Who we are and what we do at Olivine

December 2021 Olivine update: Six years after Olivine was incorporated, we’re now a badass collective of product marketers, copywriters, and designers. We’re transitioning into a new phase and have a few updates we’re excited to share.

Ashley Wilson here, co-founder of Olivine. Helping early-stage tech companies tell their story better has always been a core passion of mine. I started my tech career at Sauce Labs as the first non-technical hire. Selling and marketing Selenium in the cloud isn’t exactly an easy starting point for someone new to marketing and tech, but it turned out to be one of the best training grounds.

I quickly learned that developers didn’t want to be sold to or marketed to in a way that felt contrived or inauthentic. These lessons in digging into the core of what we did as a company,  of talking about the product and its benefits - without getting lost in the nitty-gritty - was a balancing act but over time, it clicked.

I continued to hone this skill and interest in positioning and messaging after leaving Sauce Labs and working as a consultant with a number of technical founders of early-stage startups. These founders knew how to build a product, but not necessarily how to market it. They wanted a website, a landing page, a sales deck, a case study, but didn’t know how to craft the story. 

After working as a consultant for a few years, Olivine was born in 2016 as a way to “productize” the product marketing function and bring an agency model with expert consultants to a nascent area of marketing that was being dominated (at the time) by content marketing and advertising. 

We’ve experienced a lot of changes since then and the way people understand product marketing has evolved beyond just product launches—in fact, we believe it starts before product scope.

Internally, we’ve evolved too. Three years after launching Olivine, Raechel Lambert, who I knew from Sauce Labs, joined me as a co-founder of Olivine to take it to the next level. Rae was just coming off of working at Intercom on the product marketing team for three years, and she brought in a robust set of frameworks and principles honed from her time there that up-leveled how we handled production positioning, product launches, and strategy. She also helped Olivine expand beyond its original audience of developer-focused companies. 

Six years after Olivine was incorporated, we’re now a badass collective of product marketers, copywriters, designers, and filmmakers. Positioning and messaging for B2B SaaS companies is and always will be our bread and butter, but we have a core set of offerings to choose from and decide with the client what’s going to be the top focus. Our consultants have worked with clients big and small, public and private, including ServiceNow, Envoy, ElationHealth, Applitools, and more. 

We love how product marketing looks different at every company, yet the most important part is still exceptional positioning and messaging. And now that we’ve covered the gamut of company stages and industries, we’ve learned a lot about how the role of product marketing evolves as a company scales. 

Our services

Some services we provide have been around since day one and some have come into the fold with the expertise our new team members have brought. Here’s everything we do:

Product Marketing

Within product marketing, we can deliver:

• Product marketing process and cross-functional collaboration

• Positioning & messaging guides

• Persona development

• Product landing pages

• Product & feature launch management and strategy

• Hiring & interview support

• Sales training strategy & assets

• Partner with external sales trainers to develop supporting materials (Winning by Design, Sandler, etc.)

• Pitch Decks, 2-Pagers & Battle Cards

Branding & Websites

For branding & websites, we can deliver:

• Brand positioning & messaging

• Visual style guides

• Logo design

• Website design & copy

• Photography

• Graphic illustrations

• Website implementation

Workshops

Examples of our strategic workshops:

• Brand positioning & messaging

• Defining proto-personas

• Marketing the jobs to be done

• Product positioning & messaging

• Story-first product development

• Build-a-box messaging

• Sales enablement roadmap

• Onboarding your sales team

Our latest updates and plans for 2022

What’s next for Olivine?  Going into 2022, we’re transitioning into a new phase and have a few updates we’re excited to share.

First, Olivine Films has spun off as it’s own brand and website. Cinematic marketing films have been a core offering since the beginning and I always envisioned it as something that could stand on its own. It’s taken time to develop Olivine Films and now we feel it’s ready to be independent.

Secondly, the Founder's Marketing Playbook (FMP), our self-service program to support early-stage founders, will live under the Olivine brand. Rae initially launched FMP with support from me and the Olivine team as a side project. Now it makes sense to officially put FMP under Olivine since FMP supports early-stage companies through our Olivine frameworks and templates at a price point that works for their stage. 

Lastly, the biggest news is that I’m stepping back from running Olivine day-to-day to help grow Momentum, a new startup in the sales infrastructure space. What started as a side project to support with marketing and operations early on has grown significantly and we just announced our seed round. Rae and I remain partners in Olivine and she and our VP of Operations, Daniel, will run the day-to-day.

It’s exciting and rewarding to see Olivine naturally progress to this next stage. The original spirit is there, but Olivine has grown to a team of fifteen consultants and we’ve established a core part of our team to build its next level of leadership. We’re still meticulous about our growth and who we work with so we can offer a great experience to our clients and our team, and we can’t wait to see how this thing scales into 2022 and beyond.