11,000 Leads Before the Product: A Conversation with Greg Gorzynski

Greg Gorzynski is a product growth and marketing strategist who has worked with some of Poland's top tech companies, now at Sprout Social. As CMO of an early-stage startup called GoodSalary, he generated 5,700 users and over 11,000 leads pre-product in about seven months. He has been a specialist, a growth strategist on the consulting side, and an in-house leader, and he is a digital nomad who has lived in seven-plus countries, based out of Kraków.

What makes Greg worth listening to is that he is refreshingly unromantic about growth. He does not sell miracle tactics or a favorite channel. This conversation is about a repeatable early-stage marketing process, the honest difference between consulting and in-house work, why growth is not growth hacking, and the one trait he thinks actually makes a good marketer.

The pre-product playbook

GoodSalary was a free product for developers offering personalized salary reports, and Greg is candid that he was not even happy with the 11,000-lead result because the goal was higher and, on his own back-of-the-envelope math against the budget, probably unreachable. The hard part was data: developers are famously reluctant to hand over salary and career data, and there was no dedicated engineering team, just developers borrowed from the founder's software house and pulled back whenever a client needed them.

What he did have was a simple, repeatable strategy that should take two to four weeks to build, in four steps: user research, analysis and conclusions from personal experience, alignment workshops with the other stakeholders, and writing the whole thing down in a simple document. The alignment step mattered because the team, including the CEO, was newly hired and did not know each other. And the engine underneath it all was testing. He ran roughly eleven marketing channels, from Facebook, Google, and Bing ads to Reddit ads and influencer marketing, and the surprise winners were influencer marketing (highest ROI) and Wykop, the Polish Reddit, which was full of developers.

Test eleven channels, keep two

Greg's approach to a growth budget is deliberately anti-guessing. Given ten thousand dollars to grow a million-dollar SaaS, he would do exactly what he did at GoodSalary: write down every channel that might work for that specific business, try all of them a little, treat it as a funnel, and let the data reveal the two or three that actually work. It is the Pareto principle in practice, and the point is to avoid having a favorite channel. His current favorite is influencer marketing, and he works hard to keep it out of the decision, because consulting taught him that what worked for one company often fails at the next.

He is honest that influencer marketing is hard for early-stage companies, because good influencers with real personal brands protect those brands and do not want to work with a company that might mess up, especially around sensitive data. They will read your terms of service and ask who is using the data and why. But when it works, the ROI is unmatched. The through-line is that there is no easy growth strategy. Influencer marketing looked implausible for B2B until he tried it, and the only way to know is to run the test.

Consulting versus in-house, honestly

Having done both, Greg prefers in-house, and he is candid that consulting gave him burnout episodes even at a good company, because of the pressure and heavy deadlines. His diagnosis is structural. There are three pieces to marketing work: the strategy, doing or reviewing the implementation, and having a stake in the company succeeding. Consulting usually only covers the first, and most consulting projects end after the strategy, which he considers a problem because implementation is everything, not the strategy itself.

The hardest part of consulting, he says, is that clients expect one thing and often need something different, and you have to deliver both. Fail to give them what they want and they are not satisfied; fail to give them what they need and they do not succeed, and either way they do not come back. Since consulting runs on word of mouth and reputation rather than cold outreach, that repeat business is the whole model. It is a genuinely tough gig where the results are your responsibility even when you cannot control the implementation from the inside.

Growth is not growth hacking

Ask Greg what founders get most wrong about growth and he names the belief that growth equals growth hacking, and that growth hacking means magical tactics that deliver huge results with tiny resources. He does not even use the phrase. Viral tactics, in his view, are overrated, because of survivorship bias: you only see the successful viral campaigns, not the millions that nobody ever saw, so betting on virality is playing against the odds. If he had to, he would need to create many campaigns and scale the approach, which means thinking in numbers, which means being analytical.

