From Zero to €40M ARR

Native Teams had a genuinely interesting product: EOR services offered directly to freelancers and remote workers, with no company required to stand behind them. A contractor could get properly employed, handle their taxes, and access benefits without relocating or waiting on a client to set up a local entity. In a market where PayPal and Payoneer were the default, that was a real differentiator.

When I joined, the challenge wasn't the product. It was that almost nobody knew the category existed. There was no paid media history to build on, no SEO authority, no established demand to capture.

I started with PPC because it was the fastest way to find out what messaging worked, which buyer segments had intent, and what the actual conversion funnel looked like before investing heavily in longer-term channels.

The first paid campaigns were B2C, targeting freelancers and remote workers across Europe. Campaign structure was built around buyer intent rather than keyword volume: the people searching for how to get paid compliantly as a contractor in Germany had completely different needs and conversion behaviour than someone looking for general payroll software.

A lot of the early work was iterative in a way that doesn't get captured in a final number. Testing headlines, killing ad groups that were spending without converting, figuring out which compliance pain points resonated in which markets.

Tracking was non-negotiable from day one. Full-funnel measurement connecting spend to pipeline to revenue was the infrastructure everything else was built on. Without it, the B2B transition that came later would have been much harder to diagnose and fix.

As the B2C base grew, a pattern became hard to ignore: the companies on the other side of these freelancer relationships had the same problem in reverse. They needed to hire internationally without setting up local entities. The category was already being validated at scale by well-funded competitors raising hundreds of millions. The B2B market was real and we had a price point 4x below the enterprise-tier players competing for it.

I led the B2C marketing push while we started testing B2B in parallel.

The same campaign logic that worked well for B2C — fast intent signals, short decision cycles, direct response creative — produced very little when pointed at B2B buyers. We spent without generating proportionate pipeline for a period. The root cause was a mismatch in assumptions: B2B buyers in EOR operate on much longer timelines, involve multiple stakeholders, and need significantly more touchpoints before a sales conversation makes sense. Once I rebuilt the model around that reality, tightened the SQL definition with sales, extended nurture sequences, and fixed attribution to track the full path to closed-won, the results changed quickly.

B2B LTV was significantly higher than B2C. Once the acquisition model accounted for the longer sales cycle properly, spend-to-LTV ROI exceeded 500% at peak. The B2B transition went from the most difficult period of my time there to the clearest inflection point in the company's revenue growth.

The most valuable thing I took from Native Teams wasn't any single campaign result. It was understanding what marketing infrastructure looks like when it's built to scale rather than to perform in the short term. Setting up tracking correctly before it feels urgent. Defining what a qualified lead actually means before spending on acquisition. Building organic programmes before you need them to carry load.

The B2B transition was the hardest period. We got the strategy right and the initial execution wrong, which cost time and budget. What made it recoverable was having the measurement in place to see exactly where the model was broken rather than guessing. That experience is probably the most directly applicable thing I carry into any new engagement.