default way a company proves that work is happening.
The 37signals approach has always made sense to me: small teams, calm operations, good writing and fewer layers between the people doing the work and the decisions about it.
Beyond marketing
Marketing is the work I do for clients, but it isn't everything I build.
I co-founded Bitcoin Studios (opens in new tab), a venture studio for early-revenue Bitcoin businesses.
I also mentor through MentorCruise (opens in new tab), mostly working with technical founders and developers who know how to build something but are still working out how to find the first people who will pay for it.
I like that stage because the distance between an idea and reality is still very short. You can talk to somebody, change the thing and find out quite quickly whether you were right.
The kind of work I like
I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow years ago and one part stayed with me: good work needs clear feedback.
Climbing is a particularly obvious example. The rock tells you what happened. If your balance is wrong or the hold is bad, you find out immediately.
I like work that has some of the same quality.
A campaign goes out and buyers respond. A landing page converts or it doesn't. Somebody uses the thing you built and tells you where it falls apart.
The feedback isn't always pleasant, but it's useful.
That's probably part of why I've ended up doing several things that look different on paper: marketing, building companies, mentoring. In each case I'd rather be close enough to the work to see what happened and change something because of it.
Influences
There are a few people and ideas I keep coming back to.
Seth Godin, particularly his writing about trust, permission and making something for a specific group of people rather than everybody.
André Chaperon, for showing me how much a very small business can do when the work is thoughtful and the audience relationship matters.
37signals, for taking small teams, remote work and written communication seriously long before most companies had to.
Away from business, I read the Stoics, especially Seneca. I'm less interested in collecting quotes from them than in the practical idea underneath a lot of the writing: pay attention to what's yours to control, and get better at how you respond to the rest.
None of these is a system I follow wholesale. They're just people and ideas that have helped me make better choices about work and how I want to spend my time.
Where to next
- The operating guides. How the marketing works, part by part: positioning, demand generation, lifecycle, attribution and marketing engineering.
- The newsletter. Occasional letters about what I'm building, what I'm learning, the experiments and the mistakes.
- Work with me. If you're building growth-stage B2B SaaS and the work fits, leave me a note.