A marketer and an engineer.
That's the whole company.
Forthbound is two senior operators running the marketing function for B2B SaaS founders. End to end, AI-native, no agency in the middle.
You don't need more vendors. You need it owned.
Most early-stage founders don't have a marketing problem. They have an execution problem. They know roughly what should happen: positioning, content, a website that converts, a founder who posts, outbound that books calls. Almost none of it happens consistently, because no one senior owns it.
The usual fixes don't fit. A senior hire takes a quarter to find, a quarter to ramp, and costs more than two engineers, and you're committed before you know it works. Agencies hand your account to a junior and a project manager, then bill you for the overhead. Freelancers cover one slice and leave you to stitch the rest together.
We built Forthbound to be the other option: a senior marketer and a senior AI engineer who plug in and own the whole function. The engineer isn't a gimmick. It's the unlock. Custom AI agents carry the volume (research, drafts, monitoring, outbound personalization) so the senior judgment stays human and the work ships at a pace a traditional team can't match.
We're deliberately small and deliberately senior. No account managers, no junior pool, no status theatre. We ship, you review, the work compounds.
The two of us.
May Villaester
Product marketing lead with deep B2B fintech and SaaS experience. She's built positioning, run content programs, and led marketing for fintech companies with thousands of customers (Whenthen → Mangopay, now HeyGrand). She owns strategy, messaging, content, and execution.
Art Mashanin
Senior AI engineer building Papertrail, an AI-native fintech compliance platform. He designs the AI agents and automation that make Forthbound 3–5× faster than traditional teams, and builds the websites, outbound systems, and custom AI tools.
Six rules we don't break.
Senior-only
The people who win the work do the work. Nothing gets handed down to a junior.
AI as leverage, not output
Agents handle volume; humans own strategy and the final word. You see work that sounds like you.
Async-first
A Monday summary beats a standing call. We protect your calendar, not fill it.
We ship
Output in week one. Not a deck about future output.
No lock-in theatre
3-month minimum to let the work compound, then month-to-month. We earn the next month.
Anti-buzzword
Clear positioning over clever slogans. Specifics over claims.
See what your
first month looks like.
We'll review your current marketing and growth systems, show you what we'd do first, and walk through how it works. 30 minutes. No pitch deck. No commitment.
30 min · No pitch deck · Just an honest conversation.