That leads to his most useful and mildly controversial take on what makes a good marketer: analytical before creative. You can build a process to produce something creative, but you cannot easily build the analytical rigor, and you do not need to be born creative to be a good marketer. He is also clear-eyed that consistency works for every role, echoing what Michał Sadowski said on the show, but that you do not always have the luxury of time to be consistent. Sometimes you have to run at a specific goal, as he did at GoodSalary, and skip the slower, more consistent tactics.

The digital nomad experiment

Greg is, by his own description, a semi-retired digital nomad who spent five winters living abroad, and he rates the experience underrated. It met every expectation, from sunny winters instead of the gray of Poland to a productivity boost he traces to the sun and walking by the sea. His advice to anyone curious is that it is far less difficult than people assume: it feels emotionally heavy because you are leaving home, but practically you just need a budget, an Airbnb, and a one-month trial to run the experiment on yourself.

His counterintuitive finding is that being abroad made him more productive, not less. Where others struggle to focus with the sun outside, he set strict working hours, pushed hard inside them, and then closed the laptop guilt-free to enjoy the place. He also has a sharp, practical take on LinkedIn: it is his favorite personal channel, and while people call it cringe, plenty of successful people read it, and every post is a touchpoint that reminds your network and potential employers or customers that you exist, because people simply forget you otherwise.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Build the two-week strategy. User research, analysis, alignment workshops, and a simple written document. It is enough to start, and it forces alignment on a new team.

Test many channels, keep the few. Try eleven a little, treat it as a funnel, and let data surface the two or three that work. Avoid a favorite channel, because last company's winner may be this one's dud.

Implementation beats strategy. A deck alone rarely changes anything. The reason in-house often beats consulting is that you get to actually implement and have a stake in the outcome.

Growth is not growth hacking. Viral tactics are survivorship bias. Real growth is analytical, run as a numbers game across many attempts.

A good marketer is analytical first. You can build a process for creativity, but not for rigor. You do not need to be born creative to be great at marketing.

Frameworks worth stealing

The two-to-four-week strategy

Before spending, build a lightweight early-stage strategy in four steps: user research, analysis plus your own experience, alignment workshops with every stakeholder, and a simple written document. It is fast enough to start immediately and structured enough to align a brand-new team.

Test eleven, keep two

Treat a growth budget as an experiment, not a bet. List every plausible channel, run all of them a little, and follow the funnel down to the two or three that actually convert. Deliberately keep your favorite channel out of the decision, because it biases you against what the data says.

Delegate, don't abdicate

Before hiring a marketer, do enough of the work yourself to be able to review it, because you cannot manage or plan what you have never done. If you have some experience and the budget, delegate and free your time for the business. If you have none, run the two-week strategy and implement it yourself for three months first.

Every post is a touchpoint

Treat LinkedIn activity as a series of touchpoints that keep you top of mind with your network, employers, and customers, who otherwise forget you exist. Consistency of presence, cringe or not, is what gets you seen and remembered, and it is essentially free reach.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

I don't want to have a favorite channel. What worked for one company might not work for a different one.

The implementation is everything, not the strategy itself.

A marketer has to be analytical. It doesn't need to be creative.

And the honest truth about virality.

You only see the successful viral campaigns, not the millions nobody ever saw.

Rapid fire round

The conversation ran long on channels, nomad life, and LinkedIn rather than a formal rapid-fire, so here are the threads worth keeping.

On a $10k growth budget: Do exactly what worked before. List every plausible channel, test them all a little, and double down on the 20 percent that work.

Favorite podcast: My First Million, mostly for the "Sarah's list" idea of picking stable companies with big upside and stock options.

On digital nomad life: Underrated. Try it for a month. Strict working hours plus a sunny walk made him far more productive.

On LinkedIn: Not a fad. Post a few times a week and it becomes a stream of touchpoints, including with your next employer.

---

Greg Gorzynski is a product growth and marketing strategist now at Sprout Social, previously CMO at the startup GoodSalary and a growth strategist on the consulting side. He is a longtime digital nomad based in Kraków. Find him on LinkedIn.