Harsha Kotthapalli

Available — 2 slots, Q4 2026

Product marketing functions, built 0→1 · EU and GCC

I build product marketing functions from zero.
In ninety days.
Then I hand you the keys and go.

Positioning, launch process, competitive intelligence and enablement — installed as six frameworks your team runs without me.

Book the build →See the work
Days 1–30Understand
Days 31–60Diagnose
Days 61–90Build
Day 90Handover

The engagement ends. The function doesn't.

3×

Built from zero

90

Days to handover

€18K

From · the function build

6

Frameworks

Built the product marketing function at

MarineTrafficKplerPayhapsLinagoraGlobcoinWealthKarmaFoodVessel

Three of them from zero.

Sound familiar?

  • People read your website but can't repeat back what you do
  • Sales writes its own material because nothing official exists
  • Every rep explains the product differently
  • You sell to analysts, engineers and their bosses, and one message serves none of them
  • Launches get negotiated from scratch every time
  • Your competitor got acquired months ago and your sales deck hasn't noticed
  • You've hired a "strategic" product marketer and you're measuring them on how many assets they ship

Three or more? You don't have a product marketing problem. You have no product marketing function — and hiring one more person into the gap won't create one.

The offer.

The function build

90 days to install the PMM Operating System

For companies with no product marketing function, or one that's become a content desk. I've done this three times from zero.

Days 1–30 — Understand
Days 31–60 — Diagnose
Days 61–90 — Build
Handover

Days 1–30 · Understand the business

Product, roadmap, vision. Customer calls. Win/loss notes and support tickets. An audit of every customer touchpoint. The goal isn't answers — it's finding where the story breaks down.

Days 31–60 · Find the commercial gaps

Why customers actually buy. Where deals stall. Which objections repeat. By day 60 we know whether the real constraint is positioning, messaging, pricing, launches or enablement.

Days 61–90 · Build systems, not assets

The six frameworks, installed and populated with your market, not a template. Then the handover: owners, refresh schedules, a trained team, and the automation that keeps it current.

Seed / Pre-Series A — one product, one market€18,000
Series A — multiple segments or a second product€28,000
Series B+ — multi-product, or post-acquisition€40,000

Payable across the three months. About twelve hours of your team's time in total.

Talk to me first

Not sure you need this? Take the three-minute assessment →

The positioning sprint

3 weeks, €7,500 fixed

The narrow version, when the function exists but the story doesn't. Your real competitive alternatives including "do nothing." A positioning decision, argued and stress-tested rather than a template filled in. A message for each person in the deal. Your homepage rewritten against it.

About six hours of your time.

Book a sprint

The competitive teardown

Free, three a month

Your market, six competitors, 50 questions, every claim sourced. Inbox within 24 hours.

Get the teardown

What you own at the end

The PMM Operating System.

Consultants hand over documents. Documents rot. What I leave behind is six frameworks that decide things — so the next launch doesn't restart the argument, and the next hire inherits a function instead of a folder. Four of the six names are mine; all six are yours once I've gone.

The function you don't have yet

01

Product Oracle

The single-source product brief

One source of truth per product, including who it isn't for.

02

The Half-Life Map

Your asset register, with expiry dates

Every asset with an owner, a home and a refresh date.

03

Launch Tiers

How big should this launch be

A tier per release, and a fixed checklist per tier.

04

The Fifty

Competitive intelligence, 50 questions deep

Fifty sourced questions, you and up to five competitors.

05

Trust Metrics

How the function gets measured

Measured on research coverage and sales confidence, not output.

06

The Messaging Matrix

What to say, to whom, with what proof

A message per persona and stage, every claim tied to proof.

Your team runs it without me

Launch Tiers

Tier 1Tier 2Tier 3
Activities27124
Internal brief
Sales enablement
Press & analyst
Customer comms
Paid campaign
Launch tracker

Every release gets a tier. The tier decides the work.

