Everyone Is Building, Almost Nobody Is Growing: A Conversation with Basia Derkowska

Basia Derkowska is a fractional CMO and go-to-market advisor for early-stage B2B SaaS founders. She is not an agency and not a consultant who hands you a deck and disappears. She is the person founders call when they need someone to actually help them go to market, build something that lasts, and occasionally talk them off the ledge. She is also a co-founder of Growth Meetup in Wrocław, the deliberately small event series that, full disclosure, is where the idea for this whole show came from. Basia was one of the very first guests on Messy Growth, and she is back solo.

What makes Basia worth listening to is that she works with enough early-stage companies to see behind the curtain, past the shiny LinkedIn version of founder life. This conversation goes deep into what going fractional actually takes, why founders freeze instead of move, and what distribution and brand really mean now that everyone and their dog is a builder.

Going fractional, the right way

Basia went fractional out of a long-standing urge to build something with her name on it, and full control over her time and decisions. The push came from her network reaching out with opportunities, one ask leading to another, very organically. But she does not believe in pure luck. You have to be ready for the luck when it comes, so if you are thinking about starting something, keep getting ready. For anyone without her network, her advice is blunt: just start selling what you want to offer. You do not need a website or a brand. Shape your offer, post it, do simple outreach to ten companies, and see what happens. There always has to be a first sale.

The hardest thing she had to unlearn is that she is just a marketing leader. Now she also runs a business, so she is the salesperson, the legal team, and the negotiator, with no agency of ten people to delegate to. And the relationship changes: clients are clients, not just employers, and a fractional engagement only works as a genuine partnership. She will not take on a company if she does not sense the potential for one, because hiring a fractional leader without giving them trust and freedom is just hiring a very expensive intern. She is also clear this is not for everyone, and not for the start of a career. Fractional demands you handle your own onboarding, research, and hard founder conversations, which requires a leadership muscle you build over years. She recommends holding the full-time version of the role before going fractional, because fractional is the same job, slightly faster, on a smaller budget, across multiple companies at once.

Founders are drowning in choices

Behind the curtain, Basia says, founder life is heavy, not the shiny stream of wins on LinkedIn. The dominant problem she sees is not scarcity but abundance. There is always another tool, another AI capability, another potential client or partnership, and founders freeze because they have too many choices. You can do everything, but if you do everything, you do nothing, so you end up running left and right until it is a mess. What she loves doing is being their accountability system and second brain, helping them prioritize, listening, and brainstorming which options get a no this time.

Her point is not that everyone needs a fractional CMO. It is that founders should not spend too much time alone in their own heads. It can be a local community, a founder bubble, a mentor, or a friend. And while talking to AI is a fine first pass, she urges founders to then talk to a human who will be less nice, someone who will say "this is bad, don't do it" rather than "brilliant idea." Honest feedback from a real person is what you actually need. On competition, she reframes it as noise: it is no longer one big competitor with a huge budget, but twenty similar solutions all fighting for the same attention. Which, she notes, makes it a great time to be a marketer, because when everyone can build, everyone needs to figure out how to stand out.

Distribution now that product is easy

The old wisdom that a great product means distribution will follow is, Basia agrees, mostly wrong now. It used to be product, product, product at the center, but when product is everywhere and easy to clone, you have to tackle distribution and understand its foundation. Her prerequisites are a founder with genuine drive, a solid understanding of the audience, and one good distribution idea. She stresses the one, because the mistake she has made repeatedly is trying to do everything at once: events, LinkedIn, founder brand, paid, community, sales enablement, AI search, all while being one or two people. As a startup, pick one good channel, test it for a while, and only then add another layer.

Which channel depends entirely on the audience. For B2C, TikTok and Instagram with UGC ads work because that is where people spend time and they trust other people. For B2B it is harder and industry-dependent: a security audience might be on ad blockers and off LinkedIn, forcing you offline or into engineering communities. So the real first move is deep user research, talking to as many potential ICPs as possible to understand where they are and what would make them buy. The trap of easy building is that people skip the homework, assume everyone will want their idea, and are then surprised no one buys. Even if it is fast to build, validate the market need first.

