Starla - Early Traction to Enterprise GTM in 8 Weeks

Context & Challenge

 

Voxly Digital was preparing to commercialise Starla, an AI platform designed to automate creative and advertising compliance for global brands.

The opportunity was significant. Regulatory pressure on advertising was rising, brand risk teams were under scrutiny, and AI governance was becoming a board-level topic. But the category itself was unclear. “Creative compliance” sat somewhere between legal compliance, marketing operations, and brand risk, meaning multiple buyer groups needed to be engaged at once.

Proof of value already existed, including exceptional results with a major global drinks brand. However, that success story lived as operational knowledge, not as buyer-ready messaging or a repeatable commercial engine.

Outreach needed to begin quickly and start to build trust in a sensitive compliance-led category.

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Decision & Approach

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The founder brought me in as Fractional CMO and Go-to-Market Lead, with a clear mandate:​

 

• Define who Starla is for

• Articulate why it matters

• Build a repeatable commercial engine

• Enable early pipeline without reputational risk

• Help hire a team to deliver growth

Rather than treating this as a marketing project, we approached it as a commercial operating model build, aligning product narrative, sales motion, content, and outreach into a single coherent system.

 

Execution

 

Positioning & Messaging

We built a comprehensive messaging framework to unify narrative across product, marketing, and sales:​

 

• Defined a clear core value proposition

• Established messaging pillars

• Created persona-specific narratives

• Articulated competitive differentiation versus legacy compliance tools

• Embedded messaging consistently across website, sales decks, outreach, and content

Sales & Marketing Operating Model

 

We designed Starla’s commercial foundations:

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• Defined inbound and outbound responsibilities

• Built an account-based targeting strategy

• Established weekly pipeline reporting and review cadence

• Created job descriptions, interview scorecards, on-boarding plans, and 90-day execution frameworks for new sales and marketing hires

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Demand Generation & Outreach

To initiate controlled pipeline growth:

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• Implemented structured account and persona-based targeting, supported by outbound sequencing

• Built segmentation by industry and location

• Designed persona-specific outbound sequences

• Launched a monthly thought-leadership newsletter focused on AI, compliance, and responsible marketing

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Content & Thought Leadership

To establish category credibility:

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• Produced long-form SEO content addressing regulation, AI governance, and industry pain-points

• Created a content and events calendar aligned to GTM priorities

• Structured narrative and assets for a flagship enterprise case study

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Partnership & Ecosystem Strategy

To support scale beyond direct sales and demand generation:

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• Designed partner go-to-market approach for DXP and platform integrations

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Outcomes & Impact

 

By the end of the engagement, Starla had moved from concept to commercial readiness with:

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• A clear go-to-market narrative aligned across product, sales, marketing, and partnerships

• Fully-built sales and outreach infrastructure ready to scale

• Live inbound and outbound activity generating early engagement across target accounts globally

• A consistent stream of content and outreach establishing early credibility in a new category

• A defined hiring and execution roadmap enabling confident scaling of sales and marketing

• A repeatable commercial foundation to support partnerships and enterprise sales cycles

Most importantly, Starla now had direction - a clear understanding of who the product is for, why it matters, and how it wins in the market.