The Half-Life Map

AssetOwnerLives inRefreshStatus
Competitor battlecardProduct marketingSales wiki90 daysStale
Product one-pagerProduct marketingShared drive180 daysCurrent
Pricing sheetPMM + FinanceSales wiki180 daysDue
Persona deckProduct marketingShared drive365 daysCurrent
Launch checklistProduct marketingProject toolPer launchCurrent
Homepage messagingPMM + WebWebsite180 daysDue

Most teams track who made a thing. This tracks when it stops being true.

Product Oracle

Page one

What it is

Who it's for

How it works

Limitations

Page two

Packaging

Pricing

Personas

Anti-persona

The field most companies refuse to write.

Product Oracle. Two pages per product: spec, metrics, limitations, packaging, personas, including the anti-persona. The single source of truth that stops four teams describing the product four ways.

The Half-Life Map. Every asset mapped to its owner, its destination and its refresh cadence. Positioning doesn't break — it quietly stops being true, so the useful question is when each asset goes stale and where it lives.

Launch Tiers. Every release scored 1, 2 or 3, each tier triggering a fixed activity checklist, owners and critical path. Without it, every launch gets negotiated from scratch.

The Fifty. Fifty questions across market, product, positioning, marketing, sales and company, filled for you and up to five competitors. Every cell sourced with a URL and a date, or marked unknown. No silent blanks.

Trust Metrics. OKRs measuring research coverage, sales confidence and cross-functional trust, not assets shipped. Everyone else counts output. Output is the half that got cheap.

The Messaging Matrix. Per persona, per funnel stage, every line tied to a proof point, so claims can be checked rather than repeated.

I automate the execution, then hand you the keys.

By hand · 2023

28% filled · 0 sourced

The Fifty

100% filled · Every cell sourced

Same 50 questions. Same six competitors.

AI has made the execution layer of product marketing cheap. Competitive research that took a week takes an afternoon. That's good news, and it's also the trap: teams treat the freed-up capacity as room to ship more deliverables, which was never the point.

So I build the automation into the handover. The competitive grid refreshes itself and cites its sources. Messaging gets audited for drift. Stale assets flag themselves before a prospect notices.

I tested it on my own work first. A competitive grid I'd built by hand in 2023 had 28% of its cells filled and no sources anywhere. The system filled every cell, sourced every claim — and found that one of the six competitors I'd been tracking had been acquired fourteen months earlier. By the company I worked for. My battlecard was still arguing against them.

That's what happens to positioning everywhere. It doesn't break. It quietly stops being true.

Get a free competitive teardown

The work, not the adjectives.

Two kinds below. Functions I built and ran — where I owned the outcome and the team. And teardowns — companies I analysed from the outside, so you can see how I think before you've paid me anything.

All work →

Built and ran

01 · MarineTraffic → Kpler

MarineTraffic → Kpler

Four product lines, no shared answer to what any of them was or who it was for. Sales had started writing its own material.

Built product marketing from zero and led four PMMs across MT Central, In Transit, Port Call Optimisation and Fleet Ops. Then Kpler acquired the business and three merged acquisitions became one product nobody could explain in a sentence. Enterprise pipeline up 30%.

The judgment call

Every deliverable got an update frequency and a destination, not just an owner. That's what later told me exactly which assets had rotted.

Read the case study →

02 · Payhaps

Payhaps

The merchant's first question is "what's my cost of capital." Payhaps doesn't have one, because the shopper pays in full.

Built the function from nothing for a UAE payments startup: positioning, merchant segmentation, the merchant sales narrative, onboarding journeys, integration guides, investor material.

The judgment call

Refusing the BNPL category, even though it was the budget line merchants already had.

Read the case study →

03 · WealthKarma

WealthKarma

Nobody wakes up wanting to plan a retirement that's thirty years away, and the UAE has no pension enrolment moment to hook onto.

Built through Antler's Dubai cohort and taken to market as co-founder and CMO — the GCC's first AI-powered retirement platform. Four evidence-based personas, a test-and-iterate value proposition method, gamified onboarding.

The judgment call

Making education the entry point, so the assessment does the qualifying while the user thinks they're just learning where they stand.

