A Magic Wand Needs a Magician: A Conversation with Natalia Slota

Plenty of B2B marketers talk a big game about growth and scaling. Ask whether they've ever built something from zero and you get crickets. Natalia Slota has, and then shut it down when she ran out of hours in the day.

Between marketing exec roles, Natalia built an e-commerce jewelry brand, Shopify, influencer partnerships, photo shoots, packing boxes herself at night, grew it fast through paid social, and eventually closed it. She led growth at BibliU, one of the UK's fastest-growing startups, built demand-generation engines at a mortgage-tech company, and now runs a B2B marketing agency, Apricot. That operator mindset, having actually done the messy work, is what she brings to advising tech companies.

Marketing is the cherry on top

Natalia's foundational belief is that marketing can't save a product that hasn't found its market. Make sure you have product-market fit before you invest in marketing, because marketing should be the cherry on top. Invest at that stage and you'll get the ROI; invest before it and you just lose money. Product-market fit, in her words, is making sure you solve a real problem in the market you want to be in, and she's watched technical founders pour time and money into brilliant solutions nobody uses, either because they were the only one with the problem, or the market was too small, or solutions already existed.

The corollary is to test before you build. Before Apricot even had a website, she ran an outbound challenge, messaging her ideal customers in Switzerland to ask whether the world needed another B2B marketing agency for tech brands. The response was positive, and those early conversations pulled people into the ideation and co-creation, which is exactly how you land the trickiest thing of all: your first customers.

The Uber Eats voucher that built trust

Her BibliU story is a lesson in ABM against a tiny, low-trust market. BibliU brings textbooks online for universities, and in the UK that's roughly 140 institutions, of which maybe a third were open to switching. So the team targeted precisely, researching each university's values and strategy, and worked hand in hand with sales and SDRs. Then they built a community of trust: monthly sponsored "spill tea" webinars where a different university shared its struggles, with a £20 Uber Eats voucher for every attendee. Directors came for the voucher and stayed for the content, a tiny cost for a remarkable return.

But Natalia is careful not to let the growth story become pure merit. The external factor mattered enormously: this was COVID, students couldn't visit libraries, and demand for an online textbook platform surged. There was strong product-market fit at exactly the right moment. They were lucky, she says, and they utilized that luck to the maximum.

What B2C actually taught her

Selling jewelry on Instagram surprised her with the brutal economics. B2C demands volume to be profitable, and the margins in a competitive category are slim, eaten up by duty, delivery, VAT, profit tax, plus Shopify, email tools, Google Suite, and ads. She'd end up with maybe 20 zloty of margin on an order, after a full day job, then come home to package everything, writing handwritten notes and adding dried flowers because she's a perfectionist. Fifteen or twenty letters later, drained, she asked whether it was worth it. The creative parts, the photo shoots, the influencer barter with celebrities, were fun, but the grind wasn't, so she closed it. At scale it might pay off, but reaching that scale takes relentless consistency and luck.

The two channels she'd bet on

Pressed to pick two channels for a $2M ARR B2B SaaS, Natalia first refuses the premise, there's no single recipe, every product and ICP is different, and it all starts with providing value. But if forced: email and LinkedIn. Email is high-performing when used strategically with clean data and a good CRM like HubSpot that shows you exactly who engaged. LinkedIn because everyone's there, though it depends on the market and ICP. Her mortgage-tech playbook in Germany, a market with no brand awareness, was to build awareness through ads and ABM, watch for target accounts engaging on the LinkedIn dashboard, then hand those warmed accounts to sales for outbound, with clean CRM data and bounce management underneath it all.

Aligning sales and marketing is really about drinks in Munich

Everyone says to align sales and marketing. Natalia's answer for what actually makes it happen isn't more meetings or calendar time. It's getting to know the person. At the mortgage company, she and the salespeople went to a conference in Munich, stood at the booth all day, then went for drinks and walked around the city without talking about work. Despite an age gap and being the only woman among men, that personal connection made everything easier afterward, exchanging information and ideas on Slack, even being a bit silly. It helped that they operated as one go-to-market team rather than separate departments. In-person connection, she says, is the easiest ROI you'll ever get.