The homework AI cannot do

On brand voice in a world where AI writes most of the words, Basia has watched the price of the written word fall as everyone became a copywriter, and she expects the best writers to become more expensive, almost luxurious, precisely because everyone else sounds the same. AI is genius for producing volume, but positioning, messaging, and a real point of view still require creativity and, above all, understanding your audience. The shift is that it is no longer about choosing words that sound nice, but choosing the words that come from your audience. Beautifully written, grammatically perfect English is worthless if your audience does not speak that way.

She is emphatic that the answer is not to avoid AI. All the great writers she works with use it, for aggregating data and brainstorming, but they know which output is actually good, and you only know that if you did the homework. Her worry is learning: if you stop exercising the muscle, it atrophies. So even when you use tools to aggregate data, read what you get, because you cannot prompt your way to a deep understanding of the problem. As she puts it, there is even more pressure to do the homework now, because you have no excuse not to. She lived this as head of product marketing, where her daily job was to read something a customer said so she could be the market's voice in leadership meetings.

Sell before it is built

Basia's practical playbook for anyone on the fence is a three-step exercise she used herself. First, call five people who really know you as a working person and ask what your unique strengths are and what they would recommend you for. Do it with five or ten people and a clear picture emerges. Second, take those strengths, imagine what you could build from them, and go back to those people for feedback on the idea. Third, and most important, go and sell it. If you can actually sell it and run it for a few months and you like it, continue. If not, iterate and treat it like any other product.

Underneath it all is a posture she keeps returning to: be persistent and a little shameless. If you send one outreach email once, that is not outreach. Keep asking, keep following up, and accept that not everyone has to love you. There is no shame in business, and it is not dating, so you do not need to agonize over messaging someone. The best opportunities are not on the market, so you have to create them yourself, whether you are looking for a client, a fractional gig, or a full-time role. And whatever you end up doing, she adds, make sure it energizes you, because if you follow your energy the hard parts are bearable, and if you do not, it just becomes a chore.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Fractional is a business, not just a role. You become the seller, the negotiator, and the legal team. It demands a leadership muscle built over years, so do the full-time version first.

Founders are drowning in choice. Abundance, not scarcity, is the modern problem. The value of an advisor or a community is helping you decide what to say no to.

Distribution beats product now. When product is easy to clone, pick one distribution channel matched to where your audience actually is, test it, and only then add another.

Do the homework AI cannot. Use AI for volume and aggregation, but positioning, judgment, and knowing which output is good come from understanding your audience yourself.

Create your own opportunities. The best roles and clients are not advertised. Be persistent and a little shameless, because there is no shame in business.

Frameworks worth stealing

Sell before it is built

Do not wait for a website or brand. Shape your offer, post it, and reach out to ten real companies to see what lands. There always has to be a first sale, and selling before it is fully built is how you validate whether the thing is real.

Pick one channel

As a startup, resist doing events, LinkedIn, paid, community, and sales enablement all at once with two people. Start from where your audience actually is, choose the one channel you can sustain on your budget, test it for months, and add another layer only once it works.

Week one is talking

When you start with any company, spend the first week talking, to the founder, the team, and the customers. Extract everything from the founder's head that was never written down, then get primary insights from real sales calls and the market. There is no marketing without understanding your customers.

The five-people exercise

To decide your next move, call five people who know you as a working professional and ask what your unique strengths are and what they would recommend you for. A clear picture emerges from the pattern. Build an idea from those strengths, get feedback on it, then go sell it and run it for a few months to see if it fits.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

You can do everything, but if you do everything, you do nothing.

Start selling before it's being sold for the first time.

The best opportunities are not on the market. You have to create them yourself.

And the reframe every anxious builder needs.

It's just business. It's not dating.

Rapid fire round

The rapid-fire came woven through the conversation rather than as a formal round, so here are the threads worth keeping.

On starting: Be persistent and a little shameless. One outreach email is not outreach.

On feedback: Talk to a human who will be less nice than AI, someone who will tell you an idea is bad.

On brands she loves: Once she believes in a product she carries it forever. She has bought Brand24 at three different companies.

On energy: Whatever you build has to energize you. Follow the energy, or it becomes a chore.

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Basia Derkowska is a fractional CMO and go-to-market advisor for early-stage B2B SaaS founders, and a co-founder of Growth Meetup, the small-format community and event series in Wrocław. She was previously in product marketing, including at Brand24. Find her on LinkedIn or at growthmeetup.com.