Read the case study →

04 · Linagora

Linagora

Prospects had no comprehensive idea of the offerings and no understanding of the ecosystem. Every deal restarted the explanation from zero.

Acting CMO for a French open-source publisher. Global software strategy across five versions, brand platform, value proposition framework, redesigned first-contact journey.

The judgment call

Diagnosing a packaging problem, not a messaging one, and proposing a single membership that made the ecosystem itself the product.

Read the case study →

Also: FoodVessel — marketplace GTM and Saudi market entry (→ /work/foodvessel) · Globcoin — a fifteen-currency stablecoin explained to people who'd never heard of purchasing power parity (→ /work/globcoin)

Teardowns

How I think, before you've paid me anything. Six companies analysed from the outside — ICP, positioning, messaging, competitive landscape, go-to-market. Built as case study exercises using public information only.

Sumsub

KYC for European gambling. Three buyers including the regulator, each with its own message.

Read →

Kisi

Video intercom across real estate, tech and healthcare. A competitor table with a counterpoints column, so a rep can use it live.

Read →

PhantomBuster

Should a LinkedIn tool chase customers who don't sell on LinkedIn? A TAM argument, and an honest answer.

Read →

WalletConnect

One SDK, three audiences, and a competitor set that includes Firebase.

Read →

Proton

Growth strategy for a twelfth product. One feature gate doing acquisition, conversion and cross-sell at once.

Read →

ChargePoint

EV charging meets European commercial real estate.

Read →

How I work.

Systems, not assets. You keep the PMM Operating System. If your team can't run it after I leave, it isn't finished.

Judgment is the product. AI can research, draft and recommend. It can't own a trade-off.

Evidence over assertion. Every claim carries a source, or it's marked unproven.

Say who it's not for. Positioning that appeals to everyone appeals to nobody.

About.

I'm Harsha Kotthapalli. I've built product marketing functions from zero three times, across fintech, SaaS and marketplaces.

Most recently that meant a global maritime data business — MarineTraffic, then Kpler after acquisition — where I built the function, led four product marketers across four product lines, and took it through three acquisitions. Technical products, technical buyers: analysts, engineers, operations leads. The kind of product where the differentiation is real but hard to say out loud.

Before that, Acting CMO at Linagora in Paris and founding product marketer at Globcoin. Crypto and web3, open-source software, maritime supply chain — B2B and B2C, across European, North American and Asian markets.

In 2024 I went through Antler in Dubai, building a retirement platform for the GCC with a co-founder I'd met during my MBA at HEC Paris. That year is the reason I take the "can your team actually run this" question seriously. On the other side of the table, a strategy you can't execute is worse than no strategy, because it costs you the same three weeks and leaves you with a document instead of a decision.

Based between Dubai and Barcelona, working across the EU and GCC.

Straight answers.

We're pre-revenue / very early. Is it too soon?

Probably, and I'll tell you if it is. The function build pays off when you have enough customers to find patterns in — roughly when sales starts asking for material you don't have. Before that, you need a founder who can tell the story, not a function.

Were the teardowns paid client work?

No. They were built as case study exercises from public information, and I've labelled them that way because you'd find out eventually. The reasoning in them is the same reasoning you'd buy.

Can you also run our ads, SEO, or content?

No. Positioning, competitive intelligence, launch and enablement. I'll hand your content team a strategy they can execute and recommend good people for the rest.

What happens when you leave?

That's the part I design for. You get the frameworks, the automation and a team trained to run both. If the function collapses when I go, I've failed at the actual job.

Do we need this, or do we just need more leads?

If people convert once they understand you, you need leads. If they don't convert because they don't understand you, more leads just scales the confusion.

Will you talk to our customers?

Yes, up to five interviews if you can make the introductions.

What if we're not a fit?

I'll say so before you pay, and tell you what I'd do instead.

Tell me what's not landing.

The launch that moved nothing, the competitor sales can't answer, the website nobody understands. Two sentences is enough — I'll reply within two days with an honest read on whether I can help.

No sequence, no nurture, no call required.