The attribution trap

The mistake she sees most, especially from scientific, engineering-minded founders, is demanding that every lead be attributed to a tactic. She lived through excruciating biweekly meetings where each slide was a channel, blog, ads, events, email, and each had to report leads generated. Ask a content marketer how many leads the blog generated this month and the honest answer is roughly zero, because there's no direct path from blog to booked demo, but that doesn't mean you kill the blog. Attribution platforms are expensive and not fully accurate, and in enterprise it takes around seven touchpoints before there's even intent. Marketing is a journey, and you need common sense alongside the analytics, nobody sees one brand-awareness ad and signs a million-pound deal on the spot.

The founder reality, and burnout

A mentor warned Natalia she'd be the only person losing sleep over clients, working weekends and evenings with little personal time. She insisted she'd keep work-life balance, and while founding is taxing, she's found it genuinely fun, a creative outlet, with a new layer of challenges: building a culture that's high-performing but inclusive, closing deals, crafting contracts. Having been burnt out before, she's honest that it could return, but for now she's in flow.

On burnout itself she's direct: it's a serious problem, and if you can't quit right away because of kids or a mortgage, seek help, a doctor, a therapist, open up. But if you're able, end the cycle, because a bad environment most likely won't get better once you've done what you can, and no compensation is worth your mental health.

The magician behind the wand

To founders who think ChatGPT means they don't need a marketer, her answer is "sure, go ahead," and they come back months later needing help. AI is a superpower that accelerates everything, but pair it with a human in the loop or the output looks cheap, poor, and broad. You need someone to guide the prompt, define what high-quality output means, and connect the dots, because you won't find what you're looking for if you don't know what you're looking for. ChatGPT is a magic wand, she says, but you need a magician to operate it.

Key takeaways

Marketing is the cherry on top of product-market fit. Invest before you have PMF and you just lose money. Test demand before you build.

Build a community of trust. BibliU's sponsored webinars, and a small Uber Eats voucher, turned wary competitors into an engaged audience. Small cost, big return.

Attribution isn't everything. In enterprise it takes about seven touchpoints before intent. Don't kill the blog because it can't be traced to a demo. Use common sense with the analytics.

Alignment is personal. Sales and marketing align when the people actually know each other. Drinks in Munich did more than any process.

A magic wand needs a magician. AI accelerates the work but produces cheap output without a human guiding the prompt and defining quality.

Frameworks worth stealing

Test before you build

Before building the product, the website, or the brand, go to the market and ask. Natalia messaged her ICP directly to gauge whether there was room for another agency, and the early adopters who engaged in that co-creation became her first customers. Talk to people, and let their response, not your conviction, tell you there's a fit.

The community-of-trust play

In a small, low-trust market, don't just run ads at accounts. Create a reason for them to gather, a recurring event where peers share real struggles, sweetened with a small, thoughtful incentive. They come for the perk and stay for the content, and the trust you build does the selling that cold outreach can't.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Marketing should be the cherry on top. If you invest before product-market fit, you might just lose money.

They came for the Uber Eats voucher and they stayed for the content.

ChatGPT is a magic wand, but you need a magician to operate it.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Get out there and take calculated risks. Stay humble, learn as much as you can, leave your comfort zone, do things with cool people, and have fun along the way.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Early in her career she wishes she'd taken the agency path, learning tactics and skills from experienced people across many products, instead of going in-house for a higher salary and having to reinvent the wheel on her own. Invest in your growth early, reap the fruits later.

What would you tell your younger self? Don't be afraid, things will work out. Take care of your mental health, and meet people.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Recruiting a senior delivery person who's a great culture fit to help build the agency she has in mind.

Favorite spot? The pasta at Luo Pasta Fresca in Warsaw. All of it is excellent.

Tool you can't live without? Claude for its more natural writing, and ChatGPT for deep research on complex things. The agents are pretty cool too.

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Natalia Slota is the founder of Apricot, a B2B marketing agency helping tech companies build and scale their growth engines. She previously led growth at BibliU, one of the UK's fastest-growing startups, ran demand generation at a mortgage-tech company, and built and closed her own e-commerce jewelry brand. Find her on LinkedIn.